April Prita Manganiello explains "While we all experience pain in our lives, true suffering is born of a disconnection from the core self.  Such disconnection may result from life's traumas."  Whether you have experienced traumas of intrusion, absence, betrayal, illness, accident, or loss, these moments become frozen in the body.  In turn, when a modern-day situation stimulates the trauma memory (consciously or unconsciously), our bodies revert back to that state of disconnection.  To help melt these frozen places, April Prita Manganiello, has created the Emotional Re-Education Workshop - a safe and healing place to challenge limited self beliefs and to cut through inhibiting stuck places.  Within the safety of this container, you will have the opportunity to unwind and melt traumas you have experienced.  It is a container to try on new attitudes, support your ability to give and receive love, and to be more fully connected to yourself and others.  "It is a process of recognizing, releasing, and re-framing," explains Prita.  "Through this work, it truly is possible to change your reactions into responses, and live an abundant and connected life."

If you have the on-going support of a therapist or coach, and would like to experience a deepened connection to yourself and others, sign up for this powerful workshop.

• Are you so stressed that it is difficult to stay creative and motivated?
• Feel stuck deciding how to focus your efforts and take the next steps?
• Would you like to resolve tensions in your primary relationships?
• Frustrated by office politics that make it practically impossible to do a good job?

In April, I invite you to join me, as I co-facilitate a full weekend of Constellation work with Executive Coach and Strategist, Volker Frank.  Together we will use the Constellations Approach to explore the hidden contracts and silent agreements that strongly influence our perceptions and choices.  The dynamics that develop at work, with family, and with friends may operate with a secret, unspoken mission that both parties adhere to, without ever acknowledging the complex underlying agenda that is playing itself out.

Whether it's in your personal life: relationships, health, feeling like you are swimming against the current and struggling; or in you professional life: career, relationships at work, difficulties reaching your goals, etc.; this weekend will offer space for you to connect with self, identify the secret contracts you've been honoring, remove the obstacles blocking your path, and get back into the flow.

Most months, I facilitate a one-day event, An Introduction to Family Constellations.  This workshop offers participants clarity and resolution to long-carried legacies passed down from the generations that have come before.  However, the Constellation Approach reaches far beyond the scope of our familial realm.  Together, Volker and I will support your ability
to directly and respectfully experience how unconscious patterns contribute to creating difficult situations and a sense of struggle.  A process that allows you to step into resolutions and new perspectives that support natural and sustainable changes in your life and provide direct access to your inner strength and clarity.

"So meditation is not against action.  It is not that you have to escape from life.  It simply teaches you a new way of life:  you become the center of the cyclone." 

Lately, I've spent quite a bit of time with my son, as we've traveled to and from his gymnastics practices and meets.  When we're together in the car, he's a twelve year old boy, telling jokes about how, if he won the lottery, he might buy a McDonald's and moon people as they came up to pay.  But when he's on the floor competing, he focuses in ways that allow him to do amazing feats with his body - the strength of rings, the letting go of vault, and the balance of pommel horse, among others - with such exacting precision that he even points his toes while flying in mid air.  How does that switch happen?  He practices - six days a week, four hours a day.  Whether it makes sense for a twelve year old boy to practice that much can be debated, but the results of his efforts are evident - he can drop in to compete mode quickly and effortlessly.  His body just knows the feeling of doing these routines, and when he drops in, and engages in an event, it's so known to him that he can just do it. 

He recently had a meet in Las Vegas with people he hadn't competed against before, far from his comfortable surroundings.  He fell out of a handstand on rings, fell off the pommel horse, and stumbled on the floor routine.   But then he did his best event, the vault, and the discomfort fell away and he remembered to just let go and follow what he knows, and he did very well for the rest of the meet.  When he out-thinks it - when he worries or gets nervous - it becomes much more difficult for him.  When he trusts what he knows, he flows.

We're all much the same way.  We might not do double-back layouts on a mat, but we can in life.  We forget that we are such soft, beautiful beings.   Lisa Andrews, a personal trainer within The Consciousness Collaborative, wonderfully coaches on releasing our inner athlete.  If I might momentarily co-opt the phrase, I would coach on releasing the inner you.  Release you.  Many of us have touched those moments in our lives where we are in the flow, where we are free and open and just loving each moment that we hardly realize the time that is passing.  That is us being our true selves. 

And like my son, we forget that flowing place, and when we do, life becomes more difficult.  We stumble, we fall.  Relating with others, being open to life and what is unfolding, may feel impossible.  We feel pain, and we try to avoid that pain.  We drug, we adrenalize, we try to escape.  But life does not stop to allow us to work through it.  The next event is in front of us.  What do we do?  

If we know that flow place well-really well-we can quickly return to that natural way of being.  Meditation is certainly one way to train ourselves to stay and not escape when the pain arises.  There are many modalities that can support us, and Meditation can help to anchor our knowing of who we are.  By practicing being in that flowing state, we start to let go of the things that don't support us.  We get more and more of a taste of what it's like to be our free selves, and that's where we want to be.  And with time, though we may trip and feel bruised, we get up to the next event, and we remember-oh, that's right, I can flow here.  How awesome is that?  The previous trying moments fall away, and we are right here, enjoying who we are. 

It may not seem easy, but it can be.  The nice part is that everything we need is already within us.  When we trust what we know, we flow.  To practice remembering the flow within, join us for monthly meditations in Lexington.