Sacred friendship..

You mightn't know it necessarily. If you log onto my Facebook profile, you'll see I have 1080 'friends'. One might jump to the conclusion that a girl with so many 'friends' is unlikely to place much value on friendship. You may assume that friendship is something I toss off like a spare coin, carelessly, to anyone shooting off a request.

Quite the contrary.. though I DO sincerely value each of those 1080 connections for their myriad possibilities and the big and small ways that they enrich my life, friendship, real friendship, to me, is rare and precious and sacred.. If you don't really know much ABOUT me then it's unlikely you really KNOW how true that is OF me.

I believe friendship manifests in a variety of ways. Each starts with a seed. Much the way a plant differs from a tree, each grows at its own unique pace, one taking many, many years to develop and unfurl and another sprouting up with the passion and exuberance of a zealous weed. Neither is more or less a friendship. None is necessarily more or less valuable, more or less revered. Each has its perfect qualities and characteristics making it like no other that has come before or will ever come again.

Frienship is chemistry.

Friendship is magic.

Friendship is a subtle, nearly inexplicable DNA-level response.

Friendship is a deep and spiritual connection with another, an exchange of energy, an opportunity to learn and grow and support. In encountering friendship in another we are magnetized by the qualities that we have yet to fully realize within ourselves or that we have disowned and must learn to reintegrate, though we may have no awareness of the unawakened need. A friend provides support, sometimes in very quiet and subtle ways, other times with much more of a sledgehammer-over-the-head, tough-love approach, in precisely the places we need it until we learn and shift and expand and awaken, later requiring different support in a different way or having it to offer in return. It is infinitely reciprocal. It is eternally giving and receiving.

When I make the choice to give of myself in friendship, sacred friendship from where it originates in the deepest recesses of my heart, it is with the utmost reverence and in the truest, simplest and most pristine form of love.

Once I have granted you access to that place in my heart, you will forevermore find a home there. I will carry you with me always. You will have come into my life and I will have allowed you in. You will have touched my soul and changed me. Forever.

Anticipation..

Every detail was so vivid that morning..

He stood there at the corner of King and Dufferin amidst the morning commuters with their iPods, lattes and frustrated expressions. I observed him from my vantage point on the King Streetcar. He shook visibly. His jacket was just a bit too big, his pants a bit too short, his shoes worn and misshapen by another man's feet. Though his hands struggled to cooperate, his face was set with determination as he fought to open the slippery plastic packaging of a five-dollar ice cream bar. It may have taken him hours to beg the money toward its purchase. The juxtaposition was striking: pure decadence clutched in a trembling hand against a backdrop of need. I wondered what had been the last thing that he'd eaten and how long it had been.

There was a desperation about his eyes and I noted my own sense of panic, so afraid that, after all of his effort, he would drop the bar to the sidewalk without ever savouring a bite. Time was suspended while I watched, silently cheering him to victory.

And there it was.

The defiant hands overtaken.

The slick packaging conquered.

The ice cream revealed.

Even before he allowed himself his indulgence he reached to discard the plastic wrapper in the trash bin next to him. It was the sort that is divided into three separate receptacles for trash, plastic and paper. An elderly woman approached to dispose of her own litter in the same moment and from the scowl on her face it was apparent that she was scolding him for placing his garbage where the bottles belonged. She was oblivious to the struggle that had let up to the moment. She had no idea that getting the wrapper into the bin at all was a coup.

She was clearly perturbed.

He stared back in disbelief, the reward of his efforts slighted by her anger.

He turned from her and took the first bite he had been so painfully anticipating.

I wondered if it tasted as good as he had hoped.

::

CRAZY CIRCUS WORLD

A lemon yellow Lady Macbeth
Her smile fills a room
While she thinks about death
And seeks out a soul to consume
In the room
A lemon yellow chair sitting there
And in it hides a lock of his hair
And the lady ponders on about death
In the gloom
Of the evening there’s the sound of her breath
And she fears not this thing they call death
And she won’t be beholden to doom
And she basks in the light of the moon
In her town
Where the crazy circus world spins around
In her head
Where the Candyman tells her that she’s already dead
Where the fat lady sings
And the supper bell rings
Where lions and tigers and grotesquely pretty things
Live for the spotlight
And the warmth that it brings
And the lock of his hair
Is still hiding there
In a lemon yellow chair for Macbeth

author: Lara Marjerrison
circa: April 17, 2009

Pretty..

