A lifetime of challenges has allowed me to fully realize fearlessness. To clarify, fearlessness is in regard to what my mind creates, as opposed to the acute fear of facing imminent physical danger such as a hungry lion chasing me down. Fearlessness equates to bravery and there’s really nothing complex about stepping into one’s own courage. Cultivating courage takes discipline, trust, and the development of self confidence. To be confident is to feel you are able to protect yourself and also to accept that danger is always at your door, no matter if it is real threat to your physical body or just the illusion of threat to your security, financial or otherwise.
I realize bravery may not be easily accessed by many people and if you aren’t used to moving your body in vigorous ways every day those qualities of strength, courage, and self confidence may not even be accessible through the imagination. You see, courage is supported by the physiological processes of the body, stimulated by building physical strength, and also dependent upon the mindful inhalation and exhalation of the breath. Courage is allowing the mind’s imagination to take a rest while the awareness returns to the present moment.
You may think of courage as the ability to face any situation with logic and calculated response, and even if the flight mechanism of the central nervous system is triggered, brave people will stand strong and choose to face their foes and fight rather than run away in fear. If you are the one fleeing, you will also be the one eaten by the lion. You are prey.
Most people who have known me for any considerable length of time will attest to my strength, both emotional and physical. Yes, I’ve been referred to as. “bad ass” many times but I will admit that those qualities were not inherent to me, and as a child I was often paralyzed with existential fears of eternity and timeless space. My mother was also fearful, often warning her 4 children of all the potential dangers the world had to offer us daily and she repeatedly advised ways we could avoid those potential and illusory dangers with quick wit and defensive action.
I never knew stability when I was a child. With an unsettled mother always searching for the “perfect” place to live, I experienced moving from house to house and from town to town each year of my adolescence. This experience threw me into a repetitive cycle of fear from the uncertainty of what the day ahead would bring. I was forced to enter new schools each year and leave behind what had become familiar, many times without explanation of when or why we were moving again.
Being the fourth and final child of my divorced parents I was often left on my own, developing independence at a very early age. By nature I was quiet and introverted and felt much more comfortable in the presence of animals than I was in the company of people. Despite this introversion my need for human connection was not easily realized as it drove me out of my comfort zone again and again throughout my youth. I longed for long term relationships but lacked the stability or permanence in which to build them. Thankfully, I had a sister 2 years older than myself, and she became integral to my personal growth, providing me with a sense of protection and connection as I developed into a teen.
Woven throughout the circumstances of our familial transiency were many gems of life experience. I was born in Southern California, with white sand beaches and scattered clumps of tar that would stick to my feet, crystal blue cresting waves always on the horizon, and endless days of warm sea air. From infancy I was brought up by two Latina women, my nannies, whom my mother trusted to take charge of me until the age of about 5. Those women gave me 100% of their love which made all the difference in my child’s mind of unstable family structure, divorce, and uncertainty; however, I was often found wandering along the beaches, venturing into tourist shops alone, and eventually would end up in the local police precinct, waiting for my mother to come claim me.
The gypsy life (as my mother referred to it) began when she decided to relocate the family to the cooler climates of Northern California, which was where my educational years began. By necessity I became more concerned with how to ”fit” into each new school environment than learning how to calculate mathematical equations. I spent a lot of time alone reading, drawing, and playing with horses and tadpoles. I learned to be comfortable in silence, I found refuge in my own company, and I began to master the art of identifying which children my age would accept me as a new friend.
My mother remarried when I was 7 and I loved my stepfather dearly. It seemed like we were becoming a more settled family until a few years later, when marital waters became turbulent, and my mother decided to take my sister and I to live in Mexico for a spell. It was a sudden decision, as all her moves were, and we didn’t have the advantage of mental or emotional preparation for the relocation.
