Happy New Year 2012!

Happy New Year 2012 to you.

I hope your holidays were filled with blessings and love and that this new year holds great promise and happiness for you and your loved ones.

I want to share with you an account of some of our blessings of 2011:

1. We started our new year on a junk boat on a river near Hanoi, Vietnam. It was pretty amazing. However, January 2011 also surprised me with some health issue. Fortunately, I was able to heal with vitamin supplements, a more balanced diet, and positive thinking. Louise Hay says that the emotional root of anemia is a "yes, but" attitude, lack of joy, fear of life, and not feeling good enough. So, I repeated her affirmation, "It is safe for me to experience joy in every area of my life. I love life." I repeated this as a gardener sowing seed after seed into the fertile earth of my beliefs. Now, I am well.

2. In February 2011, my yogi friend Tomasz and I held our first Yogic Diet Retreat in Bali. It was blessed, perfect, powerful, and delicious. Every participant experienced life changes...from the reduced size of their waistlines to the improved quality of their marriages and beyond. Our next retreat in Bali is April 9-14, 2012. We still have room for more and we really hope you can make it. A yoga retreat is much more than a vacation. It is a true turning point in your life. Check www.yogicdiet.com for details.

3. During the rest of the spring, we had a beautiful Chinese themed birthday party for my daughter who turned seven. So many cherished friends helped make it fancy and special. My son turned ten and his whole class slept over on his birthday. It was a total blast. Our family also experienced so much love as we were bade farewell by our dear community in Indonesia.

4. We traveled back to the US for the summer. We caught up with friends and family and also took a yoga family retreat together. This retreat has become one of the highlights of our summer.

5. At the end of August, our family had a smooth move to Kuwait for my husband's job. It is a different world here in many ways. Camels, desert, ultra conservative clothing, the wild west highways, and an interesting first world veneer on a mostly third world country. And though it is natural to see, feel, and at times resist the differences, I believe our family has settled down now and that we will begin to feel more at ease and find more in common with the people here.

I would love to hear back from you about some of YOUR 2011 blessings. I would even love to post them for all of those who follow the yogic diet posts to read.

I believe that when we count our blessings, that we make more space in our lives for greater abundance. Again, we are shifting our focus from what we may not feel is right in our lives to what we do actually want.

And what I want is for you to have a very happy, a very blessed, and a very soothing new year.

Love,
Monique