God doesn't take 30 years...you do

Friday, September 13
Los Angeles Ca

My birthday week...
It is my birthday this week...It has been quite a year. A year ago at this time I really committed to travelling less and grounding to create a home for me and my son. He was struggling and had dropped out of high school like I had, repeating alot of the self destructive habits I had at his age. I realized I would have to mature and model for him so he could have more stability to grow from. This morning I woke up in gratitude- I felt so lucky - I woke up in my bed that I love in the house I have really hustled for and look out the window at green bamboo and the sunshine in my backyard. My son is living with me now and just saved enough to buy his first car working this summer. It wasn't an easy journey to change the way I had been doing everything, but I wanted to have different results in my life and so I knew I had to change my habits. Anything worth having is worth fighting for. The biggest fight was with my own fears, resistence and ego to let go of the past and the things I had grown comfortable with. Even getting what you want can be a little scary... God gave me the things that I asked for and now I have to put on my big girl panties and keep taking care of the things I love. Hard work, dedication, faith in the mission and GRATITUDE...Happiness can be a choice...i didn't believe that a few years ago...

LET GO OF YOUR STORY! Yom Kippur is this weekend, it is a Jewish holiday, the day of atonement- letting go of the past. Traditionally it is a day of fasting to atone for all the sins of the year before, to ask forgiveness in relationships and with god...i believe that we live our prayers- so instead of fasting this year- i am making the clear decision to let go of the past emotional baggage and moving forward with strength to the future and the life my soul loves. in all our ceremonies and religions, i believe too much emphasis has been on redemption and suffering. we suffer because we don't know how to let go of our wounds and move forward to a better life. i have been in ceremonies where a mother prayed to god for a better life while her child was being neglected right next to her. she was still suffering from her wounding and so she could not let go of her pain and she was repeating the patterns with her own child. it is like we are all a bunch of wounded children walking around the planet lost and confused, blinded by our own troubles and poking each others wounds. to evolve this humanity, we have got to grow up as individuals! make your prayers real. bring the spirit to the flesh. make heaven on earth now. be willing to be happy. god doesn't take 30 years, you do.

Finding your True Love

TRUE LOVE - A true story

In 2009, I travelled to Istanbul, Turkey to meet a mysterious sufi teacher. I had never met this teacher before, but I had fallen in love with sufi poetry and wanted to meet a teacher from this mystical tradition that is called the "Path of Love". Of course, I always need to have the real deal, hardcore experience, so I had sgned up to meet this teacher half way around the world without ever meeting him before. I had just filed for divorce, and with my life quickly disintegrating, I had an even stronger desire to find out what "real love" was. I walked into the teachers house, Mutlu Baba (which means, "Happy Father"), and he was sitting at a table surrounded by his students. They were serving dinner and there was an empty plate and chair that had been waiting for me. Baba waved for me to sit down next to him, a great honor. I sat my weary, jet-lagged body down, my eyes still burning from a sleepless flight from India. "Why have you come?" Baba asked me in broken English with his thick turkish accent. I looked around at the table filled with expectant faces, all curious about what the American had come all this way for. The women had round faces and were middle aged, they were stnding to serve the food while the men sat at the table being served. Most of the men had moustaches, in the Turkish style. I cleared my throat and looked earnestly at Baba, "I have come to learn Sufi poetry". He looked at me and laughed, "Sufi is free!" he said emphatically. Yes, I thought to myself, i have come to be free. Little did I know that being free would mean having myself psychologiaclly torn to pieces by this very traditional Sufi teacher. He would have to take away all my ideas of "true love" for my mind to be free. It would be a painful process over the next 21 days, but I did not know that yet. I still felt lucky to be welcomed into this teachers home so far from my own.

I love to share the wisdom of love that Baba taught me on that trip to Isatnbul, one of my favorite stories from the Path of Love is this:

Your soul is the king or queen and the throne room is the heart. The mind is the

servant whose duty it is to guard the door. For most of us the mind has become so

frightened from past experiences or past hurts that it has locked the door. So, the

king or queen is asleep on the throne. The soul is asleep and the decisions are being

made by the servant.