Living in central Mexico as a 10 year old allowed me to observe the cultural and economic differences between rich and poor, a wake up call for my young western mind. As my sister and I navigated our new environment we were faced with the multi sensory impact of third world poverty, beggars on the sidewalk, the smell of open sewage flowing through streets, and many of the rural homes which appeared more like sheds than houses. I now recognize this time in my life as one of the most exciting and adventurous of my younger years. Each day was a new possibility, an opportunity to explore, to travel by bus into the countryside so that I could ride horses, and to begin to live in each moment with the unknown always at my side.
Our stay in Mexico was cut short by a break in the relationship between my mother and stepfather. We had to quickly fly back to the States only to discover our family was no longer united. Essentially, one day my sister and I had a father, the next day we didn’t, and were never able to make contact with him again. Devastation and resiliency became the name of the game.
We continued our cycle of relocation, now even further up the coast to the Redwood forests. I had no choice but to root down, find a tribe, and hold on tight as I entered my pubescent years of turmoil. I was blessed with the authentic connections that I formed in the coastal towns of rural Northern California, I developed relationships that to this day provide me with a sense of belonging, even as the rest of my adolescence continued to be uncertain and unstable.
At age 11 we made another move, this time to Hawaii, where I developed self-defense in the wake of the inherent prejudice of native Hawaiian children who bullied me in the classroom as we learned about Captain Cook and the annihilation of indigenous Hawaiian culture. My refuge was the ocean, even as I was being pounded by the relentless waves in the clear, tropical waters I continued to swim, day after day, nurturing my self in the solitude of aloneness.
When I was 12 we moved back to the mainland, back to the Northern California coast, where I continued to establish what would prove to be deep and life long friendships. It was when I turned 14 years old that I finally left my mother, her boyfriend dramas, and the gypsy lifestyle she was committed to. While my intention was to establish stability in my father’s Santa Monica home, I was also successful at creating a life of independence in the city of angels.
Los Angeles was a proving ground for me to grow up fast. I experimented with psychedelic drugs, various parties, spent some time hanging with gangsters, and established many varied impermanent, friendships. Thankfully, I shared an interest with my father in physical activity and spent many days cycling along the beach front bike paths to release my teenage angst while building endurance. I also developed a love for running up and down stairs, brushing elbows with celebrities also on the run.
After high school I quickly moved back to my Northern California community, met my future husband, and settled into homesteader life. Country living was an escape into hard work, raising livestock, experiencing new life and sudden death of many of our animals. When I was 20 years of age I went from being saddled with chronic anxiety of the “unknown” (everything is unknown) to actively dissolving irrational thoughts and coming into calmness and peace of mind. In essence, the greatest gift of my early adult years was learning to meditate and to breathe properly. It was this in this time that I also began gardening for food, a challenging love which to this day remains at the forefront of my lifestyle. At 23 my husband and I decided to start our own family and had 2 babies, raising them along side my sister and her children and the numerous other friends I grew up with. We had community to help raise our families, we all had each other to rely on.
I became more extroverted as I matured into motherhood. I was always an artist and developed entrepreneurial business adventures, managed employees, and struggled to establish retail stability in small town America. I had decided to forgo public education for my daughters and homeschooled them instead; choosing to raise them in the retail business environment and allowing them to develop real life skills while offering them the forest as their classroom. My decision wasn’t very popular among the other mom’s who had been playgroup friends but I didn’t need validation for my decision to keep my kids free from the status quo. Individualism was always in my blood, even as I sought other connections in community.
I became vocal in the anti war movement, standing up against the Bush invasion of Iraq through public protests, through educational endeavors to teach our community how to become more sustainable in their lives and to rely less on imported foreign oil. I also became an outspoken whistleblower for the health of our coastal town, drawing attention to a corporate entity that had been polluting the air and poisoning the citizens for generations. I faced many fears of retribution by some locals bent on intimidating my young female self but I also became a point person for those who had been suffering with chronic illness due to toxic exposure. My sense of justice was what created the drive to overcome fear, to allow discomfort, and to risk the stability I had so long desired as a child. I gained courage through necessity of standing my ground for what I felt was obvious and just.
