Hello Beautiful!
Today I want to share a little about my journey with spirituality. I feel like it will give you a little insight about who I am and why I do what I do, as well as some context for where I am coming from when I write to you 🙂
For me, meditation and spirituality came into my life very early on in the form of prayer. I was raised in the Christian tradition - but within a very charismatic lineage. We believed in the ability to communicate with God, and with his ability to communicate back. For me, prayer was a dialogue in which I fully expected to receive messages and guidance. As the saying goes - prayer is talking to God, and meditation is allowing God to talk back to you. I felt a deep connection with spirituality from the get go, and had many deep conversations with my mom about heaven and God and angels pretty much from the time I could speak. She often walked away from these conversations feeling like she didn't have any answers for me!
I was serious about God basically from about this age
I was intensely spiritual and much of my life revolved around church, praying, asking God for guidance, and so on. I considered myself a very 'good Christian' but my personal connection to Jesus and the Divine was really very real for me. In high school I was literally known as the Christian Girl. People often came to me with their problems. People who didn't even really know me would come sit with me and tell me their life stories. It was something that I really loved - connecting with people on a deep level was what I lived for. Meanwhile, I was suffering from debilitating self hatred. I had super poor self esteem, I hated my body, I hated my personality and I really felt like I was a worthless person if I wasn't helping people. I believe I started struggling with anorexia at about the age of 14, but I didn't really get 'good' at it until later in life.
I graduated high school 6 months early, and two days after my 18th birthday I got on a plane to go to New Zealand to do a 'DTS' - which stands for Discipleship Training School. I was meant to be in New Zealand for 3 months for training, and then to go on a 3 month 'mission' trip somewhere.
During my stay in New Zealand I had some very - interesting - experiences. First off, the community living situation we were in was really gross. Things were stolen on a regular basis and I had a hard time dealing with living in such close quarters with people I did not know. I even sat in a closet just big enough for my body to squeeze into at one point just to have a moment alone.
Another interesting incident was being told by the leader that my raw vegan diet was from Satan and that it was going to make me a mean and judgemental human being. I was told that I needed to give it up and eat cake with everyone else. I am not saying that all Christians believe such things - it was just something that I experienced. This portion of the tip took me from boarder line anorexic, to full blown sickness. I made a very clear conscious choice at that time that no one would ever tell me what to eat again. I felt very lost, very alone and in some ways abandoned by God, and confused at what I had done to 'deserve' this kind of thing.
This trip was pretty traumatizing for me. I decided to go back home after the three months and to skip the mission portion. I came home and for the next few years I spiralled into illness. It was a pretty dark time. In it all, I still felt connected to God. I still prayed and believed. I still wanted to help people.
I continued living my Christian life, getting sicker and sicker. It was during this time that I started to develop a deep pull to practice yoga. My church was not all that excited about the premiss, but I simply could not help myself. I used to skip church (full of guilt) and to go yoga instead. Again - this is not true of all Christians, this is simply my experience 🙂 I started working at a yoga studio and this marked the beginning of the end of Christianity for me. By 2008 I was officially diagnosed with anorexia, and I started my long road to recovery.
I regained my needed weight within about 4 months - but I was far from better. I was struggling with still having anorexic thoughts without my anorexic body to match. It did not seem that there was much out there to help me, and I floundered.
When I was around 20, I made the choice to 'walk away' from my Christianity so to speak. My sister and I moved to Edmonton, and it was just a perfect breaking point where we moved away from our Christian community and Church. I took about 6 months where I pretty well shut down all spiritual practices because I so strongly associated my relationship with the Divine to church that I felt the two could not exist separate from one another. To be honest - this time was very odd for me. My sister looks back on this time and feels like she does not even know who I was.
Then in 2010, I started my Yoga Teacher Training and everything turned around for me. I started to re-connect with my spirituality, inch by inch. My teacher training was very focused on alignment and the practical side of yoga, but it had just enough spiritual teachings to set me back on my path. I was fascinated with yogic spirituality - our Sutra talks were my absolute favourite portions of the course. I also began reading Martha Beck's 'Finding Your Own North Star.' This book really helped me to identify my negative thought and belief patterns and gave me tools to move away from them. You can read a deeper account of my healing journey and learn the tools I used to re-connect with myself in my book The Perception Diet.
This return to spirituality was also what took me from being sort of not anorexic anymore to someone who was fully on the path to recovery. My new found connection to God helped me connect back in with myself. To do the necessary digging around in my consciousness to find out the real roots of my illness and to extract them.
We moved out to Vancouver in the fall of 2010 and that is when things really started ramping up for me again. I got myself a spiritual guide called Callie, and she really helped take my spirituality from something I thought about sometimes, back to a full blow practice and way of life. I started to practice yoga asana every day (rather than sporadically), and I started to sit in meditation afterwards.
I started to connect with my guides, to re-open those lines of communication with the Divine that I had closed. I did a year long reiki training which again deepened my practices. I connected with other amazing teachers all who gave me tid bits of wisdom along the way. I felt like I was constantly searching, constantly seeking for a deeper connection. I felt like I could honestly sit around all day and talk about the universe, God, yoga and meditation all day every day and be totally contented. I even started working with people at this point! I finally felt like myself again. Fast forward 3 years and we (my sister, partner and I) were selling everything we owned and moving to Thailand!
Thailand was magical for me. I felt so connected and had some very magical yoga practices and was starting to have deeper and deeper meditations. I was starting to feel more and more restless as the time went on in Thailand however, feeling like I needed to take my spiritual practices to another level - but I was not sure how to do it.
Then in 2014 Marcus and I moved to Montreal. In the middle of winter. I knew no one in the city, didn't speak french and honestly, had very little desire to go outside because it was so.darn.cold. I felt like I had been plucked out of life and sent to my own little French ashram.
In late December I clearly felt that i needed to sit in meditation for 1 hour a day. Up until then the longest I had ever dedicated to my practice was about 20 minutes. I was strangely excited about the prospect. I also felt a deep desire to start reading A Course In Miracles.
On January 1st, I started my hour/day practice. On January 31st (the day after my 25th birthday) I started reading A Course In Miracles. It was amazing. I read through the course text in about 3 months, and have been doing the daily lessons ever since.
So it was here where I really dedicated myself to my practices with some structure and direction. I started out by dividing my meditations into 3 - 20 minute segments, which slowly became one long hour sits. I was doing some things that I had picked up from Kundalini yoga, some things I had picked up from my Hatha yoga teachers, some things from my Reiki training and some things I felt intuitively guided to do.
In April I went to see a Kundalini teacher, and he gave me a 40 day Kriya to practice. This again took my personal practice to a whole new level! I also started regularly channelling for myself and others at this time. I did this Kriya all the way through up until we moved from Montreal to Vancouver in May, then to San Francisco in June.
Which brings us to now! In my next post I will show you exactly what my practice looks like today 🙂
This path has been life long for me, and I have learned so much about healing, transformation, communication, coaching, and to be honest, magic 🙂 This is why I do the work that I do. I believe in the deeper meaning of life. I believe we all have a calling here and that sometimes we just need some help to find out what that is. That is why I am a spiritual guide.  For me, it has been what I have done my whole life.
<3
