just cuz

It's been a while since I blogged. Life has been amazingly hectic but mostly hectically amazing. I'm in training to become a yoga teacher. It's a 200-hour program stretched out over 10 weeks, six of which I have completed. I started in late June and will complete at the end of August, if all goes as planned. I'm training at Yoga to the People in the East Village. It truly has been a life-affirming, inspiring and altering experience. I feel like I am on my way to finding the truest expression of myself - which maybe sounds crazy considering that I only started practicing yoga in May - but when I found yoga it really did feel like I was coming home and unfurling at the same time, both coming back to my true self after so much searching and simultaneously branching out into the unknown parts of myself that also comprise my core. To have even an opportunity, as a future teacher, to help others also find this amazing gift - is an honor and a privilege.

Remember that short film Love Sand I wrote last summer and filmed with Zac? The leading lady, Haley Strode, just booked a film with Sean Penn and Ryan Gosling. I am so happy for her and honored to have participated in her journey - what an incredible thing. I knew when I met her last summer that she had something special and significant inside her. I wanted to re-post the film here so you can watch how wickedly talented and beautiful she is. She's gonna be huge.

Love Sand from LBO Productions on Vimeo.

Thinking about being the girl who wrote (and, at least partially, lived) the sad story of Love Sand is a weird thing. I opened this blog post hours ago and watched the cursor blink at me for a while - I felt an unexpected inauthenticity as I thought about what I would say here about my life over the past few months. So much has happened, so much has blossomed for me, and I am more my Self now than ever before. I am so happy. I experience sadness but I have finally learned that the sort of destruction I experienced before resulted from my own hand. I am coming into my power as a woman. I am teaching myself never to say I'm sorry unless I truly mean it and to love myself unconditionally. As women we are conditioned to apologize at every turn - for raising our voices, for extending our bodies in space, simply for being ourselves - and I am undoing years of that. I am not sorry. I have a voice, I have a body, I have a mind - and I have a power inside of me. As a child in Alabama, I dreamed of living in New York City, creating a space for myself and living a free life where I could dance and write and use my heart. I'm on my way to that very life - one might say I'm one foot in, or maybe just a toe or two - and what a gift. What a power lies inside me! I don't say this to selfishly lift myself up, but rather to shine a light on the Source of this power, which is something I'm only beginning to become intimate with.

I saw this written in a bathroom stall. It's important.

Because, beautiful as you are, you hide so much of what you are, which of course is part of what you are: the hidden and the hiding.

Xx