There’s something I don’t think I made clear in our session. It was the part about doing something other than your passion or your dream.

I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting you give up on your dream for a minute!

What I learned from my coaches is that while we are working on what we really want to do, it can help a lot to stay open to other possible ways of receiving income, so that our dream or passion does not bear the burden of financial desperation.

These other ways can be things that we also enjoy and learn from, even if they are not the number one thing we want to be doing.

As I said to you, I always thought of that as a compromise, as if I had to give up on what I wanted most in order to open to other possibilites. Now I see it another way, and realize how fixed I was in my own ideas of how the universe should be supporting me.

For me, it was very liberating to let go of that fixation and say to Life, “Okay, I’m open..whatever needs to happen-how do I know what that is? I’m not running this whole show. Let me be open to the mystery and grace that is the source of everything I know.”

Dedicated to your Optimal Well Being and Full Aliveness

Issue #1

Dear students and friends:

This is the first issue of the Soma Yoga newsletter. I have put you on this list if you are a yoga student, or someone I think might be interested. If you do not want to receive this newsletter, please put Remove in the subject box, hit Reply, and I’ll remove you right away, with great willingness. I do not want to clog up your inbox with emails you are not going to read.
If, on the other hand, you know someone who might benefit from this newsletter, please pass it on to them. Thank you!
Please remember to put my name on your email white list, so your spam detector doesn’t throw me away.

A Place To Sit

Don’t go outside your house to see flowers
My friend, don’t bother with the excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers…
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens. (Kabir)

Yoga and Community
On one level, your yoga practice is all about your relationship with yourself. As one of my students at the government building said recently, “I love it, because it’s a non-competitive sport!” But on another level, yoga is all about community. Doing yoga with people offers you a simple and very profound way of connecting. It’s been a great joy for me to watch deep friendships evolve in my yoga classes over the years. Just by being present, just be showing up, and witnessing the efforts of the people in your class, you offer them a great deal. Don’t underestimate the value of what you are giving and receiving through your yoga practice.

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I’ve been lucky enough over the past six years to have 5 children born in my immediate neighborhood. I’ve witnessed a lot of natural and exuberant learning and evolution, right in my own back yard. Isn’t it amazing to think that every human being walking around on our planet learned how to walk in the same way: by standing up and falling over, standing up, taking a step and falling over, again and again and again.

Then we start thinking, once we’re a bit older, that our learning should proceed in an entirely different manner. Sometimes it does, but there is still a lot of falling down and getting up that is an essential part of human life. Have you noticed this? Learning to accept this aspect of life as a given and work with it in a good way can release a lot of our suffering. Molly Gordon, a wonderful coach I have worked with, speaks about learning how to “bow to failure.” When we bow to our failures, we look a little deeper than how things first appear. We get curious enough about the nature of life to consider that perhaps failure is not something to be shunned and avoided at all costs. What if our failures bring us something just as valuable as our successes? This has been a big learning for me, and I’d like to share some of it here.

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Please print this lifeletter if you can. It is meant to be held in your hand.

Dear friends:
This lifeletter is an introduction to the whole process of evolution and transformation, as I have engaged in it and witnessed it over a lifetime. This lifeletter is a bit longer than usual, even though I’ve made this description quite short and simple. I’ve used ‘aphorisms’ or compressed statements that can be expanded and unfolded by each one of you as you read this. 

I’ve spoken of our evolution in the context of coaching as I have experienced it, and as I practice it, but of course it can also happen quite spontaneously.

There are a multitude of ways to approach this subject. This is one window into a vast realm. Looking through it may be helpful to some of you. I hope so.

‘And the day came when the risk to remain in the bud
became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’ (Anais Nin)

Introduction

Barefoot Coaching is offered in these areas:
· Personal evolution
· Relationships
· Communication and Expression
· Non-dual spirituality
· Writing

Barefoot Coaching begins with a vision of you standing here with a foot in both worlds: the formless world of spirit, or Being, and the constantly evolving world of your humanity. To grow into the wholeness of your true nature is to learn how to embrace and honor both of these aspects.

