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Please enjoy this Balinese Sound Healing Meditation all the way from Bali. I sat listening to this whilst getting the most amazing Ayurvedic Crown Head Massage... Please Enjoy... Add Comment There is a beautiful water feature at the end of our pool in our villa here in Bali. I have been enjoying water the water cascading down the wall and gently caressing the water below. The ripples which follow are just delightful to watch. Here it is.... Aim to breathe deeply whilst watching this water falling and imagine it cleansing you. Enjoy....  I recently started a writing programme online with an amazing author SARK. She talks a lot about the inner wise self. The part of you who is 100% authentic, genuine, loving, caring and wants only the very best for you. Some people call it an inner guide, an inner knowing, your highest self. I call it intuition. Intuition has been my friend my whole life but it's only recently that I began to listen and trust her and what she said. I ignored her for so long and was basically tuned in only to my inner critic voice. The one who tells you all the things you'll never do, have or be and exactly why. SARK encourages us writers to tune into the loving voice rather than the critic. The critic will only serve to stop us. The inner wise self will motivate and indeed inspire us to find our authentic voice and write and indeed live from that wise place. It will actually encourage us to write and actively give us the momentum we need. My wish for you is to tune into it also. It can be an amazing practice to make as part of your self-care practice. I'm on a self-care mission and if we all took the time for some self-care, we would nourish our roots and find what we need internally rather than always looking for it externally. We would have a solid foundation from which to move through our life from. Some of the things your inner wise self will just know:
If that doesn't sound exciting, I don't know what will!! So each and every morning, post meditation, I now sit in complete quietness on my bright orange meditation cushion and ask my inner wise self just what I need to hear that day. It usually starts of laughing or smiling and then speaks so clearly to me that it makes me smile. The other week it told me "Shoot for the moon. Be bold. Play big. Be gentle." Another time it said "Allow the frozen parts of yourself to thaw...it's time." Well okay then. That day I wrote and played and felt amazing!! Rather than the 'inaction' I can sometimes feel when producing work and putting myself out there in the world, it produced action and conversations and great feelings all day long. So often times during the day I will simply check in and this usually means stopping what I am doing just for a moment and asking..."Inner Wise self (IWS) what do I need to know right now...how can you support me?" You could ask this before a meeting, a conversation, an action... It will tell you, intuition will, a gut feeling, a knowing, a voice, a feeling. One or more of these will show up and give you what you need just in that moment and if you don't receive anything then perhaps you are already acting from it and again you will know. Once you become present to this self, you will never feel alone again. It will always keep you company and have your back. It will forever push you to take the next right action. It will become a trusted guide and that my friends is the most amazing feeling there is! Take Care and watch this space...I am off to Bali with my hubby for a vacation and a scouting mission...(I hear holding retreats in my future). I will be posting beautiful visual meditations so check back in. Yvonne xx  It all started with a cup of calming tea... I was having one of those day...you know the ones when you get out of bed, you don't feel your best and all you really want to do is pull the covers back over your head and snuggle down for the day. Well, since I work for myself, there are times I can take a day like this, if I really wanted to. However, being me, I cannot stay in bed all day...I just believe that life is for living and why waste it sleeping...plus, it would only keep me awake tonight and then the whole cycle would continue.... So I got up. I stayed in my PJ's. I drank some coffee, I ate a cookie for breakfast...ok, after some granola but still, I was being a bit naughty. I began to tell myself that I had to do some work. My head was telling me that I should do this and that but my body....Ah my body had other plans, my heart told me to be still. My heart told me gently to do my meditation then sit in silence. Some cool stuff came up during that meditation...in that stillness. Some answers, ideas and yet again I was reminded of the importance of silence and stillness. Of getting in touch with our bodies. My friend and fellow coach Dr. Susan Bernstein (I interview her for my self-care course here) took me through her sensational shift session last week and I was reminded of the power of taking ourselves out of our heads and getting into our bodies. The power in this lies in what can be shifted here. It can be pretty powerful yet there is no need to feel guilty about this. Yes it sounds indulgent...I hear you..."well I haven't got the time to sit in silence, I'm too busy to just sit on my ass." I hear you, truly I do. Yet what I also hear is what is not being said here, what is simmering under the surface and believe me, I have heard a lot form my clients in the past.. "I'm too afraid of what will happen if I sit in stillness." "I'm making my life not matter." "I'm not worth the time." "I'm not worthy...period." Do any of those sound in any way familiar? Have you said these to yourself at some point or another. Be honest here... The greatest gift you can give yourself and other people is by practicing the art of self-care. Self-care may sound like crap to some people yet it equals self-love. It equals worth and power and energy and vitality. Filling ourselves up from the inside. The pull feels so much better than the push. That place where we are pushing ourselves so hard to achieve, more, greater, better, more successful. It feels anxious, tight, irritating, uneasy. The pull when we take our time, end up doing a better job, good enough. It feels more in flow, easy, balanced, strong, connected. You can literally pepper your days with moments like this. You don't have to have an entire day but small mini moments such as:
There are so many beautiful acts you can engage in to ensure you stay a little more grounded, a little more relaxed and yet not feel guilty. Guilt usually is a completely wasted feeling. Aim to discard as much of this feeling as you can. Do you have too much push and not enough pull? What do you think will happen when you don't conserve some of your energy? Drop a comment here on over at the Facebook page. Take Care, Yvonne xx Do you do things for others and expect a return? Do you place conditions around things? 
