Why you NEED a coach!

When I think of all the ways I've struggled in life and how often I've hoped that someone would help me out, I wonder why would anyone go through so much suffering when easier way exists. Simply, get a coach. When athletes want to win, they get coaches. When executives want to improve performance, they get coaches. When you get stuck in life, you tough it out, muck around, curse, cry, and feel sorry for yourself. I know I did. In my teens, I had a coach and made it to Olympic team. In my thirties, I lived alone and didn't know coaches existed for things other than sports and suffered terribly because of it. Now I am a coach and I give you sound reasons why you should have one too.

1) Coaches are people who can help you reach your goals, personally, professionally, relationally, etc.

2) Coaching can be a perk to employees, but employers can greatly benefit from paying for their coaching. Professional coaching can drive sales, employee engagement, creativity, workplace satisfaction, and bottom line results. According to a Manchester Consulting Group study of Fortune 100 executives, the Economic Times reports "coaching resulted in a ROI of almost six times the program cost as well as a 77% improvement in relationships, 67% improvement in teamwork, 61% improvement in job satisfaction and 48% improvement in quality." Additionally, a study of Fortune 500 telecommunications companies by MatrixGlobal found executive coaching resulted in a 529% ROI. The CIPD concludes "coaching is not just perceived as a nice-to-have intervention." (2011, CBS Interactive Inc.)

3) A good coach can help you create positive change in whatever area of your life you need it. Change is difficult. Doing it alone can be even more so. With a coach to keep you motivated, focused, and to support you, change will feel more like transformation and less like a root canal.

4) Good coaching focuses on your strengths. They empower you and help you be yourself. Coaches advocate for you. They are the outside observers who love to see you succeed! Good coaches don't tell you what to do, or what you should do. They help you find your way.

5) Coaching produces rewards far beyond the cost. Psychologically, coaching can keep you balanced, clear-headed, focused, and motivated. Professionally, coaching can help you reach your career goals and improve your financial situation beyond the few dollars you spend on getting help. A thriving relationship is more than worth the investment in coaching. However you look at it, coaching more than pays for itself.

As one of my clients said: "Everything gets better with coaching, even the parts of your life you didn't know you could make better."

Do yourself a favor. Stop struggling and get a coach. Better yet, get me :)
info@thisfulfillinglife.com / 804-242-3181

What do you really want?

I can't help but notice how happiness seems to be everyone's highest priority. Lately, I've been considering the possibility that what people actually want is not happiness. The elusiveness and ambiguity of happiness causes suffering as we strive to find it. Meanwhile, people who live meaningful and purposeful lives seem to be better off than the happiness seekers. Perhaps, what we really want is fulfillment--the feeling of fullness we get when we look around and things seem to make sense, someone needs us, we contribute and surround ourselves with what matters most to us.

If this rings true, than you need to look into several distinct areas in your life and evaluate yourself on your situation there.

1) Your physical body. You can't get too far in life without a healthy body. If the body is not healthy your time and energy is spent driving to and from the doctor's office, worrying, complaining, and paying Big Pharma for questionable cures. You also deny yourself tons of experience because you simply can't do them. With a healthy body you can participate in life to the fullest. Clearly yoga is one of the best ways to get a healthy body.

2) Your emotional body. What good is a life full of awesomeness if you can't count your blessings? Seriously, an attitude of gratitude goes a long way! Working on the scars past experiences have left on your psyche goes even further. Mental health is in crisis in this country. How can this be when we have so many resources? Take advantage of them. Yoga can help develop mindfulness and help you identify where you are stuck.

3) Your relationships. Yep, if your relationships suck, everything sucks. Evaluate your relations and make a decision who to keep in your life and who to let go of so you can move on. You are the average of the five people you hang out with the most...find some good people to hang out with.

4) Your work. What you do should not be just a way to make a pay check so you can pay your bills. If you spend at least 40 hours per week working, plus commute time, you are spending a huge portion of your life! A pay check is necessary and you may have to do anything you can to get it, but being selective in your work will pay you in a sense of growth, fulfillment, and motivation to continue. Choose wisely.

5) Your finances. If you can't balance your check book, if you have to borrow money constantly, if you have no savings, you are living on the thin edge of instability and insecurity. It takes a toll on you. It makes you do things you otherwise would not - like take meaningless jobs just to pay the rent, or get mixed up with the wrong crowd all together. Financial health, on the other hand, gives you space to breathe and room to be creative, choosy, and take care of your needs. It gives you independence.

