Overcoming obstacles…. the thrill of jumping the fences in life!

/in ,

Have you ever ridden a horse cross-country?

Or experienced the amazing feeling of riding in harmony with another horse-being, jumping fences and taking the pace and the obstacles, all in your stride?

As time is speeding up, being able to ride the pace, stay calm in the saddle, feel confident that we are holding the reins is all increasingly important.

Knowing how to overcome obstacles is vital.   Rather than fall into emotional spirals of fear, anxiety and the many symptoms that make up stress, with the right strategies, the “challenges” become opportunities for us to reach higher, expand our comfort zones and even begin to enjoy the exhilaration of flying over fences into pastures new.

One of my favourite riding instructors gave me immaculate advice: sit back and allow your horse to carry you forward in life.

So making the time to meditate, to calm your mind, enables the calm to resonate at a cellular level.   Yoga and Qi Gong and Tai Chi bring you back into your body, helping you to centre, focus and feel strong, flowing energy.  Any combination of the above, practiced regularly, with joy (rather than pressure) will help you reconnect with your life-horse at a deeper level.  This will enable you to get into your life stride: so you can ride in greater harmony and allow your horse to carry you up and over challenges along the way.

There are clear steps to model for jumping fences on horse-back successfully and they can be beautifully translated into day-to-day living:

* Walk the course first – on foot, see the reality of the size of the fences and work out how many “strides” you will need to jump each one.    It is essential to be grounded! The faster the pace of your life, the more important it is that you can feel firmly grounded, in your body and are able to consider the best realistic strategy for any challenging situation.  Look at the fence from both sides – take off and landing.  See difficult situations from various perspectives and this will help you distance yourself emotionally and find the more balanced, sleek and success-oriented solution.

* When you are preparing to jump the fences, warm up first, jumping smaller fences in the practice ring first

Ensure you are not taking on too much! If a challenge or situation feels overwhelming, look at bite size pieces that you feel you can deal with.  Build your confidence and then have that final face to face conversation that takes the most strength, clarity and courage!

* Find your own mantra that helps you stay in the zone

*Create an internal belief that you CAN jump the fence! and repeat it like a mantra “over” and “over” again.  Ensure it is positively stated and in the present tense, this will encode your cellular memory, so that you begin to resonate this belief: that means you will be feeling it as a truth, rather than purely something positive you are saying.

* Practice, practice, practice – remember there is no failure, only feedback to help you adapt and refine your techniques.

* Visualise, in a multi-sensory way, what you will be seeing, hearing and feeling when you have cleared the fence successfully.  Write this down and read it back to yourself regularly.  Just imagine… the excitement and anticipation of that feeling of clearing the fence.  Maybe even relief!

Enjoy becoming a master of your own life, see the obstacles as opportunities for you to heighten your awareness, expand your consciousness and blossom magnificently, in body, heart and mind.

For life coaching to enhance your ability to sail over the higher fences and navigate the cheeky obstacles that turn up unexpectedly…. contact larah@ibizaretreats.com.

 

 

 

Accumulate first… the treasures of the heart… for a Valentine’s week to remember!

/in

“The treasures of the body and the treasures of the store-house (health, family, relationships, money) are important….  but the treasures to strive for…. are the treasures of the heart”

President Ikeda – SGI International – world peace movement

When we accumulate the treasures of the heart, the treasures of the body and the store-house come into our life automatically…

So this Valentine’s week take care to notice the treasures your heart wishes to accumulate, experience and receive.

Ask yourself: How do I want my heart to feel? Radiant? Glowing? Light and free? Open? Joyful? Childlike? Happy?

Make a list of your heart-treasures and notice how amazing this enables you to feel.

Literally, just by thinking about it and focussing on it and writing down. you are drawing in this energy and receiving it back from the Universe – it is the law of attraction in action.

Then:

* Believe you deserve this!

* Ensure you are affirming that you are allowing them into your life

* Practice feeling heart-opening, heart-warming, bubbling-over gratitude…. (you really can ham it up here!) so that you can activate the Universal law of attraction and attract even more treasures of the heart into your life.

May you enjoy great love this week and spread it far and wide.

May this love fill you with joy and inspire your journey in life.

 

With lots of love…. the Ibiza Retreats team….

 

 

Love is a wonderful thing! How do you make sure you feel love every day?

/in ,

Love helps you glow with the radiance of an innocent child…. it helps you see the good and the beauty in the world… it lifts you up and it helps your heart sing.

