February Awakening

Ahhh February, smack dab in the middle of the winter. Winter is the season of the Soul, this is a time for our external and physical qualities to rest while our subtle and intuitive qualities come back to life. Winter is a time to come in, observe, sense, feel, raise awareness and assess. It's also fitting that we begin the year in the winter, after all, before we take any kind of intentional action we must get assess ourselves and build our foundations. This is the constant balance that we seek, the yin and the yang, between action and awareness. Winter is the season of Yin. In order to achieve anything we must know who we are right now.

February is also a month for love... and I'm not talking about the bullshit flowers, chocolates and plastic trinkets from China that somehow equate to "love". No, I'm talking about true love- Divine love. This love is so much more that flashy signs of appreciation. This love is humble. This love lets us be free to simply Be... Be the hot messes that are capable of so much that we truly are. Despite a commercialized holiday, February is the perfect month to take on the powers and gifts of love. January comes in all hot and heavy with it's, "I got shit to do and no one is going to stop me," mentality. January is empowered, January is strong, January is Yang. January often ends with a crash, or at the very least a slump, a reminder that there is only so much power we can put into our big plans and inspirations if we don't have some awareness and intention behind them.

This is where February, the hero of the story, swoops in to save the day. Before you fall flat on your face with shame or frustration for not having immediately achieved your list of goals, February slows you down and tells you it's OK. It's all going to be OK. Before you take another step forward, you must stop and figure out truly, honestly who you are and where you are right now. It's about creating Aligned Action- action and goals that align to your higher intentions. If your goals/resolutions in January were not aligned, there is a good chance that around now or the near future it will become apparent that something just ain't working. This is when Love comes in to save the day. Love says, "I see who you are, I see where you are, I see where you wanted to go and all that is just perfect, and where you are is just perfect." February gives us the hug that we so desperately need. Love reminds us that although we have so much progress ahead of us, where we are right now is a great place to be and to begin. We don't have to stay where we are (I daresay we should never stay forever where we are), however it is perfectly fine to be where we are. We are here for a reason, our past choices, our past lives have brought us to this moment and if we plan on taking another step forward we need to get comfortable with where we are right now. We must be willing to look ourselves- our faults and failures- in the eyes right now and say, "I see you, I love you and I am ready to change." 

February, the month of love, is also a Yin month. We we practice Yin Yoga we practice observation. We practice adversity. We practice the ability to be with adversity as we move through it. This ability comes from Love. Judgment doesn't allow us to sit with adversity and look it in the eye, only Love does, and it is only when you look your adversity in the eye that you are able to move through it. Love, and yin, helps us practice the ability to open up and see what's going on in there, in our hearts and our heads. Judgment never opens up, because judgment is afraid of seeing what's going on in there because it knows it'll likely be wrong. Love knows that although some things are better for us than others, nothing is ever wrong and everything always serves a purpose. More importantly (maybe most importantly) it is when we can look into the eyes of our adversity that we gain a phenomenal amount of power. We are able to see our enemies for what they are: Us. When we realize  that our fear, doubt, shame and every other negative theme that is holding us back is actually just another form of ourselves then we can also realize that we have had the power to change it all along. Achievement comes when we can look fear in the eye, with Love, and move through adversity with it. It is through this Yin method that we see that we are so much more powerful than we could have ever imagined. We never imagined it because we never looked, because our judgment and ego was afraid to look. Love always looks. 

So in this month we slow down. We assess. We observe. We practice the ability to Love and Accept and be OK with whatever comes up, whoever we are, wherever we are despite our January intentions. We get real with ourselves and we own it, not to prove a point but so that we can lock arms with our greatest enemies and make them allies, moving through adversity together. Then, when we are on the other side, we can look back with awe at all that we achieved and how powerful we actually are.

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