Boundaries, Balance and Forgiveness

Hello October! October is one of my favorite months - the leaves change, the air gets crisper, my allergies calm down and Pumpkin Spice is fully accepted! As we ease out of quarantine (and I say that with a grain of salt), I’m carefully navigating what it means to find balance in my life. On October 15, I will be leaving my Corporate America job for full time entrepreneurship! As exciting as that is, I’m cautiously weighing where I say yes and no to events and activities as to not overwhelm myself and my family. I’ve been know to try and “do it all” and I always end of irrigated, upset or just plain moody! So my mind continuously ponders - how do you keep your boundaries in check to stay balanced, mind, body, soul, spirit and CALENDAR!

I often find myself “busy” for no real reason at all and the next time I look up, it’s 3:00 PM! After a few days of this, I realize that I’m “out of balance” and have to work consciously to reel it all back in! This month, I’ve realized that I had to let go of teaching some yoga classes and stick to having my Tuesday, Saturday and Sundays open, maybe not going to EVERY church event, and intentionally setting “white noise” time on my schedule. I absolutely LOVE talking to people about their finances and financial planning, however, when it’s too much on the calendar at one time, burnout of your passion arrives sooner than expected!

Even though I’ve made plans to keep my boundaries and often fail, I always give myself grace to try again another day. Grace and forgiveness. The two attributes that make me a more compassionate human. I often come back to grace and forgiveness as the balance that brings me back to center. Back to keeping Jesus at the center of my life. Back to seeing others as the Father sees them!

My prayer for you throughout this month is that as you seek boundaries and balance in your life, you will cultivate the strength to forgive and show grace to others, as well as yourself!

Power Yoga “Mix”

I realized I haven’t wrote about our studio reopening (oh the joys of owning a yoga studio) OR posted on the blog in awhile since releasing The Manicured Marriage this month! I want to take a moment and write about one of my favorite classes back on my Fall Schedule, Hot Power Mix! Mix means music!!

When I mention that I’m making playlists for my yoga classes, people look at me like, what?!? How is that yoga? Guys, the practice of yoga is deep and wide. There are so many schools and lineages of yoga…we will save that discussion for Yoga Basics or a yoga philosophy class!

Music/Yoga - two of my absolute favorite things! If you’ve taken a 6:00 am class at the studio in the last year, you would walk in to the tunes bumping loud and the tempo upbeat! In my Power Mix classes, we move with the breath and the beat. Music frees the mind and allows me to push the shopping list out of my head and connect my body’s breath and movements.

So how do you create a magical playlist? First, you start with a genre, theme or intention. Naturally, you gravitate to your favorite genre - I’ve made so many Pop playlists, I had to start dating them to remember which was which! I’ve had a Lauren Hill/Aretha Franklin mix, a Whitney/Mariah mix, and a 70s/80s/and 90s mix! Once the intention/genre is selected, I spend time adding songs to playlists, then Intentionally placing the tunes in order for a meditation, warm-up, building heat, then cool down. You want the tempo to agree with your sequence so it takes careful alignment to ensure you are not heading into savasana with a fast song playing!

So that’s the Magic - Here are a few of my favorite playlists! Join me every Thursday at 5:15 for Power express set to an intentional playlist!

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/yoga-party-mix-feb-2020/pl.u-PDb40oBCLjDqrX

The Manicured Marriage

So, there's this thing I've been working on, apparently since April 2018 :-) and I'm almost ready to share it with the world! Remember seeing my relationship themed posts every week for #MarriageMonday?!? There was a very specific purpose behind it - I've been writing a book!

After spending the first month in quarantine, in late April, I began to clean out my personal computer and found an outline of a book I had titled and began on an airplane to somewhere overseas (I think my first trip to Bali) in 2018. As I had time to slow down and think about life, I kept thinking, there has to be something more than this...continuously transitioning roles and trying to climb this corporate ladder can't be life! Why can't I just use my brain power for my own good? I need to re-brand myself...enter Raudhah Rahman, the business coach/digital platform queen!

We created branded colors to fit my personality, logos for my social media posts, a website (because I wanted to start writing a blog), and an entire online platform to house my life post Corporate America! Raudhah's probing questions of "So, what else?" led me to spill my guts about this book idea. Without hesitation she said, "Ok, let's create a plan and do it!". Say what now?! Ummmm...ok! And outside of teaching 12 million yoga classes, that's how I've been spending my free time at home!

Thinking and writing, writing and talking with my husband about our time in marriage counseling, managing finances, and working through our differences. Life threw a couple of curve balls that slowed me down, but I've continued to press forward and write with a goal to share what I've learned with whoever needs it! Going through the good, bad and ugly parts of our almost 20 year relationship was not easy, but I found such a sense of peace in my weekly writing. It reminded me that not everything was as bad as I thought it was in that moment. It reminded me that we could overcome anything. It reminded me that one of the best things in life is cheesecake. That probably has nothing to do with marriage, but it was relevant at some point in our relationship!

Oh and my life post-Corporate America?! It begins on October 23, 2020 and I can't wait to see what happens next....