How can we blow the door to the heart wide open again. These are the practices that

engage the energies to open the heart long enough for the soul to bring again, the

king or queen to wake up and to be the rightful ruler of your life again.

Because of the fear in the mind, the body is numb to new experiences.


“How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being, otherwise, we will remain too frightened ”- Hafiz

Should the rapist be hung?

HANG THE RAPIST
Is violence the answer to sexual violence?
Anger over the brutal Delhi mass-rape has erupted in India and protestors are marching in the streets and demanding the rapists be hung. This is in the country where Gandhi Mahatma  (great soul) tried to advocate non-violent resistance. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" he had said. Violence breeds violence, we need to heal the underlying issues of sexual repression that lead to rape and incest with education. We need to break the silence about how widespread sexual abuse is so that society is forced to open it's eyes to the truth and begin to heal and make changes. This issue is not just in India, but the world is now watching this case under a magnifying glass.

Most societies turn a blind eye to the shadow of sexuality. When there is an incident of rape to incest that is forced into the public eye, society responds explosively by demanding "justice" for the victim and violent punishment for the perpetrator. This cycle is not new and has not brought lasting change because it is still a process of denial of the underlying root issue of sexual repression that leads to the violence and abuse.

I read a statistic that said 1 in 3 women had sexual violence or abuse. That is a staggering number but I think it is still less than the actual number. From years of teaching yoga and spiritual programs where people come to heal, I would say 2 out of 3 women have experienced sexual violence or abuse. I think the same is true of men, but they have an even greater taboo against speaking out about it since it damages the macho masculine ideal we have created. It is difficult enough for a woman to be vulnerable and break the silence to speak about her sexual abuse, it is much more difficult for men to do the same. If they were molested by another man, they will be labelled "homosexual" for the rest of their lives.

RELIGIOUS SEXUAL HYPOCRISY
It is ironic that in a country like India, where there are images of female Goddesses that are worshipped in the temples and small statues in people's homes, women are treated as second class citizens. The sex double standard affects women of all socio-economic classes. One of my Indian girl friends who drives a Porche told me she she had gotten urinary tract infections growing up because the women in her house were taught they could only use the bathroom early in the morning and late at night after the men had gone to sleep, so the men would not be "offended" by her bodily functions. This while the men relieve themselves by peeing openly in the streets. Holy men walk naked through the streets or with small cloths covering their genitalia while women are wrapped in the long fabric of the sari. Why is the man's body holy when it is naked but the woman's body is not? The shaming of female sexuality and genitalia is pervasive among all classes. Men are allowed to be sexually promiscuous while a woman may ruin her reputation for a lifetime if she dates, had sex or lives with a man out of wedlock.

How can you worship a statue in the Goddess in a temple and allow flesh and blood women to be abused? Sex is one of the biggest taboos in India. It is still one of the biggest religious taboos everywhere in the world. Wherever religions create sexual taboo, there is the hypocrisy of abuse. Think of all the cases of Catholic priests who are supposed to be celibate molesting choir boys?

Why have religions created so much taboo against sexuality when it has been proven again and again to be a breeding ground for rape, incest and molestation? Isn't it time to open our eyes and acknowledge that we need to change the root of the problem and stop the sexual repression?

FOR OUR OWN PROTECTION
I cannot think of one country or religion where men are forced to cover their bodies so that they will not cause women to sin or sexually attack them. Why the double standard? As a woman, I grew up religious and was taught if I dressed in a way that showed my body, it was sexually provocative and if a man sexually attacked or abused me, "I had asked for it". I think men should be offended that we think they are so weak that they cannot control their sexual urges. The sexual repression of the female bodies causes a brain washing of the men too, so that they are so sexually repressed they act out to sexual stimulation in violent ways.

DENIAL OF SEXUAL ABUSE
Things are really changing in India. I was at a friends house watching TV and they had a woman on the news who was telling a terrible story. She said her daughter had been molested by her own father and when the mother brought him to court the judge said, "It is not possible for a father to do such a thing." He then asked the husband what punishment he would want for his lying wife.

Aside from how horrible this kind of suppression is, it was astounding to me that they were talking openly about it on television now. Sex has been a taboo in India for a very long time. Now because of the Delhi rape case, stories like this are exploding and coming to public light.