Love is all you need!

And you have so much more to share and to give…. with and to the world around you!

Yet as long as we are depending on the love of another to feel love flowing through us… we are dependent.  This love can never be as consistent or permanent as we (and our egos) need it to be.

Love is a feeling, an emotion and a magical vibration.  When we are feeling love pulsing through us we emanate a submolecular level, a super-high frequency that attracts more loving experiences and people in to our lives.

 

So how do you get more of this delicious, nutritious love-fest into your life?

Focus on loving yourself – as well as others – this Valentines!

Have you noticed how wonderful you feel when you give of yourself self-lessly to others?

Keep doing this! By all means.  Yet for the purpose of giving yourself a love-injection that will uplift you into spring, for this February focus on loving yourself and appreciating your body, feeding your heart-felt needs and nourishing your spirit within.

1. Loving yourself & Appreciating your Body

Ahhhh the inner-critic.  How often do you actually look into the mirror and appreciate who and what you see before you.  We all know that most “perfect” images in magazines are photo-shopped – yet there is part of us that still buys into it.  So start to vitally appreciate yourself and your body – say thank you to your body for being strong and carrying you through life so well despite all the toxins we often subject it to.  Thank your body for everything that it does.  Focus on the parts that you love about your body, your curving hips, your finger-nails, your smile, your softness.

2. Feeding your heart-felt Needs

Have you made a vision board?  This is just slightly different…. ask yourself what do I NEED in my life to feel the happiest, most joyful, most contented I can be?   It may be to feel TRUST and LIGHTNESS and FREEDOM, it may be being in nature, swimming…  create a needs board – or simply write a list (like the below).  This will bring it to your attention – and where attention goes, energy flows.  You will naturally start caring more for your needs.

And this then runs on to…

3. Nourishing Your Spirit

Your spirit is like a 5 year old child, light and happy and free.  It is that part of you that, if it were socially permissable to do so, would be often dancing in the rain, laughing out loud in the middle of a packaged tube, would be singing at the top of your voice.  Your spirit loves expression, the care-free creative expression of you in your essence: the happy, healthy, vital core of you.

So how can you engage with this part of yourself?  Think about all the things that you simply LOVE to do! That fill your heart with joy – without any goals or achievement attached, where the joy is in the doing and experiencing:

* Painting
* Savouring a delicious cup of tea in bed first thing in the morning
* Listening to exquisite classical music
* Practising yoga in the sunshine first thing in the morning
* Running through fields of flowers as fast as I can

And then…….. focus on doing them – just for February! And notice how, in loving yourself, you attract more and more of this wonderful high vibration into your life….  and how you have so much more to share with your family, with your partner, with your loved ones around you.

Beautiful!

What do you most love reading to begin the day?

/in ,

Do you delve back into a novel? Re-engage with a thriller? Or open up the newspaper to find out “what’s going on in the world”?

Perhaps your prefer to pick up a book that helps you think and feel more positively (I just love Dr Wayne Dwyer’s the Power of your Intention) or maybe you open up your iphone and search online, following your favourite blogs and preferred journalists and writers.

So if you opt for news – newsflash! What you are reading can dramatically change your life!  Right now, whatever you are reading is stimulating emotional responses in your body that are changing the way you think and feel physically and neurologically.

What are the first words you read each morning?

So just like the food that you eat, how careful are you with the words that you read?

We can all too easily forget that when we are reading news, it is already through somebody else’s eyes.  It has been translated into an angle, a focus that their editor (and audience) requires to keep feeding a need for more of a certain type of information.

We are emotional beings and we are driven by our thoughts and emotions.  Newspapers sell well when there is a “big piece of news” that causes many people to react and to feel something. Headlines appear on tea-time television.

How often is this feeling something good? How often is the news simply making you feel more negative, worried and fearful because of what “they” say about the world’s economic situation, the ongoing seige in Libya, civil wars in Africa… how does that make you feel about yourself? about life? about our world?

There is SO much good in the world.

There is so much bravery, compassion, courage and beauty.

Yet how often do we actually get to read GOOD NEWS?  How often does the news you read actually inspire you to think and feel better things about the situation, to send them loving prayers and intentions, or to take some form of positive action to support a leader who is bravely risking their life to go against the will-power of institutions and dictatorships?