I’m a coach who engages you, my client, in a process of deep learning, where all of you gets involved-body, mind, emotions and spirit. I have had over 20 years of experience in supporting your ‘evolutionary impulse’ the natural movement in you toward wholeness, freedom and integrity. I’m interested in helping people evolve, heal and awaken in new and surprising ways right now.

This process carries us beyond problem solving, to a place where we can all participate fully in life, and in creating a future that allows us to take care of each other and our planet.

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A few years ago, when the Olympic games were in Athens, I was watching them one night on T.V. The American commentator decided to give us a taste of Athenian life, so he walked down to the main square with the T.V. cameras. It was about 5pm, and the square was just filling up for the evening. There were children skipping rope and playing tag, teenagers on skateboards, mothers with babies in their arms, students drinking coffee, businessmen with newspapers and liqueurs, and old men playing chess. He strolled for a few minutes around the square, taking in the vitality and general friendliness of the scene.

What I noticed was how many people were actively engaged in talking with each other. Not the cursory cell phone kind of conversation we are so used to now, but real dialogue. It intrigued me so much that I lost interest in the games. When they were over, the same commentator went back to the square at one in the morning, “just for fun” he said. “We’ll see who’s left.”

He was astounded to find that the square was still full, and not because of the games. The mothers and young children had gone home, but they had been replaced by people of all ages who were still talking. This was quite unfathomable to the commentator. Finally he approached a white haired Greek patriarch, who stood up to speak with him. “Excuse me sir,” said the American, “could I ask you a few questions?”
“Of course,” the man beamed. “What would you like to know?” He was a remarkably tall and handsome fellow, towering above the American.
“What do you do here all night long?”
“We enjoy each other’s company,” the Greek replied. We laugh, we sing, and we engage in dialogue. We are eager to find out what is in each other’s hearts and minds.”
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“Will you be on time for work in the morning?” the American asked.
“Of course,” the patriarch replied with a huge smile. “But we Greeks have a different understanding of time and work than you North Americans.”

A few years later, I spent some time running a series of conversation cafes in our community. My intention was to bring as much of the community together as possible, and create an environment where they could engage in dialogue. I had been living in India for 25 years, where dialogue and inquiry are like part of the air you breathe. The people in India, like those in Greece, are not afraid to ask what I call ‘the big questions.’ As my teacher there used to say, “Any rickshaw driver will talk to you about God, life and the universe.”

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Welcome to our new subscribers.
This material is copyrighted. You may reprint any of it in your blog, newsletter, or ezine, provided you include the full copyright information and link back to http://www.barefootjourneys@netidea.com

Let’s Turnaround

One of the themes that keeps appearing in my life and work lately has been the nature of cause and effect. How much freedom do I really have? Am I really the product of my genes, my upbringing, my conditioning and my situation? We certainly tend to think like that in our society. But is it really true?

I have asked hundreds of students and clients this question over the years: Do you really think that circumstances, people and situations determine your experience?
I’ve asked them to sit with that question in silence and wait for the truth to show itself to them. And I’ve never had anyone reply ‘Yes’ to that question. That amazes me. Every single person who took that question into their heart said ‘No, it must be that I am responsible for my own experience. I can’t make anything else the cause, otherwise I am a victim.’

But here’s where it really gets interesting. When I looked at the way I was actually living, I was amazed at how often I was thinking and behaving as if circumstances were much more powerful than I was.  (It was often my coaches that pointed this out to me, God bless them.) And I saw the same thing happening with my students and clients. I really started to wonder, “What’s going on here? Why are we not living according to what we really know to be true?”