6) What you contribute. If you are not giving, you are not living. You have to find a place where you can be useful beyond your own pleasure and convenience. To live for yourself only is a very small life. To live for others, to make a difference in another's life, to offer of yourself makes you feel bigger than your problems and your little world. It expands your capacity for compassion. It opens you up to new experiences, more gratitude, more humility, more life.

And that's that... It's what i do--help people find fulfillment through addressing what needs improvement from the areas above. Ever feel like you need me, just contact me at (805) 242-3181, info@thisfulfillinglife.com.

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Body, mind, heart….the many definitions of yoga.

The usual article about yoga tends to start by defining what yoga is. The usual definition of yoga is a dry intellectual explanation that goes something like this: “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind,” or “Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word to yoke, which means…” and usually a description of what gets yoked follows. Sometimes it sounds like this: “Yoga is a physical, mental, and spiritual discipline originating in ancient India and found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and ...”

There is this misperception that yoga is a practice of physical movements peppered with a mixed seasoning of new age ideas and ancient wisdom. It is supposed to be your highway to health and a fountain of youth,  cheaper and more fun than constant visits to the doctor or your cosmetic surgeon. 

For a lot of people that is exactly what yoga is. Generally whatever your expectations are from the practice, that’s what you are going to find in it and get from it. If you are coming to the practice for great abs and butt, you will be the person seeking ever more challenging workouts and you will be the person pushing the limits of your body in a yoga class until you are sweating profusely, exhausted and “feel the burn.” If you are the kind of person looking for connection, you will find yourself in classes where other students like to chat and hang out with each other, and find yourself in kirtans (devotional gatherings with music and chanting). If you are the kind of person who’s looking for transformation, you will have a giant library of yoga books, attend workshops, and notice how every yoga class you take makes you feel – physically, mentally and emotionally.

That’s why each one of us have a different definition of what yoga is. If you sit and think for a moment what yoga is for you, you will find your own definition, and if you stick with the practice long enough, you may find that your definition is changing. Hopefully, if you are in the yoga abs and butt category, you will indeed change your definition over time, or else, you will be missing out on most of the practice.

My first experience with yoga, even before I knew what yoga was, or that it even existed, was when I was ten years old and sitting under a blackberry bush being quiet so I can see the Universe "out there" reflected in me, "in here." I was having a mystical experience without knowing it. This goes to show you that mystical experiences are available to anyone regardless of training, age, gender, affiliation, or location. Children like me, who were pretty much left to figure things out on their own and before their heads got full with experiences, impressions, and definitions (samskaras), and who didn’t have to struggle to physically survive, are probably more open and likely to stumble upon something profound than adults who are already molded into a worldview, stuck in life's responsibilities, and generally more skeptical. I don’t think, I am special. It took me years to realize I was having a mystical experience and I was only able to appreciate it when I grew up enough to learn a few things, get a few definitions, and realize that I have built a few walls of my own.

Later in my teens, I acquired my fist misunderstanding of yoga to be a strange undertaking of a few people who live in India and sleep on beds of nails, walk around naked, try to hold their breath for too long ,and show off contortionist skills to amazed bystanders. I have no idea where that came from! Perhaps I saw it on Bulgarian TV.  My grandmother, years later, when she found out that I was doing yoga, puzzled and openly disappointed asked my mother “Why would Valentina want to do this? What is the future of someone sleeping on a bed of nails?” My own mother, when she found out that I had become a yoga teacher lamented: “You spent all this time and sacrificed so much to get a real education (referring to my economics degree)! Why would you want to throw it all away?”

Over the years, my definition of yoga has changed dramatically. I have come to realize that my child mystical experience has more to do with who I have become than what my family tried to imprint on me, or what I planned on becoming.  It left me with an insatiable yarning to find meaning beyond what meets the eye. It stuck inside and made me evaluate my undertakings as “sukha” or “dukha” (wholesome/happy vs unfitting/suffering). Sometimes willing, sometimes kicking and screaming, I managed to follow the instinct created by that mystical experience into a journey of self-discovery which has paid off with experiential understanding of human nature and the nature of reality. This, in turn, has brought about tenderness, appreciation, and compassion in someone like me who’s not that tender, appreciative, and compassionate to begin with. It's made me a Self-reliant optimist, even in times of funk and hardship. 

