So when I heard this poem that my dear friend and colleague Dr. Christiane Northrup wrote in honor of Mother’s Day I thought “Now THIS is a poem worthy of my mom!”

Dr. Christiane Northrup’s Poem:

THANK YOU, MOM, for your steadfast love and support!

I am so grateful for the amazing relationship I have with my mom and I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to experience the transformation of our relationship from mother-daughter to friend-friend. Talking to other women, however, I realize not everyone has the same positive, supportive relationship with her mom that I have.

Dr. Northrup speaks so eloquently about the importance of a mother’s love and support:

“A mother’s love is the most powerful and fierce force in the world. This love—or lack thereof—is also the blueprint that creates a daughter’s health and belief system for her lifetime.”

If you would like help navigating the precious connection with your mother, Dr. Northrup is offering a live online course called Lightening the Mother Load: Healing Strategies for Daughters.

Is it time for you to rediscover, celebrate, or heal the mother-daughter bond in your life? If so, click here to register for her course.

PS- The Embody Your Bliss weekend retreat is SOLD OUT if you had wanted to attend click here to join the wait-list.

Aaahhh…

Our prayer was that the love, peace and joy we all experienced during our sacred time together be a blessing to all beings.  Little did we know how needed that prayer was.
Mother Nature on Britt’s Yoga Farm is stunning!

In order to bring some of the delicious goodness of our retreat into your home I wanted to share the recipe for the amazing, anti-oxidant-rich, raw chocolate dessert Britt made.  (I highly recommend you visit Britt’s website to get more of her recipes and learn more from her!)

• 1 cup raw walnuts
• 8-10 pitted medjool dates
• 1/2 cup powdered cacao
• 1 T. ghee or coconut oil
• pinch of sea salt
• raw cacao nibs

Super simple, super food:
In a food processor, chop the walnuts until they make a course walnut flour. With the food processor on, slowly add the pitted dates. Then add the powdered cacao and the salt. The mixture should hold together when you pinch it in your hands — if it doesn’t add either a little more ghee, coconut oil, or water.

Roll them into balls, then roll them in more cacao and/or raw cacao nibs. You can make the outsides even more scrumptious by rolling them in gogi berries, ginger flakes, coconut flakes, or add a little cinnamon or fennel powder to the cacao before rolling.

Ready for an experience that returns you to the center of your being?

Join 23 other women in Austin, TX at my
Weekend Retreat Embody Your Bliss

Sign-up by the Full Moon (Today, April 25th) to save $50!

See those tiny branches growing on the trunk?  Those are called suckers.  They divert nutrients for optimal tree growth.

As I continued my walk I reflected on all the suckers in my own life…the things that divert energy for an optimal life.

Here’s just a partial list of what came to mind:

• Compulsively checking emails, Facebook and texts
• Trying to make everything okay for everyone
• Fear that I’m not leading people effectively
• Criticizing myself for my looks, how I parent, how I don’t have a garden this year…
• Worrying…about anything.  
• Taking phone calls when it isn’t convenient for me to stop what I am doing
• Clutter
• Doubting myself
• Wanting things to be different than they are

You know what?  It’s time to prune the suckers!!!!

Need help pruning your suckers?  Join my weekend retreat.
I have the perfect pruning shears to do the job!

Register by the Full Moon (April 25th) to save $50!

Sister Maurus with my son in 2003.

Yesterday was no exception. It was 5:30 a.m. I was just finishing my morning prayers under the silvery light from the full moon and suddenly I was flooded with love and inspiration. It was as if my beloved spiritual guide, Sister Maurus Allen, was in the room talking to me…reminding me of the messages of love, forgiveness and liberation that Holy Week brings.

Sister Maurus was a radical Benedictine nun who taught yoga at the convent for 42 years. Radical because:

• She saw God in everyone and everything.
• She honored all paths.
• She taught women how to know the feminine face of God in themselves.
• She saw that Christ Consciousness was not confined by religion.
• She believed that “it is through women that the Cosmic Christ will manifest in this millennium.”

Even though Sister Maurus is no longer on earth in physical form, she certainly lives on through the millions of seeds of love she planted!

I wish you all could have been here yesterday as we danced radical Love, Forgiveness, Trust, Release, Joy and Liberation. I wish you could have felt the radical fusion of Holy Week…Holi, Passover and Easter…as a divine dance. I wish you all could have heard the words of Sister Maurus as she spoke through me at the end of class as we lay in deep relaxation….her words floating over us saying “There is no shame or guilt so deep that it cannot be healed by Love.”

Wishing you radical blessings during this Holy/Holi Week,

Not in Austin? Click here for my playlist and dance this Radical Holiness wherever you are!

ONE BILLION RISING IS:

• A global strike
• An invitation to dance
• A call to men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends
• An act of solidarity, demonstrating to women the commonality of their struggles and their power in numbers
• A refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given
• A new time and a new way of being

You can participate from wherever you are.  All you need to do is DANCE!  Dance in your living room, dance in the streets, dance at your gym, dance at your church or synagogue, dance in the aisles of the supermarket.  Just DANCE!

Here’s what my friend and mentor Dr. Christiane Northrup has to say:

Here’s the powerful anthem for you to dance to:

The personal is political.

This is not just an event about “them”…it is about each and every one of us.  In order to stop violence against women, we must stop violence against ourselves.  Violent thoughts such as self-loathing, self-doubt and self-criticism lead to violent thoughts about others such as judging, jealousy and hate.   These thoughts then lead to violent behaviors against ourselves and others.

Love is the answer.

It is no coincidence that One Billion Rising coincides with Valentine’s Day.  Love is the only energy powerful enough to dissolve violence.

Dance is the action.

Dancing is not only an act of celebration and victory, it is the one surefire way to move all residual memory of violence out of your body.  In preparation for One Billion Rising I learned the choreography to the anthem “Break the Chain” (CLICK HERE TO LEARN IT) in order to teach it to my dance class and to moms and daughters in my neighborhood.  Every woman felt a huge release and sense of power at the end of the dance and we sent our prayers for healing across the globe to all women who need our support.

What happened next took me by surprise. In the middle of the night I had a vivid nightmare reliving the experience of being raped in college 35 years ago. The reason this took me by surprise is that I’ve done so much healing around that incident that I didn’t even consider myself as part of the statistics that 1 in 3 women will be raped in her lifetime. It literally seemed like a lifetime ago for me. Obviously, however, some residual memory was left and the energy of One Billion people rising across the globe was powerful enough to finally wash that out of me.

I am so grateful!

My prayer for all of us is that we put an end to ALL VIOLENCE today.   Learn more at http://onebillionrising.org

Let’s dance!!!!!!

PS- It’s not just for women… MEN RISE, TOO! Ending violence against women is not just for women and girls. It is for men and boys, too. Jackson Katz, Ph.D. has great insight and solutions to help us dissolve violence against women.