yoga – Presence and Positivity

Everything I Wanted

“In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied”. – Florence Scovel Shinn

When I was 17 I had the inspiration to write a list of what I wanted in life. I included details about my ideal partner, my children, how it would feel to be together, and how I would feel with all those things secured. I sealed up the list in an envelope and I tucked it into my favorite book at the time.

Twelve years later, I was packing up to move to another state with that ideal partner and those two kids just in the gender order I had specified, and the forgotten list fell out of the book. I paused for a long while looking over what 17 year old me had very directly listed I wanted to have and I felt everything freeze around me seeing it all received. I HAD EVERYTHING I WANTED. That may look like a lovely blessing and I definitely felt it as such at the time. I was a bit wowed at how I had simply listed it all and easily received it all without toiling over it. I didn’t repeatedly look at the list and wonder about how it would happen. I just clearly stated what I wanted and let it go. So this realization of how life *can work shifted into my conscious awareness and I say it like this because I have no doubt that some unconscious part of me understood already. It also helps that I wasn’t asking for anything outside of the realm of what we consider to be common occurrence. Those things take more trust and imagination to bring about.

As the move continued on, I didn’t think about the list much more but in the year to come, I found myself begin questioning everything I thought I understood about reality. HOW did that happen exactly? I began to feel curious about astrology and venture down pathways to understand different lenses of life as well as to write poetry and some short stories regularly which caused me to seek inspiration points in others. I found observing the qualities in others as well the way people relate to one another to be an excellent past time; it was super informative for how reality appears to be different depending on the participants.

As more time passed, I began to have symptoms of what many refer to as spiritual awakening. I felt different in my reality, with contrast coming up between me and those around me. I saw others differently than I had seen them before because I was changing. I learned to respond differently to the reality to heal the unhealthy patterns that were playing. I devoted myself to creating a healthier physical form after childbirths and within that began a practice of Kundalini yoga which I attribute now to the pattern awareness that occurred. When I first practiced this yoga I felt like I would vomit after every session for many weeks, and yet for some reason I kept doing it with adjustments here and there to help myself through that reaction. More recently, in a training to teach Kundalini, I understood that was a release of toxins in my body. The breath work and the lymphatic cleanse cleared so much energetic density from my body and it was absolutely worth it to do that work and to ultimately feel better. This also meant becoming more sensitive to my body and what my body needed as well as what it did not need.

I became more sensitive to everything around me as well. I could always read people with ease, but their motivations began to become apparent to me and I could feel their feelings too so that a person’s energy would speak to me before they ever said a word. I found this to be overwhelming for a time, wishing I could just process myself and not so much other information at once too. As I learned to anchor into this way of experiencing life, my external reality took on some challenges that didn’t match that original list at all. Everything I wanted was shifting into an external expression that wasn’t at all what I wanted, but now that I’m a decade deep into venturing away from the list, I’ll say I’ve come to view the growth that has occurred as it’s own blessing. Loss is a great teacher. I’ve learned to have gratitude in each day, to let forgiveness be an ever-present practice, to be mindful of what I speak, that saying less and sometimes nothing is more effective than anything I could have uttered, how to give without a thought for what may come back, how to expect the best from others knowing that allows them to show up as such, and how to love others as well as myself unconditionally. I’ve also learned to trust the universe to know best what’s in alignment with my highest good and to welcome what shows up in my reality now under that frequency.

Sometimes our ego and our soul want or need different things. Making sure they’re aligned is imperative. Otherwise, it could be that everything you want is only in service to a particular aspect of you, but not in service to the whole. That moment of thinking “I have everything I wanted” for me was a gateway to one of many spiritual awakenings. Sometimes Spirit creates a little precursor moment to releasing the ego because the soul has other plans.

Night Yoga

I’ve been immersed in a training since March that I find shifting me at every level of being, integrating past expressions and future intentions with the ability to hold those loosely in present moment , as well as healing beliefs that are ultimately blocks in true self embodiment.

As we wind down into the final modules, invitation to illuminating the shadows of self to better inhabit a consistent vibration of joy led me to a night practice of asana (yoga postures) outside over the last month or so. I practice outside during daytime hours when possible but have not extended that to night before. The intention to welcome the shadow hits a little differently under a blanket of darkness with considerably less human activity occurring.

Ultimately, after dedicated practice I began to feel myself as the point of illumination. Miraculously, the shadows shrink when you hold yourself as the light. It’s a powerful experience.

I’d invite you to try this should you find yourself in an environment that can offer you darkness safely.

Circle Around

I’ve had more experiences than I can count of certain themes circling back around in my life, each time a little different, and I’d like to think improved in how it appears and in how I respond. A good portion of this post was written in 2020 and saved as a draft until now that the topic has circled back around with significance at the end of 2025:

I had several voice teachers during high school and college who all had different ideas about the best practices in singing and each one would take you through warm ups of melodic lines based on his or her own training, peer influence, and personal insights. My second voice teacher in high school approached singing from the German school of thought, valuing a round, darker quality in the voice producing a lot of resonance in the chest. To create this sound, you can get a feeling for it by pretending you have a whole orange or a golf ball in your mouth and say a line, any line. If you’d like to reference performances of Wagner’s works (i.e. Tristan und Isolde), you can hear more of that quality in recordings of professional singers.