My definition of yoga is: “A personal practice of transformation that tames the mind and reveals its limitless creative potential, purifies and shapes the body into the most amazing instrument of action through with creativity can manifest, and opens the heart to universal connectedness that humbles, challenges, and further transforms anyone willing to withstand it.”

Yes, I love me a challenging physical practice and always look forward to one. But my definition of yoga expands beyond that and infuses that with meaning beyond shape and form. I find my asana practice to be one of the best opportunities to practice mindfulness of my psychological tenancies. I notice the impulses of the ego to push the limits, the tenderness of the heart reminding me to listen deeply into the body, the passing of life and vitality which brings sadness and utmost gratitude for that which is still present now, the emotional reactions to the thoughts that arise, the reactivity and at the same time the vastness of speciousness and deep silence within which everything is born, takes shape and returns to. An asana practice for me is one of the best places to experience the multidimensionality of humanness because it is a safe container for vulnerability.

Ultimately, our intentions determine our actions and the outcomes of these actions end up serving our intentions, even though the outcome may be something we didn't expect or plan for. My intention has been to grow, explore, and fulfill the potential within me. I’ve been many places I didn't expect to find myself and each and every place, person, situation, and event had something to show me about me.  That’s karma, the law of causality, and interconnectedness of events. One is liberated by solving the riddles karma delivers your way and transcending the samskaras, the unconscious mental habits and conditioning that lay at the bottom of every karmic occurrence.

Yes, it’s an ongoing process, because we make more karma as we are going along – sometimes out of ignorance, other times because we can’t see the connections between things. Sometimes, we make decisions out of ego which is unable to let go of its usual way of seeing and doing things just yet.  Other times, our attachments and aversions run so deep we don’t know they are there. Sometimes, it’s just dumb luck and reactivity towards it from deeply ingrained conditioning…  Basically, it’s safe to assume that for as long as we are on this planet and have a body, we all are going to have plenty to do in the karma department.

Beliefs usually are at the basis of our intentions. We intend for something we believe we want, deserve or need, something that we consider good. Something we believe is worth our time and effort. We don’t set intentions to suffer unreasonably, to be dishonest whenever possible, to cause others to suffer, and to feel miserable pretty much all the time.  But sometimes we actually believe that we don’t deserve love, connection, and prosperity. We actually believe we are incompetent and unable to get from where we are to where we intend to be. If intention and beliefs misalign we find trouble because we find no fulfillment and prove to ourselves that “this stuff just doesn’t work. “  By examining our beliefs we learn massive amounts about ourselves. We find all our samskaras.  As we unearth them, than we have an opportunity to transform them, thus transforming our beliefs and setting intentions that match our deepest convictions, our highest visions, and our most sincere aspirations. 

So, what is your intention for your yoga? Does your yoga serve your intentions and how? Are these questions you even think about? There are no wrong answers, only sincere answers and pretend answers. If your answers are sincere, your practice will be a good start on the endless road of transformation. If your answers are wishful thinking, or parroting things you’ve heard or read somewhere, than your practice will give you something just for practicing – like numerous health benefits that are attributed to yoga, but those will be temporary, limited, and not that different from other forms of exercise, because that’s all you are doing – exercising.  Yes, exercising is better than not exercising, but there are a lot of unhappy people who are exercising every day. There are a lot of people with broken relationships, who are exercising every day. There are a lot of mean and selfish people, who are exercising every days. 

If you want to know if your yoga is “working” take a look at your relationships. What is your relationship with yourself, with your partner, or children, or co-workers….all of your relationships? If you find things you can improve upon, go back to the mat, to the books, to meditation, and contemplation. The Greek Olympics used to have a slogan, or perhaps they still do… “Healthy mind, healthy body, healthy spirit.” That’s not too far from what Yoga is all about, is it?

Heal your mind, transform your body, open your heart.  A mind that sees clearly and is free of obstructions envisions the future. A body that’s healthy, energized and agile creates the future. A heart that’s open and wise, shares the future with all others.

Ultimately, yoga is really not about you, is it? But without you it won’t happen. 

Take a class or one of my workshops, and you will see what I mean. If you are on journey and need guidance and support, consider my coaching services. It's always a pleasure and an honor to help people along their unique paths. info@thisfulfillinglife.com / www.ThisFulfillingLife.com