This is dedicated to every person that’s helped me along this road of life.
I’m done feeling broken behind closed doors.
I’m done waiting for perfection to present myself, my product, or my story.
In November of 2013 I left my salaried job to pursue a more genuine, fulfilling life. I taught my first class as a yoga instructor two weeks before and started what would become The Pure Collection the year before that. I planned to teach until the products sustained my life, but if that were how it happened, this wouldn’t make for a very interesting story.
Instead, I froze.
I became caught up in myself, my internal dialogue. My ego, the smallest part of me, had all my attention, and it was paralyzing.
I couldn’t sell, but I wouldn’t quit. I would create all day, but I couldn’t share. I would set up my tent and then afraid to talk about my products, return home defeated. When I’d receive constructive criticism from people who love me, I’d cry, shout, shut down and retreat. I felt that no one understood me and they certainly didn’t understand my vision.
The truth is, I really didn’t understand it either.
It wasn’t until after abruptly halting all of the achieving of my previous life that the tidal wave of suffering hit me square on. For the first time I had to STOP being in my head and start feeling the piles of shit that had accumulated inside of me through the years after I shutdown, which I came to learn had occurred long before I realized.
See this frozenness wasn’t something new in my life, but with a clear roadmap given to me, it had just been masked by all of the thriving. It was almost as if all of the pain, resentment, fear, and anger I felt inside was fueling the successes of my past.
And oh, were they brilliant successes.
In that way, I am grateful for the pain, for the tears and the locked away frustrations, for they provided the spark, igniting my power. It is this understanding of what I am capable of, evident through my past accomplishments, that has kept me going in the darkest moments of the journey.
But this next phase of my life, I decided early on, would not be fueled by anger but instead by love, for myself first, so that the love for others would flow effortlessly. I refused to be who I had been, a girl acting from fear, but didn’t know yet how to be a woman approaching my work from love. I would have been better off had I resorted to action like in the yesteryear of my life, but I felt I had made such a mess that I couldn’t and wouldn’t trust whatever next move I had planned. And hence, frozen, no way forward and a stubborn refusal to go back.
So began my journey back to the woman I had once played, but had never confidently been.
Sometimes I wish I could have shared this journey in real time. Certainly, it would have made it easier. The single most detrimental thing I’ve done on this path and in this life is isolate myself from the people that love me. But as it goes, we always get – or do – exactly what we need. I’m incredibly blessed with a strong support system. It was only in my own fears that I felt alone. My own fears blocked the way to asking for and receiving help from willing others.
It’s been said before I’m too hard on myself, and the likelihood is I am. It’s that quality coupled with the incessant need for “perfection,” or an attachment to a false, unattainable, singularly successful outcome, that has kept me in my own shadows all this time.
But fear not!
Cause though I haven’t shared in the moments of crisis, it’s a wonderful truth that I have documented it almost daily. I am a constant thinker and I learned at some point paper and pen is the perfect container for all that runs and flows inside of me. It’s my safe space, my respite, my oasis in the desert. There is no degree of frantic that can’t be cleared at least in part by putting my flowing words on to this blank space.
And so, come on this journey with me yet again into a place of retrospective understanding. It’s what I’ve been wanting, wishing, waiting and praying for the courage to do all this time, to share my true voice with you, in all it’s sassy, feisty, explicitly personal candor. So that you may understand me, so that I may understand me in all my perfect imperfection and so that maybe you will be encourage to embrace your own story with loving confidence and show yourself to those you love deeply, because it is our collective stories that will get us out of, or hold us through, whatever suffering we face.
On my path I’ve often (always) neglected the work I need to do for some crazy understanding of the work I “should do.” It seems as though it’s finally aligned, the work I need to do, the work I want to do and the courage to DO.
Not to think.
Not to feel.
Not to analyze.
Not to contemplate.
Not to learn.
Not to avoid.
Not to procrastinate.
But to do. To actually put pen to paper, get it done, and then share it.
Thank you for allowing me the space to sleep.
May we move mountains together.
Love,
NC