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One of my readers, Karen Marsden, wrote and thanked me for my ‘lifeletters’ a while ago. I realized that she had come up, spontaneously, with a new name for these newsletters. Thanks Karen. And welcome to 20 new subscribers and new members of this virtual community. I’m posting some of your responses to and comments on the lifeletters in my blog, which is part of my website.
The Power of Willingness

I’ve been noticing lately the kinds of questions that arise when I’m working with people:
“Would you be willing to accept this experience just as it is?”
“Would you be willing to love yourself for feeling this?”
“Would you be willing to ask your body about this?”
“Would you be willing to live with this question and not know the answer?”
“Would you be willing just to say yes to this moment?”

A lot of the time people respond by wanting to know how, how to do whatever follows the word ‘willing.’ But that’s not the question. We really don’t have to know how. All we have to do is touch into the willingness.

About six years ago, on retreat, I discovered the power of willingness. Our facilitator had asked us to open right up and directly contact our inner experience, the whole spectrum of our feelings and thoughts, without holding back. He asked us to find out how willing we were to do that. I was in a lot of emotional pain at the time, and I realized, when he asked the question, that I wasn’t very willing at all to contact myself in that way. I was deeply discouraged by this, because I could see that without that willingness, I was stuck in a contracted place. I walked around for a while, contemplating my unhappy state, and wondering where I would find the willingness I was looking for. Then I realized something. I saw that I was willing to be unwilling. It seemed so simple, almost like nothing at the time. I simply saw that I was in a place of unwillingness because I was willing to be there.

It reminds me of Jon de Ruiter, a spiritual teacher, who talks about the liberating power of tenderness. He says that all you need to start with is a tiny droplet of tenderness. That’s what happened to me that day-I found a tiny droplet of willingness. And once I found it, it expanded and filled the whole universe. It turned into something much bigger and more potent that I had ever imagined. I realized that willingness is not something my mind produces. It’s an unconditioned quality that comes from the ground of my being.

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I’ve always had a deep sense that presence and creativity are not really luxuries, but an essential part of life. This inner knowing has been confirmed by a great book I’m reading, called, “Deep Survival.” It contains many well- documented tales of survival-in the wilderness, at sea, in prisoner of war camps, and in the twin towers of 9/11.

It turns out that the people who survive are not necessarily the well- trained, experienced ones. The survivors are the ones who are able to deal with the reality right in front of them in a creative, flexible way. The ones who die are holding on to a map inside their minds. They have an idea of what is happening, and the idea stands between them and the truth of what is actually going on. They cannot meet the moment, the situation as it is, and respond to it.

So the more we live life according to our maps, our ideas, the less we are able to be present to our immediate, direct experience. And the more we can respond creatively, flexibly, to the demands of the moment, the more likely it is that we will walk out of the situation alive.

The state of presence, and our capacity to live creatively are essential survival skills. And they are not something we can just pull out of the bag, next time we get into trouble.

It was clear, reading ‘Deep Survival,’ that survivors carry these resources deep in their being. Their ability to be truly present, to let go of their mind maps, was a direct result of the way they had lived their lives. The ones who fought with reality, complained, resisted and denied what was going on, simply did not live to tell the story.

It’s random acts of kindness week in B.C. A small group of children started the week off a few years ago in their neighborhood, and the project took on a life of it’s own, like a stream that could not be contained within its banks.

I’ve asked a lot of people about their experiences with ‘unsolicited kindness.’ Everyone has experienced this mysterious force. There are stories that fall on your heart like sweet rain. Can you imagine if we heard such tales every day on the news?

Here’s mine:
A few years ago I was leaving a week- long meditation retreat. I was with a friend, and we didn’t know the area very well, or how to get to the main highway from where we were. We were still very deep in some meditative state. I was driving, and it wasn’t feeling so easy, even to drive round this quiet neighborhood.  We got thoroughly lost in about 10 minutes.

I stopped at a mall. There were a few cars and people around. I looked way across the parking lot and saw a guy standing beside his blue truck. Somehow I knew that he was the one.