Watch this first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

For years I believed it was my only asset. I was told repeatedly as a child that I was such a pretty little girl. Pretty. It came to be the thing that I knew I could rely on to get what I wanted. Pretty = Power.

When you're pretty, people like you before they know anything else about you. When you're pretty, you get given things you haven't earned. When you're pretty, you're let off the hook. Doors get opened, drinks get bought, lines get bypassed, gifts get conferred. You'd be amazed just how much pretty gets you.

But pretty isn't all it's cracked up to be. As often as people like you before they know you, they hate you. As often as positive assumptions are made, negative conclusions are jumped to. As many times as it's flattering to be seen as pretty, it's frustrating to be seen for only that. More than frustrating, it's potentially deadly. If pretty is all you've got and pretty gets you what you want, soon pretty becomes your currency. And pretty often just isn't enough when you're trading for the big ticket items, like love, acceptance, tolerance, respect. It gets to be about more than just your face, more than just a smile.. it gets to be about your body, your spirit, your soul. And when those become your currency, you're getting into very sketchy territory. Boundaries get blurred or disappear completely and each time you spend, you lose a little more. Each time someone wants, they want a little more.

There have been many times I've wished I were ugly. I have wished it right out loud, "I wish I were ugly so people would notice my heart and my mind." I wanted to carve up my face. In fact, once or twice, with my own fingernails, I did just that. It wasn't pretty.

I'm not pretty.

I'm beautiful.

And I'm not beautiful because I have a pretty face.

I'm beautiful because my heart overflows with love and I daringly wear it right out on my sleeve where everyone can see it despite how incredibly vulnerable that makes me.

I am beautiful because I see my greatest strength in that vulnerability.

I am beautiful because I am constantly striving to be a better person, to learn more about myself and my purpose in the world and my impact on others.

I am beautiful because I am passionate and I allow that passion to shine through, even when it's not so popular or so widely understood.

I am beautiful because I'm not afraid to make mistakes and I'm not afraid to admit to them and apologize for them. And mean it.

I am beautiful because I keep getting back up even when I'm not sure I'm strong enough to do so.

I am beautiful because I live my life as one long act of improvisation, as though all the world really IS a stage (and it is) and this is my greatest ever role and I must fulfill it fully and completely.

I am beautiful because I would give you every piece of me if you needed me to and not expect anything in return because I believe that's the way it ought to be.  

I am beautiful because I hold onto my convictions and because I'm willing to be proven wrong.

I am beautiful because I'm scared too.

I am beautiful because I am flawed.

I am beautiful because I had the courage to admit where I was falling short and to do something about it, because I was willing to learn how to love myself, here and now, from the inside out and to stop relying on you to tell me I'm pretty.

I am NOT. merely. pretty.

Picasso..

Have you ever met someone for the first time and recognized them? Despite the internal protests in favour of logic, have you ever just known? Have you ever met someone that, in a fraction of an instant, your heart encouraged you to risk everything for while your mind was busy trying to talk some sense into you? Have you ever spent time with a person and found that every. single. moment. spent. was exaggerated, embellished, monumental, mythical? Even the teeniest, tiniest ones? That each point of contact, each encounter, each syllable, each accidental (or purposeful) touch was pregnant with promise and passion, mystery and magic, celebration and sensuality and serenity? Have you ever been rightupclose to someone that you know just KNOWS your whole soul, that hears and speaks and listens to your silent subtext so that you needn't utter a word and still he'll understand you at your very core, will understand things about you that you don't even understand about yourself, will see things in you that you have yet to notice? Have you ever met someone with precisely the right smell and touch and taste and sound? Have you ever met someone with precisely the right sense of humour on precisely the same wavelength with precisely the right values and precisely the right philosophies and precisely the right passions and precisely the right way of expressing them, demonstrating them, sharing them, evoking them in you? Have you ever met someone who got right into your very DNA and caused you to realize that you'd been missing something you didn't even realize you'd lost? And despite all this knowing and all this magic and all this passion and all this promise, have you ever had to walk away anyway? Have you ever found your masterpiece and had to leave it? To just hang there? Just doing what it does?