Of course, my next teacher a few years down the road was not a fan of that style at all. She preferred the Italian school of thought: Bel Canto. With bel canto or beautiful singing, one focuses on a lighter quality with more fluid agility , pointing the sound towards the space above the hard palate, stretching up to the point between the eyebrows. You may want to reference Bellini and possibly Cecilia Bartoli who is a well known practitioner of the style.

In my relatively long ago experience of moving from the one approach to the other, I was given the assignment of singing “like a witch” for two weeks straight. I suppose my voice teacher thought two weeks could override two years of previous practice. Singing “like a witch” meant that I had to sing everything in my nose and record it as well as listen back over whatever that sounded like followed by journaling on the experience. Truly, this voice teacher set me up for the spiritual reflection process that would be important to my current path.

The assignment was an over exaggeration calling me to work in the opposite direction for sound produced in the mask of the face. It felt beyond weird and sounded worse. However, after two weeks I was completely out of the golf ball territory causing me to almost swallow my sound under the soft palate and I could comfortably access a different internal focus, right above the hard palate of the mouth, in the nasal cavity. If you’re not sure about those, you can feel the hard and soft palates by flattening your tongue out against the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth and sliding it back towards your throat.

So after two weeks of the one and two years give or take of the other, I could better understand how to access the space in the middle of these. When I was asked to send my sound towards the middle of the brows, accessing a midway point felt relatively easy. She was correct that two weeks was enough time for her desired change to take hold. With more time dedicated to this new placement, I learned to send sound out in an arc between my eyes or up through the crown of the head. These points are also spoken about in Kundalini Yoga as triggers for awakening to your spiritual self which made it much easier to access when I found myself in those practices.

These vocal explorations led to momentary success in producing what the current teacher desired to hear. It also felt lighter and easier to sing this way.

I went on to teach public school music at the elementary level with a volunteer chorus offering in the mornings. Early on in teaching public school, I was asked to take on private students. I decided to only work with adults that wanted to give singing a try. However, later I did begin to say yes to working with singers of all ages in the private studio with the understanding that we would only learn melodies that they liked together and sing to sing. I found myself refusing to train anyone in a specific way or other. If I saw a singer doing something wonky (unhealthy or stressful) in their sound production we would find ways to address that with movement and visualizations but otherwise the rule was to “let your voice be your voice” and don’t worry about sounding a certain way. Looking back on it, mostly I was encouraging better postures, relaxing muscles that were tight, and giving students visual tools that would help them get out of a self sabotaging mind. It was called a voice lesson but often times it was leaning towards a meditative practice. Maybe I was on the tip of the iceberg I find myself on the underside of these days.

After about seven or eight years in the public system, I was done. I didn’t feel like singing anymore or pretending that I had some remarkable answers to making the best sounds. I thought, “anyone can tell someone else to drop their jaw and release tension”. I stopped working with people on this topic and focused on my family. When I did come back to sing again, it was through mantra that was part of a yoga practice and my voice was half what it used to be when there at all. I was a mother to two young children, not sleeping well, and not singing much so that makes sense but I knew it was more than that. Some say singing is the truest expression of spirit and mine was lost it seemed. I was only interested in quieter forms of expression for a long while and I began to rely more on a home kundalini yoga practice to feel connected to myself. Thankfully, that grew into feeling connected to something more than me and with that, my sound in mantra became more steady and purposeful.

And now, I find myself a few days out from a vocal session with a former operatic singer who leads sessions in connecting to the voice for healing. She works with anyone who is open to her work and shows the voice as the key to wellness. She incorporated the bel canto with tantric yogic practices in our session and I found myself laughing a little as I felt like a dog chasing my tail for the past 25 years — always searching for something, you know. I haven’t been to a vocal class of any kind for at least 15 years and certainly not one focused on myself as the singer. I attended this session not because I was actively seeking it but through yogic training with the teacher being a guest speaker. I swear, Life always has so much fun with me and it’s a blessing to feel that way. The more I notice meaning and synchronicity, the more they appear. The other participants in my training have not previously trained as singers and it was so beautiful to witness them engaging with singing in this non judgmental, healing, and joyful expression of connecting to the pelvic floor and root chakra while letting gentle sounds move through their vocal folds. We were in a virtual environment and muted apart from the teacher, which in this case seemed to provide the participants ability to make sound freely though under the gentle care of this teacher, I imagine they may have felt this regardless. I found myself in tears a few times actually, because in a flash my entire path felt connected and purposeful. I felt a larger hand at play. How lucky are we who experience standing directly over our unwitting threads revealed as a more intentional tapestry?

Wahe Guru! I bow my heart and head to the Infinite Teacher.