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

A Mirror

About ten years ago, I was visiting one of my teacher's ashrams and a woman who was leading one of the programs made an impression on me. She was beautiful, confident, down to earth, and warm. I noticed she was happily married to another yogi and they made a lovely couple. I remember feeling that I'd like to be like her. I wanted to be more powerful, confident, and whole in my life. I wanted my husband to join me more fully on the yogic path. It was an impression and a thought...and it was gone.

Fast forward ten years. Last summer, I was attending a retreat with my family at another one of my teacher's ashrams. The energy was as powerful as I remembered. I easily tapped into my own greatness and inner divinity and to that same greatness in others. This is the power of yoga. I watched my husband and children shift in powerful ways. It was an amazing retreat and a blessing for my family.

One evening, I sat down with some ladies that I had not had a chance to meet. We hit it off and began sharing about our lives. One lady shared that she was a life coach and had her own business. Wow, just like me. She also taught kid's yoga. Just like me. She was attending the retreat with her family. Just like me. She felt very powerful and strong in her life as she had healed many issues by following the path of yoga. She still sometimes struggles and is open and honest about that with her clients. Just like me.

Then it hit me. This was the woman that I had seen years ago. I asked her if she had indeed been there leading that program and she confirmed my intuition. The thought of wanting to be like her had manifested. Through grace, she had returned to mirror and show me how much progress I have made over the years. I told her my experience of wanting to be like her and we marveled over our parallel lives.

The magic, mystery, and power of yoga practices continues to amaze me. Yoga works. Yoga transforms. Yoga heals. Yoga empowers.

May the universe continue to guide each one of us toward the people, places, teachers, and ideas that show us a glimmer of who and what we are capable of being.

Namaste