My problems are bigger than your problems? I think not..

I met a girl last night outside a downtown bar and we got chatting. This was shortly after I completely insulted a different girl by asking her why she was wearing a prom dress. She had been in a wedding party. If her eyes had been armed with weapons of mass destruction, as of that moment I'd have been reduced to a splat on the Princess Street sidewalk. Oops.

Anyhow, in chatting away with a lovely young blonde girl and her boyfriend about nothing in particular, or nothing that I can easily retrieve given that I had consumed my fair share of vodka and soda by that point in the evening, she was stunned to learn of my forty years of age and wished out loud more than a few times that she "could be as beautiful and youthful as me when she reaches my age". I told her flat out, "You can." She attempted to dismiss my confidence in her ability to do so with all sorts of, "Oh no, I could never, you do so many good things.. etc., etc.." It saddens me to note how little belief folks have in themselves and their ability to achieve their own personal levels of greatness, to realize what an epidemic of low self-worth permeates our human condition.

I looked at her squarely and said, "Listen to me. I am NOT perfect. I am NOT a saint. Sometimes, I'm not even that nice a person." I have made a bazillion errors in judgment and put myself in more dumb situations than I care to admit (though I would if you asked nicely). I have been a drunk, a drug addict, a bad friend and a self-centred wretch at times. I have lied to people, cheated on people, taken things that don't belong to me. I have wallowed in self-pity and failed to live up to responsibilities resulting in other people having to pick up my slack. I still make mistakes (though I'm happy to report that overall I make less colossal mistakes these days than in past) and I hope I will continue to do so as my very, very, very best and most impactful and long-sticking lessons have come from them.

From all of those errors in judgment I have learned precisely the effect alcohol and drug abuse has on a body, on relationships, on an entire life and each life that life touches, how to be a good friend and why lying and cheating and taking things that aren't yours leaves you unable to look at yourself in the mirror and continue to like the person who is looking back. All of those awakened awarenesses led to a commitment to living a life of integrity and dignity from a place of kindness and forgiveness. To a degree, I'm even less self-absorbed than I was in my younger years, though I admit I could still use a bit of work in that area.

I showed her the scar on my left wrist to illustrate to her just how badly I had felt about myself at one point in time and to give her a contrast for comparison against that which she was seeing standing before her. She was stunned once again.

Eventually our conversation led her to reveal that she was feeling the pain and stress of suffering some recent losses in her life. Clearly there is much on her heart and mind that needs to be lifted. But, she protested, "My problems are nothing compared to yours."

Once more I looked her squarely in the eye and told her, "Everything is relevant (thank you JoAnne). Everything is relative. Do not minimize your challenges just because someone else's are bigger. It's good to have the perspective so that you DON'T wind up wallowing in self-pity and so that you DO take action to change the things that aren't working in your life. But, to diminish them to nothing dimishes you.

You are important. Your feelings are important. Your problems are as real for you as anyone else's are for them. And, please, don't romanticize mine. I'm blessed beyond belief. I live in a country where I can walk freely down the street, wearing whatever clothes I want, speaking to whomever from wherever of whatever colour, gender or religious affiliation (or not) I please. I can vote. I have an education. I have a job. I have a roof over my head, clothes on my back, money in my bank account (sort of) and food in my belly. I have NEVER known what it feels like to go hungry. I have NEVER been without water and shelter and people to love me and care for me when I needed care. I have NEVER heard the sound of a bomb or seen its devastation. I am free. And I am happy. And my problems don't even register on the SCALE when you compare them to the tragedies that are taking place around the world every minute of the day. Alllllll of that being said, it's also true that MY problems are relevant and relative and real to me and deserve their own due credit but only insofar as giving them the appropriate amount of attention gives me the power to turn them into opportunities."

I also told her that the beauty that she sees in me comes from the joy in my soul, that true beauty comes from within. I told her that she is beautiful too, that she sees beauty because she IS beauty, that her bone structure and her body and all of that stuff are, indeed, beautiful, but that the real reason she is beautiful is that her heart is beautiful. She smiled. Radiantly. Her boyfriend smiled too and vehemently nodded in agreement.

She asked if she could call me.

I said yes.