How many of you reading this have stopped listening to the radio, watching the news on TV and “filter” the information in newspapers to avoid succumbing to the doubts and fears that sadness that not just the stories, also the way that they are told, can encourage?

I most certainly get my news filtered!  And then I look for positive aspects to chant for, to meditate on, how can I, little me, support or feel good towards this situation?

What a gift to pick up the new DeTodo.  An Ibiza-wide broadsheet that helps you find “almost everything” that you are looking for in Ibiza.  Lovely David Moss, the editor, has revamped and revitalised De Todo Good News Paper for 2012: it is officially Ibiza’s first GOOD NEWS PAPER! Check them out online here: https://www.detodoenibiza.com/

To write a GOOD NEWS story, the focus needs to be on encouraging the reader to think and feel positively towards the situation.  To put a situation in a positive light, a cup “half-full” approach, this needs to be the new angle for journalism.

Science is increasingly meeting with spirituality in the new consciousness that “everything is energy”.  Quantum physics can be both proved and also can blow our mind with concepts our conditioned mind cannot yet grasp fully, about time-space reality.

What more and more of us are agreeing with is that the power of our thought is phenomenal.   That when many minds get together to meditation, to pray, to think the same thing collectively, this has an enormous impact, consciously and subliminally on a person, a situation or event.

This has been used negatively in the past, to drive fear and create support for violent and aggressive actions.

Yet we can all come together, wherever we are in the world and choose to think and feel positively about situations that are happening.  Like the millions of people around the world who prayed simultaneously for the water to be clean and clear after the radioactive waste disaster in Japan.  These situations more and more are encouraging us to take positive, affirmative, life-enhancing action.

Our next blog is about the Water of Life… and the power of meditation, of choosing your thoughts, of the words that we think and feel on us and the world around us.  So that your power to positively change your world – and the world around you, will be, like a clear glass of water, clear and life-givingly transparent.

Lots of Love x

Be like a chameleon! Life Yoga Coaching to Learn to witness and observe…

/in ,

As the new year energies gather pace, projects adapt and situations change.  Have you noticed this?  

How is everything happening? Precisely in the way you willed it to for this year…. or, are you needing to think and be flexible?  To find new “positions” that help balance situations?  Just like on the yoga mat?

Here are some practical tips to become more of a “witness” to be able to “observe” the situations unfolding, rather than feeling “stuck in the middle” of situations, of negotations between clients and suppliers, this will allow you to respond in the best ways, with courage, with fluidity and with grace.

Just like a chameleon, you can watch and listen and learn and await with poise for the perfect moment to say the right things.. without pushing or pressing an agenda….

This is brilliant for resolving challenging situations and changing situations within all types of relationships – at work, within your romantic relationships, families and friends.

It will set you on a life-yoga path for your year ahead and help you be more in the flow of life – where the right things that really are best for you flow to you more easily!

If we feel ourselves striving and pushing to hard, it is because we are going against the current.

So give this a go and learn how to flow….  simply:

Be like a chameleon!

The animal card for a chameleon talks about being sensitive, being the silent witness, rather that reacting on emails and writing hurriedly to try and save and resolve, rather step back, allow yourself to become still and to breathe and to blend in with the background.  Then, as you watch events unfold, you can contribute sensitively to support the way that the situation is meant to flow.  This is not about being passive, just as in many yoga asanas, like Tadasana (Mountain Pose) we are actively engaged with life, rooting to the earth and to nature, relaxed in our body yet strong and connected, all muscles are prepared and ready to respond at the right moment, for the clearest next movements, following the next conscious breathe.

1.  Stop – look – listen:

To the emails, to the conversations, allow others to speak, to offer their perspectives, their ideas and their insights (every challenging or uncomfortable situation offers a LOT of growth and learning)

Watch the correspondence, look at the patterns in different people’s actions and behaviours, listen to the dialogues.

2. Remember – what is the HIGHEST GOOD? What is it that all of us in this situation wish to happen, to achieve, to transpire?

What is our common goal?

What is YOUR truth in the situation?  Does the achievement of the original goal REALLY feel good to you – or, now that you have looked and listened more deeply, are you happy if events happen in a different way? Could this open up more space and time for other opportunities to blossom?

3. Reflect – on the truth – and when you are asked for a response – reflect the truth!  That is all you need to do! Just like a chameleon allow the light and the true colours to flow through you.   This will help you see things for what they are, to help you clarify the best path of action for you and for everyone concerned.