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Who Are You and Who Am I?

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I love to travel, partly because I discover new facets of myself when I encounter different environments and communities. In Ecuador I feel part of a loving family, in Chile I laugh more, in China I experience an ancient familiarity and reverence, in India my heart spills open with devotion. Travel has helped me realize how much we create one another by how we treat each other. To a certain degree, we become the projection that others have of us, and others become who we make them. The question becomes, who are you and who am I without these projections? Because I do a lot of teaching, people project "teacher" onto me. If I am a teacher, then those who learn from me are students. Are we not all teachers and …

How Am I Blocking Joy?

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We block ourselves from experiencing joy when we suppress other emotions, such as anger, fear and sadness. In this short conversation which took place during a Beyond Addiction program, Dr. Gabor Maté invites us to create space to experience our emotions as they are. Allow for whatever is there, accept it, and be curious about it in a compassionate way. Gabor: Welcome to the real world. The world is not out there to support your joy. It’s actually there to sell you stuff so that you can feel you have joy temporarily. A: Distract us. Gabor: Yes, exactly. You know and it’s not there to support the growing part of you. It’s there to exploit the hurt, helpless part of you. So it is natural that it is hard out there. But it …

How Are You Going to Show Up?

  I am not going to live to see the day that the system is going to change fundamentally. I am not. The reason that I am not going to live to see that day is because a certain social system will beget a certain kind of ideology, and that ideology will beget a certain kind of medical system, a certain kind of mental health system, a certain kind of social work system, a certain kind of prison system, and all of that. The system itself generates a certain way of looking at human life that is short of reality. If we lived in a social system that valued human life, would we be destroying the environment? Would we be doing so many things that we do? I'm not trying to be negative. I just want …

Healing Trauma

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Trauma affects each of us in some way. Either we’ve experienced it firsthand, or have been impacted by the traumatic history of others. Trauma is not just about the things that happened to us that should not have happened. These might include physical, sexual or emotional abuse; witnessing violence in the home; substance abuse or mental illness in family members; parental separation or divorce; a family member being imprisoned; a natural disaster or serious accident. Trauma also includes what didn’t happen to us that should have happened. We may have been neglected physically or emotionally because our parents were unavailable, preoccupied, or chronically stressed. We may have missed out on childhood experiences because we were expected to shoulder too much responsibility at a young age. Childhood trauma is the root of much mental …

Can “My Best Future Self” Influence the Present?

In a recent article on Quantum Theory that I read, the author stated that the future can influence the present and that theory has been amply demonstrated.1 At first I asked the question, "What does this have to do with me?" but as I kept on reading, I felt I knew what he was saying. When the book The Secret, hit the mass market some twenty years ago, even though it was a re-statement of previous manifestation theories and practices, it contained a phrase that provides a clue to how retro-causality can work.  The phrase was that once a person has formed and stated his/her desire, "the universe will rearrange itself" to manifest that desire. Replace the word "desire" with "vision" and, in effect, I have created a future reality. That vision, then, doubles back into my present …

What’s Your Underlying Belief?

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I continue to benefit from the insights of Dr. Gabor Maté, both personally and professionally, and am immensely grateful for the opportunity to study and teach with him. One of the areas in my own life that I currently bring awareness to are the mostly unconscious beliefs that show up when I feel self-pity or want to blame others. Both of these states cause internal discomfort. Here's a recent example. I was in Utah last week on a family vacation, touring around in my son's new-to-him 1992 Volkswagon camper van, hiking in gorgeous national parks and tenting at night, enjoying being together with my grown children, son-in-law and husband. On a particular long uphill hike to a natural hot springs not far from Salt Lake City, I found myself well behind the …

Beyond Addiction at Sun Door Yoga on Hornby Island

I felt inspired to host a Beyond Addiction Program at Sun Door Yoga following my participation in the Vancouver 2014 program with Sat Dharam Kaur. I knew then that the most important personal work we can do is to uncover our trauma and negative thought patterns. Left unhealed, this trauma manipulates and habituates us to act and behave from a place of great pain, which leaves us far from standing in and acting from our authenticity. I have intimately known substance abuse, co-dependency, socially accepted addictions, and other addictions to be over-arching shadows in my life. Hosting this beneficial and radical program has been a way to honour and spread its efficacy to those in need. Addictions are so prevalent in our society, and they arise in part due to …

Reflections from a Beyond Addiction Support Group

For several months now, after completing the first round of the four month Beyond Addiction program, a group of committed students have continued studying Beyond Addiction, meeting on a weekly basis. We have dug into the process of self-discovery and deep reflection, spending one month on each of the sixteen modules. In this summary below, you will have a glimpse into the inner workings and musings of this group. The excerpt below is taken from the reflections after a group meeting where the group reviewed Module One and with deep self-exploration, tenaciously pulled apart the material on the complexes as we explored our edges and growth. Attachment to Our Complexes Four of us spent an hour going deep into the meaning and the overcoming or transformation of complexes/identities. We discussed complexes such as …

Beyond Addiction Gathers a Research Team!

We have some exciting Beyond Addiction research opportunities on the horizon and wanted to tell you about the current research that is underway. York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and Knowledge Mobilization Unit have teamed up with KY-WHA and the Beyond Addiction (BA) program to research the long-term efficacy of the Beyond Addiction program. York PhD Candidate in Education, Stacey (Amardeep) Bliss, has recently come on board as a student-intern to collect and analyze data with the newly-organized BA Research team. Other members of the research team include Heather Good from Calgary, Ellen Winofsky from BC, and Dr. Wendy Harris along with our statistician, Richard Casey from Los Angeles. Thank you, all! Our gratitude goes to Brian Rush Ph.D., and Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa Ph.D., who have helped us formulate the research instruments …

The Regeneration Project: Connect with Your Essence and the Earth

By reconnecting we can begin to work on regenerating ourselves, our relationships and the environment in an integrated sustainable way. The Regeneration Project aims to do this by integrating the Beyond Addiction program with organic, permaculture based and/or Biodynamic farming, cultivating a healthy relationship between people and the environment. "When we heal the Earth we heal ourselves"  ~ David Orr “We can calculate in approximately how many decades agricultural products will have degenerated to such an extent that they can no longer serve as human nourishment. It will certainly be within this [20th] century. We can see how necessary it is to derive forces from the spirit, forces that are as yet quite unknown. This is necessary not only for the sake of somehow improving agriculture, but so that human life on …