I walked over, told him we were lost, and asked him for directions. He was very kind, and repeated them a few times for me, while I wrote them down. I could see him looking at me, picking right up on the state I was in.

I walked back to my car, and he waved and wished me luck. He was going home, back in the other direction. I got back in the car with my friend and we drove off. This time, due to the totally altered state we were both in, it only took us five minutes to get lost again. But now we were right in the middle of heavy traffic, and it was not going to be easy to stop. I could feel myself starting to panic. I looked out the window, and there was my guy who had given us the directions, right behind us in his blue truck-honking and waving us into the next lane, where we would turn right. I realized that he had turned around and followed me, knowing that I was not really capable of following his directions.

I turned right and started to get my bearings. I leaned out the window and shouted to him, “Thank you, I’m okay now-go back home!”

“No way,” he shouted back at me, “I’m staying with you till you get to the bridge.”

And he did. It was a good ten minute ride, and he stuck with us the whole way, until we turned onto the bridge and waved him goodbye.

Perhaps it was because of the state I was in that day, but I never really got over it. This ordinary looking guy in blue jeans with his pick up truck had a heart as big as the moon. He had absolutely nothing to gain by taking care of us like that. I’ll never see him again, and I don’t know his name. But he lives on, inside me.

Behind my T.V.
in the bedroom,
are four pots of geraniums,
sleeping through the winter.

Three are pale green,
one has no leaves
at all.

I water them
once in a while,
just enough
to keep them alive
until spring.

I love
that they bloom there
in secret,
behind the T.V.
where nobody sees them
but me.

I wonder about
the quiet plant,
the leafless one.

Will it come
alive again,
under blue sky
and warm rain?

I feel curious about
the secret movement
of life.

Life that sprouts
in silence,
hidden away,
forgotten,
but not dead.

A seed can sit
for a long time,
before it awakens.

Some seeds only sprout
when fire
comes upon them.

What seeds
do we carry,
that wait for fire
to ignite them?

The Acceptance of Difficulty

A couple of comments:  re “humans addicted to struggle”.  I also feel that we in the western world are addicted to all things going our way, that we should always be happy, be fulfilled--if not we often try to escape, resort to alcohol or take a pill. 

I’ve had a big learning in this area and have come to accept that parts of life are difficult (what we take on as alive human beings). The acceptance of difficulty, defeat and pain in our lives plus the awareness that we have a choice- either to indulge in the negativity or to let go, accept and be proactive and realize that this too shall pass seems to eliminate the struggle aspect.  Perhaps this is when sweet vulnerability comes in.  I love your imagery of babes in water...no struggle, no splashing around, just perfect balance in their environment.

Marilyn McCombe, Nelson, B.C. Canada

If you really want to get a feeling for how someone lives, look at the way they relate to time. Time is like a river we are all floating in. It surrounds us, encloses us, until we cannot even imagine a different way of being with it. But there is. I am lucky enough to live beside a two year old girl called Ruby. She has taught me a lot about time, gifts I was not ready to receive when my own daughter was that age.

One night a few weeks ago, Ruby’s mother and I were out shoveling snow at about 6 o’clock, while Ruby played in the piles we were making. We shoveled away for about 40 minutes. I was conscious of dinner waiting for me inside, and the night growing darker and quieter. Just as we were finishing and getting ready to go inside, Ruby jumped up and announced with great energy and glee, “It’s time for a walk!”

“Now?” we asked her, looking around at the soft snowy night. “Yes, now!’ she said, “offering a hand to her mother, “Let’s go!” Her mother, who is quite extraordinary, laughed, took her hand, and walked down the road with her, into the night. I went back inside, according to my schedule. But the moment continued to haunt me. My heart recognized a lost opportunity.