One beautiful morning, I woke up and truly appreciated my life. Not just the fact that I live in such a peaceful city near the water, but that every day I get to be me. Unique, alive, caring, loving me! Every day I grow more comfortable in my skin. I can breathe more deeply, feel more fully and share more abundantly with the world around me. It wasn't always this way... One horrible morning many years ago, I woke up with no awareness that my world as I knew it was about to completely change. The girl I was would leave me for such a long time. She would remain hidden away from the world, her head down, her light shut off. Until very recently, I thought that I had sorted out my shit, dealt with the internal condition, laughed in the face of low self-esteem but it took me going on another learning journey to realise that the girl who had started to shine still had some serious flaws... I was writing my book Beat Up To Beautiful: a journey to self-acceptance and I kept stopping. I went to lunch with my beautiful Yoga teacher Melissa (POWA centre- go google her as I'm writing from a mobile device and I don't yet know how to put in a link) anyway, here I was telling Melissa that I simply couldn't write my book because I clearly wasn't at the beautiful stage yet. She looked at me with her kind and oh so gentle face and spoke words that rocked my world so much that I had to get her to repeat what she said... "Isn't stopping writing just another way of beating yourself up?" & "Couldn't part of being beautiful be that we sometimes beat ourselves up?" Oh my!!!
Hugs, Yvonne xx 
1. You are feeling really muddled, confused, overwhelmed, fed up, stuck and you feel that you are never going to move ahead with your goals, dreams, wants for your future. 2. You really feel that life would be better if only you knew what you wanted out of it. You are unsure and have tried many times to make something happen only to fall short time after time. 3. You complain a lot. 4. You don't see how you will ever have something you can't even articulate yet you know SOMETHING needs to change. 5. You are sick of your own complaining. 6. You get jealous every single time you see someone around you beaming, successful, glowing, achieving and thriving. 7. You want to understand yourself better. 8. You want strategies to live a great life. 9. You secretly think nobody will ever feel how unproductive you feel at times, sometimes....ok...all the bloody time! 10. You want clarity, momentum, ideas, awareness...joy. 11. You want someone to be radically honest with you, support you, understand you, assist you, partner with you, champion for you and keep you accountable for the change you say you want...when you know what that is... 
 Do you have a list lurking somewhere that you made up a while ago...or maybe at the beginning of 2013. It maybe looked a little something like this. My Goals for 2013
So these are all great goals. However, I would urge you to question...who are these goals for? Are they really for you? Are the really the you in 2013 or the old you? Are they something which other people have said you ought to achieve this year? Basically, do they mean something to you...? Do they have...soul? The difference between a normal goal and a goal with soul is that often a normal goal will be boring, lacking, stale, be last year's wishes but perhaps not this years... How do we bring our soul into our goal? First we get to the heart of why we want this goal. My clients know for a fact that we don't even visit goal setting until we're clear on their values as a person and how they want to feel in their life. When I first started out coaching I was all about getting to the goal. Nutting it out and then putting milestones in place. However, I quickly realised that my client would get to the goal and still be utterly unfulfilled. They would shrug their shoulders and say "huh, but I thought I would feel different..." They didn't feel different because for one their goal was not aligned with their values, their soul. It meant very little to them. The thing, I realised, that they were all chasing was a feeling. I first read about going after our feelings in many books written by the late Debbie Ford, a brilliant coach and bringer of light! I started to tune into my clients values and how they wanted to feel. An example of this was a client who told me his main goal was to get this new job that would have him working 60 plus hours a week...away from his family. I asked him what that job was going to give him and he said money and then I asked why he wanted money...so I can spend more time with my family. So then we worked on values and one of his top was freedom and family. I asked that by going after this job of 60 hours plus a week, would he be honoring those values. He was floored as he realised that if he took this job, it would fulfill one thing and one thing only..money. However, he would be completely out of line with his values and that would hurt him and his family in the long run. He would also have very little freedom apart from perhaps financial. His first goal had no soul. It was logical and that was fine but in the end he decided not to take the job. Recap
If you are looking in despair at your goal and aren't sure if it has soul or you don't want to go it alone then please have a peek at my Discovery Package a 90 minute session to determine values, goals and more!! In your corner, Yvonne xx 
He hung in midair for the briefest of moments yet my camera caught his image as he fell to the salty water below. Suspended... To render temporarily ineffective. To cease for a period. It's how we all feel at times. Moving forwards only to be hit with something which slows us right back down again. Moving forward is easy, moving backward we find we do a lot. To be suspended in time...to be in limbo...not so easy. We start something, stop, rethink, start again with the greatest intention, only to come up short with empty palms. Palms that face the sky as we shrug our shoulders and ask why...interestingly, we tend to look upwards when doing this, as if we expect to be given an answer right there and then by someone...up there. Yet the answer remains inside and we tend to look out there, up there, to other people for our own answers. The answers that are always there yet unheard, afraid to speak up. Suspended halfway between our brain and our heart. What is it we are so afraid of? What is with all the moving forwards and then ceasing for a period? Why do we do that? We may be afraid of being caught out. Afraid of making the wrong decision. How about we just make a decision and see what falls out of it....cause we could get hurt...we could lose everything we have...we could become lost...it might not be the right way to proceed, we may be embarrassed at all the talk and no action. We may not be sure just what we actually want to do with our lives. What is great about suspension? It can't be all that bad, can it? Time, thought, reflection, meditation on moments that will give our answers a chance to be formed into the right words that we will allow ourselves to hear. They will be whispered to you at first and then grow louder in your ear, in your heart. The point where your purpose is plain may surprise you. Shock you with its clarity and honesty. It may surprise those around you who thought they knew you so well, have defined you by what you do or who you once were. This is the year of the snake so it's all about shedding your skin. Transforming into the person you were born to be. Not the person others expect you to be, not what you have been told to be. Trust your own answers yet I would strongly suggest being suspended for a time...If you do not have the time or resources to suspend for long then how about a retreat in your own home, in the evenings, a weekend...the time you take may be worth its weight in gold. Honour it. Much love, Yvonne x |
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