I hope she does.  

In peace and love and all things bright and, well.. beautiful..
Lightning Dove signing off..
Xo.

UNHAPPY HOUR

I think Rob Brezsny is a genius. Here is an exerpt from this week's Free Will Astrology. Will you grant yourself one unhappy hour per week and then let it go and get on with being gloriously grateful for all of your blissful blessings?

There's a new release from the soundtrack for my book. It's called "UNHAPPY HOUR." You can listen to it and read it here:

http://bit.ly/UnhappyHour

Here's how it begins:

You're invited to celebrate Unhappy Hour. It's a ceremony that gives you a poetic license to rant and whine and howl and sob about everything that hurts you and makes you feel bad.

During this perverse grace period, there's no need for you to be inhibited as you unleash your tortured squalls. You don't have to tone down the extremity of your desolate clamors. Unhappy Hour is a ritually consecrated excursion devoted to the full disclosure of your primal clash and jangle.

Here's the catch: It's brief. It's concise. It's crisp. You dive into your darkness for no more than 60 minutes, then climb back out, free and clear. It's called Unhappy Hour, not Unhappy Day or Unhappy Week or Unhappy Year.

Do you have the cheeky temerity to drench yourself in your paroxysmal alienation from life? Unhappy Hour invites you to plunge in and surrender. It dares you to scurry and squirm all the way down to the bottom of your pain, break through the bottom of your pain, and fall down flailing in the soggy, searing abyss, yelping and cringing and wallowing.

That's where you let your pain tell you every story it has to tell you. You let your pain teach you every lesson it has to teach you.

But then it's over. The ritual ordeal is complete. And your pain has to take a vacation until the next Unhappy Hour, which isn't until next week sometime, or maybe next month.

You see the way the game works? Between this Unhappy Hour and the next one, your pain has to shut up. It's not allowed to creep and seep all over everything, staining the flow of your daily life. It doesn't have free reign to infect you whenever it's itching for more power.

Your pain gets its succinct blast of glory, its resplendent climax, but leaves you alone the rest of the time.

If performed regularly, Unhappy Hour serves as an exorcism that empties you of psychic toxins, while at the same time -- miracle of miracles -- it helps you squeeze every last drop of blessed catharsis out of those psychic toxins.

Pronoia will then be able to flourish as you luxuriate more frequently in rosy moods and broad-minded visions. You'll develop a knack for cultivating smart joy and cagey optimism as your normal states of mind.

Now let's get you warmed up for Unhappy Hour . . . .

TO READ (and hear) THE REST OF THIS PIECE, GO HERE:http://bit.ly/UnhappyHour

Or buy the book! It's called *PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA*
and is available here: http://bit.ly/Pronoia

So? What's YOUR victim story?

So, this keeps coming up for me: Victimhood. Not my own so much, though it does resurface to a moderate degree now and again. I have mostly exorcised my own victim. Thank goodness. She was really SUCH a bore, NO fun at parties.

I s'pose revealing the story of my suicide attempt got me to thinking about all the ways that I used to live my life as a victim and that got me to noticing the ways that so many people still do. And all that getting to thinking got me to wanting to ask, "What's your victim story?" "How do you keep yourself stuck?" "Where are you getting in your own way?" "What VALUE are you getting out of your victim story?" "How is your victim story aiding and abetting your crimes against yourself?"

I'd really love to hear from you. Seriously. Feel free to reply. Comment below. Send me an email. Phone me if you want. Just tell me your story. I believe it's fascinating and replete with juicy bits. 

Signed,
Lightning Dove Wants To Know..

Improvisation In Life & Art..

There is a book entitled Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch that I have read and re-read to the point that the pages are wearing thin and the cover has had to be taped back on three times, the most recent of which was just last night. I wanted to share some of it with you so, as is my customary practice, I opened it up to a random page to share whatever passage chose to reveal itself to me this morning. Coincidentally (or not!) I opened right up to the Miles Davis quote I shared at the end of my previous entry. Here are two excerpts from the chapter that presented itself today:

The Power of Mistakes

Do not fear mistakes. There are none. ~ Miles Davis

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. ~ M. C. Richards

We all know how pearls are made. When a grain of grit accidentally slips into an oyster's shell, the oyster encysts it, secreting more and more of a thick, smooth mucus that hardens in microscopic layer after layer over the foreign irritation until it becomes a perfectly smooth, round, hard, shiny thing of beauty. The oyster thereby transforms both the grit and itself into something new, transforming the intrusion of error or otherness into its system, completing the gestalt according to its own oyster nature. 