Whenever I’m with Ruby, I remember when I was young, and my mother would wake me in the morning for school. I never wanted to get up.  I would do this thing I called ‘slipping inside the moment.’ As I lay in bed, I would let myself fall inside each moment, until it stretched out, became elastic, and seemed to last far longer than what the clock was telling me.

During the last few years that I have been coaching, there is one thing that more of my clients have expressed than any other. And that is a great longing to be free of the tyranny of time. Some of them speak about the place of ‘just being’ or ‘being in the flow,’ and how that slips away and disappears when the day’s activities take over. One client of mine spoke last week about ‘that Sunday feeling,’ when there is nothing structured or planned-just a wide open space before you, ‘where you don’t have to be anybody.’ She said that was more important to her than anything.

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In this blog I want to emphasize that the heart of the creative process involves a kind of deep unlearning. What does this mean? It means that we have to be willing to question the way that we think, the way that we observe, the way we take all sorts of things for granted. We need to get back to our ‘pre-conventional’ mind, the awareness within us that sees the world freshly, for the first time, with curiosity and wonder.

You can look out your window, and call what you see ‘a tree.’ But it’s actually so much more than that tiny little sound ‘tree.’ What is your actual experience of that tree, that person, that moment, when you let go of the words, the ideas, and just open up to it with your whole being?

If we drop back into the openness, the silence, the deep receptivity of our unconditioned awareness, we contact something very alive and true. When we write from that place, then our words have a vibrancy and power to them that wakes us up and invites us to be right here, in this moment, without our judgments, opinions and beliefs. That’s what it means to be naked.

For more information and inspiration on this topic, please visit my website at http://www.barefootjourneys.net

with love
Shayla

Did you know that people are beginning to say that we are living in the age of anxiety? As a coach and teacher, this doesn’t surprise me. I have the opportunity to hear people express daily the level of anxiety they are living with. The speed of change is so intense that people can’t keep up with it. Everything we used to depend on, all our traditional support systems, are falling away.

More people are on medication that we can imagine, because a lot of people don’t talk about it. They feel ashamed, helpless, without power.

The way that I work with people initiates them into a process of deep change, or what is sometimes called ‘second order learning.’ This kind of learning is what we really need in our world right now. Traditional forms of learning just give you more information. But information is not going to do the trick at this point, because the information itself keeps changing and becoming obsolete.

We need to discover a way of learning that connects us with our being, the core of who we are.  When we can access that place, things really start to turn around for us. Then we are no longer taking knowledge and information from the outside, and imposing it on ourselves. Instead, we are actually opening to the genuine wisdom that lives inside us, and engaging in a real process of transformation. In the short run, it’s a lot more challenging. In the long run, it’s the only thing that’s really sustainable.

I give classes, retreats and personal coaching sessions on this kind of learning.
Please call me or email me for a 10 minute chat if you are interested.

Shayla
http://www.barefootjourneys.net
250.352.7908
{encode="barefootjourneys@netidea.com" title="www.barefootjourneys.net"

I want to thank all the people who have written to me from all over the world in response to my newsletters. I love getting your emails. Please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like me to focus on: a question or challenge you might be working with.

People have been asking me where I’ve learned what I’m writing about. These newsletters are not literature! They are reports from an ongoing practice and investigation that is my life. I discover most of what I am writing about in the relationships, inquiries, and dialogues I have with my students and clients.  The courses, retreats and sessions are the laboratories in which we drill down into the living wisdom that reveals itself, again and again. I call it ‘deep learning,’ the kind of learning that takes us down to the ground of our being.

“Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?” (‘Last night as I was sleeping,’) Antonio Machado

David Mackenzie reminded me last week of James Hillman’s book, ‘The Soul’s Code.’ Hillman is a prominent Jungian therapist. He speaks about the myth of the hero/heroine in our world, and what an illusion it is. The heroic approach demands what I call ‘false courage’, a will of steel, and endless struggle. As a hero or heroine, we are invested in being strong, in ploughing our way through obstacles, in never admitting defeat.

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