Eventually the circumstances of my life allowed expansion of my career to include studies of natural medicine, and I conquered my long held fear of flying by traveling to India to gain clinical experience with my teacher. On that expedition I traveled extensively with my teenage daughters and niece, knowing that the more we experienced in the rural Indian countryside and throughout many of the cities, that I would be increasing my own bravery while establishing a foundation of adventurousness in my girls.
Overcoming the illusion of fright in the potential travails of travel, was the single most significant thing I did to reduce my own fear of the unknown. I turned 40 years old in India and began to give up control of outcomes and instead invite the “unknown” as opportunity for excitement in my life.
One international trip turned in to another, and then another, until I was back in India again and this time alone. The beauty of conquering fear, of building courage, is that it becomes an addiction. I began to look for challenges to overcome, because with each proverbial mountain I climbed, the more strength, independence, and resilience I built. Being strong means being self confident, and self confidence leads to inspiration and the manifestation of dreams. Dreams are not realized easily if one is afraid.
In 2016 I navigated the dissolution of what was a 24 year long functional marriage. I moved from California to Oregon, and then experienced the abrupt death of my sister just a few months after my transplantation. Both experiences in their own way allowed me to become more in touch with my dharma as a healer and a spiritual teacher. When my sister died I realized that all fear stems from a fear of mortality. Let go of the fear of death and the apprehension of mortality disappears.
As a newly single woman in Portland, stepping into her power in a reinvented life, I quickly became entangled in a dysfunctional romantic relationship. In retrospect I think because my sister had just been killed I was attracted to the idea of companionship, as if it offered some consolation to my grief. It didn’t. I resisted my own entrapment in a relationship that I knew was wrong for me as I struggled to maintain my integrity in the face of narcissism. I learned more about my inherent strengths through the evaluation of my greatest insecurities. I spent those years scrutinizing all my defense systems and then began dismantling them one by one as a necessary way to come fully into my life as a yogi and into my truth as a self reflective human. I began to release self judgement, embrace non-attachment as a lifestyle and as I unpeeled the layers of my own ego the romance dissolved into the ether of insignificance.
It’s been 6 years since my divorce and my sister’s death. My personal transformation didn’t change the extent to which I love my ex-husband, in fact I believe that our love for each other has grown better in a different way. My sister’s spirit is always by my side and she has led me down paths I never would have traveled had she not passed into other realms. My children are grown now and still are as connected to me as they ever were and my extended and immediate family and closest friends are on my list of favorite people to spend time with.
My friends call me a badass even though my life seems pretty simple. I cycle many miles a day, continuously challenging myself to complete at least 60-100 miles each week as the weather allows, and then walking and sprinting when the weather is too wet to safely ride my bike. My personal integrity is maintained by my yoga practice while my mind is kept in check with intentionally choosing positive thinking rather than falling prey to pessimism or negative judgements.
My latest adventure came at a time of great isolation, it was in this past dark time of winter that by necessity I released my expectations of manifesting a romantic partner to my life. It was only after, but immediately after that release, that I finally attracted the relationship of my dreams with a man who encompasses all the values I have for so long desired to share with another person. And while he and I are most definitely soul mates from lifetimes past, I still maintain my independence and personal drive to create the life I know I am meant to live and it is full of excitement of future adventures, both with my partner and also alone.
Strength and resilience building have become my daily discipline, not only with physical activity and nurturing my body, but also in the quiet stillness of peace in meditation and in my breath. Strength also comes in connectivity with others. Stepping outside the comfort zone of individuality and into the absolute joy of unity with others. It is true that together we are stronger and its only fear which drives us apart.
Each day is alive with potential and each night is enlivened by dreams of journeys into the unknown. The ”unknown” for me today is the excitement that each new morning brings. “Unknown” means anything can happen, even those experiences that I feel uncertain about, even those in which I sense the possibility of danger. With every unfolding moment I am overcome with gratitude and presence, for that is all that I can rely on to be truly aware of this existence for all that it is in this moment and all that may happen in the next.