If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl. Because the oyster is forced to live with the irritation for an extended period of time, the pearl comes to be. 

In school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide, or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don't make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said, "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.

Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable techniques. But when a mistake occurs we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.

...

Life throws at us innumerable irritations that can be mobilized for pearl making, including all the irritating people who come our way. Occasionally we are stuck with a petty tyrant who makes our life hell. Sometimes these situations, while miserable at the time, cause us to sharpen, focus, and mobilize our inner resources in the most surprising ways. We become, then, no longer victims of circumstance, but able to use circumstance as the vehicle of creativity. This is the well-known principle of Jujitsu, taking your opponent's blows and and using their own energy to deflect them to your advantage. When you fall, you raise yourself up by pushing against the spot where you fell. 

The Vietnamese Buddhist poet-priest, Thich Nhat Hanh, devised an interesting telephone meditation. The sound of the telephone ringing, and our semiautomatic instinct to jump up and answer it, seem the very opposite of meditation. Ring and reaction bring out the essence of the choppy, nervous character of the way time is lived in our world. He says use the first ring as a reminder, in the midst of whatever you were doing, of mindfulness, a reminder of breath and your own center. Use the second and third rings to breathe and smile. If the caller wants to talk, he or she will wait for the fourth ring, and you will be ready. What Thich Nhat Hanh is saying here is that mindfulness, practice, and poetry in life are not to be reserved for a time and place where everything is perfect; we can use the very instruments of society's nervous pressures on us to relieve the pressure. Even under the sound of helicopters--and this is a man who buried many children in Vietnam to the roar of helicopters and bombs--he can say, "Listen, listen; this sound brings me back to my true self."

::

Where do you find your true self? 

Have you made "mistakes" that you can re-view in search of your own precious pearls?

That was then..

In my last post I alluded to the very dark place that I lived in, in my heart and mind, for many, many years of my younger life. I recently found a piece of old writing that partially describes my state of being from back then. It's not particularly well-written but I share it with you regardless because it's raw and real and so was I. It was written on May 17, 2001 but occurred on September 28, 1998, a year and a few months post-suicide attempt. I had been slowly coming back to life within that year-and-a-bit and one day my resolve to LIVE surfaced with a vengeance. With a couple of shoves from a couple of caring friends, I took the first steps onto the new path that would lead me to precisely where I am today. Here was how that morning went..

What kind of person do you want to become?

I awoke from another fitful sleep, the brazen September sun mocking me. The bloodshot of my eyes imitated the crimson of the leaves pressed against the motel window. I could feel my stomach weighing heavy in the back of my throat, threatening to come the rest of the way up and the weatherman inside my skull was calling for heavy fog and thunderstorms; fifty percent chance of showers. I turned my head slightly to check the time. A piercing ray of sunlight reflected through the residue of Burgundy in the glass on the table beside the clock. I squinted. Two pm. 

The stench of cigarettes crept into my nostrils from every corner; the ashtray overflowed on the table. Further inspection of the room revealed chaos. The tacky, scenic motel picture lay on the floor, the glass smudged with sticky white powder and littered with rolled-up twenty dollar bills. Four wine bottles and an empty case of Heineken sat dejected next to the television set. 

Water.

On the way to the sink I tripped over the dress I had flung onto the floor at seven that morning and kicked it under the desk. I turned on the faucet and tried to find myself in the mirror over the sink.

I caught her eye, there in the streaky mirror under one waning fluorescent light bulb. She stared back at me, a stranger with sunken eyes and grayish skin made more dreadful by the garish light. She looked sad and afraid, pathetic really. Her blonde hair fell limp against her forehead. Her frail-looking body seemed to shake all over. I felt my lip begin to quiver and I noticed her action mimicked mine. I stared hard at her face, which bore such a striking resemblance to my own and I stepped away from her gaze; I didn't want to look at her anymore. My foot found the wineglass that had been carelessly left on the bathroom floor. 

With the blood came clarity.

"I have to go. Now."

::

The very next thing I did was to call two friends that I will forever credit for saving my life: Tom Roman and Cate Parry. Each of them told me something different. Each of them gave me the extra boost of strength I needed to pick up, pack up and start over again. I remain eternally grateful and humbled by their gifts to me that day.

:: 

Go placidly amidst the noise and haste..

In peace and love..

Lightning Dove

xo.

Now we're getting personal..

Okay, so I inspire people. So, I'm all blissed out and loving life. We covered that. But how? Like, really how?

Allow me to illustrate for you..

Years ago I was a very unhappy, very unhealthy girl, you know, childhood traumas and all that. I had anger issues, little to no self-esteem, drank too much, smoked too much, used recreational drugs with far too much frequency, suffered from severe and recurring depression, stayed in destructive relationships, made bad choices that hurt me and others and truly believed with all of my heart that the world would be a better place if I weren't in it.

After years of feeling that way I reached a point at which I could tolerate the pain no longer and, in June of 1997, I attempted to put an end to it all by downing a bottle of prescription pills chased by a bottle of vodka and slashing my left wrist. Well now, that's a sure fire way to mess up a perfectly good weekend innit?

I hurt people. My family most importantly. The very ones that I thought cared not for my existence ran to my bedside in a heartbeat and helped to bring me back to life. I will never, ever, so long as I live, forget the look on my brother-in-law's face nor the tears on his cheeks as I opened my eyes and "came to". That precise moment was a moment of catharsis. An absolute catalyst for dramatic change. And so began a journey..

Healing. Living. Being. Here. Now. Damn it can take a lot of work. And man is it worth every ounce of effort.

So what effected the most change Lara? 

This stuff:

Gestalt Psychotherapy*. I cannot recommend highly enough this path to self-discovery. The Gestalt approach to getting in contact with my Self and learning to live my life in awareness of my habits, behaviours and choices gave me more of the tools required to live fully and boldly ALIVE than anything else I have ever done. Seriously.

Yoga. It continuously astounds me to realize the myriad and far reaching benefits that  twisting myself up into a pretzel can have. The philosophy of Yoga married to the methodology of Gestalt (and the practice of both) gives me the courage I need to face life head on, with honesty and integrity and the faith to keep on believing even on the days that its hardest to do so. Om and Prem.

Raw Food. This is the bliss. This woman's article is the closest thing I have ever found to a perfect description of my own approach and experience. Yummalicious!

Systems that work. Isagenix is a complete nutritional and cleansing system that is quickly becoming the most recognized and utilized around the world. I appreciate the company for its integrity and culture of inclusivity. Isagenix systems pull together all of the fabulous ingredients that I was already consuming, loving and advocating as a raw-foodie and offers a program that makes it easy for folks to transition to a lifestyle of health and wellness that is sustainable for the long-haul. Try it! It works!

Inspiration from others. Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is one among hundreds of sources of inspiration that bring me pleasure for pleasure's sake and that serve to remind me: I am not alone..

Blissings..
AvoGoddess Signing Off

"Fear not mistakes. There are none." ~ Miles Davis 


* I must also credit the GIT with providing the words that I have chosen to use as my blog title. The slogan, Courage. Choice. Change. was coined by a Gestalt student many years ago and has become a personal mantra of mine.

I am an inspiration..

Who? Me? Yes! Me!

People keep telling me this.. I inspire them.

Initially, upon hearing this feedback, I was flabbergasted and rendered speechless. These days, I am humbled and grateful and, myself, inspired to share what I'm doing with others. 

So? What am I doing? I am living a life of joy, health, wealth, happiness and abundance.. sleeping better; feeling more energetic than ever; enjoying more [ahem] stamina; aging in reverse (I very recently turned 40 and I am consistently told I look to be in my late 20's or early 30's!!); and savouring a life lived in awareness underscored by a continuously present state of well-being.

Really Lara!? Is that even possible?!

Yep. It is.

All it takes is a commitment to yourself. A commitment to being your very best You. A commitment to your own health and wellness. That commitment WILL translate into the very same benefits that I have enjoyed for you and, by association, for the ones you love too.

Who will YOU inspire?

"... As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." ~ Marianne Williamson

(A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3])