"There is no stopping the truth now", my friend Vinay who I am watching the TV with says. "Students in Delhi are finally protesting and they are not stopping. The politicians are being forced to have answers. The students are bringing new life to the country."

SEXUAL EDUCATION AND HEALTHY ATTITUDES

I truly believe if there was less suppression of sexulaity and women (and men) were more empowered to understand their sexuality- there would be less sexual violence erupting from the repression. Step 1: EDUCATE! What if we actually educated children about sex instead of hiding it from them. I would like it to be truly an empowerment of understanding the power of sexual energy, not just how to put a condom on. My parents were Christian conservatives who pulled me out of public school the week they had sex ed. At the same time, I lived with a background of sexual abuse. I was too ashamed to speak openly and seek help. Repression does not yield the results we want, it creates a cycle of sexual abuse. We are the generation who can break the chain of repression and abuse for our children and heal for all our relations.

It is time for us as a human race to evolve around sexuality and sexual issues. It begins by breaking the silence around abuse so we can heal the root. The more people who stand up and speak the more we can bring light where there has been shadow. in the past, people have been afraid to speak up because they have been labeled and stigmatized for the rest of their lives. The only way to change this is to shift the perception that only a few have experienced this sexual violence and abuse. It takes a lot of courage, but we can support each other, we are not alone.

On March 16th, Courage to Rise is having a National Day of Action 

Live events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Kauai, Salt Lake City, DenverWomen+ Sex + Power"I promise you can be more powerful"Stop Sexual Violence and Abuse2013...We RiseConscious Activism and HealingWe will have movie screenings of real women's stories, yoga and circle discussions

Join us!www.couragetorise.org

Sex Trafficking in the City of Joy

SEX TRAFFICKING IN THE CITY OF JOY

Calcutta, Jan 16th

“I couldn’t believe what they did to her. Even when animals hunt, they don’t mete out such brutality”. Six men had brutally attacked and raped a 23-year old woman on a bus in Delhi. She had been at a theater watching Life of Pi and was taking a private bus home with a male friend when she was brutally raped and assaulted with an iron rod for nearly 40 minutes. Her companion was also beaten and they were robbed and then thrown from the moving bus. Before she passed away in urgent care she told a magistrate, “The accused should not be hanged but burned to death”.

“Women under Attack” screams the headlines of the newspaper the man next to me is reading on the flight to Calcutta. I have been coming to India for seven years and I have never seen so many headlines filling newspapers about women’s rights. In the past it seemed like the country turned a blind eye to women’s issues and especially sexuality. I am flying into Calcutta to propose a women’s empowerment program for sex trafficked women in Sonagachi, the sex trafficking ghetto. As an American, I have tried not to step on too many toes since I am from a different culture and have not wanted to seem like the bad cliché, the white woman coming to save all the ethnic people. It’s not like I have all the answers of course. But I do understand the problem. Beneath the cultures, different food and clothing, a woman is a woman and her sex is often suppressed and violated. Mine has been. We are all one nation of sisterhood when it comes to protecting women from sexual violence.

Before I left for Calcutta, I had lunch with upper class Indian friends at a cyber café in Hyderabad and the Delhi rape and women’s rights were one of the main topics of conversation. My friend Sonia is a school principle and she shook her head as she took a bite of naan bread and veg curry, “There is so much we don’t see, don’t want to look at”. Three years ago, she was less interested in the subject of women’s empowerment, especially for the lower classes. As usual, I am outraged at sexual violence against women. As an American, I am more impatient than my Indian friends, I want change and justice in the world to happen now.

I am anxious about going into the sex trafficking slum. It is a great wound in the world of sexual suffering and triggers my own memories and fears from the past. I am worried if I will make it out intact. Not because it is dangerous (which it is) but because I have done activist work before that left me in deep depressions that made me sick for months. Still, I am driven to do this. A friend from home sent me a message this morning on facebook saying that I am a brave soul. Bravery is only possible in the face of fear. Courage is when we face the fears and still take action.

“Welcome to the City of Joy” the sign says as we disembark the plane and walk across the hot tarmac to the Calcutta airport. The sky is smoggy grey, smothering out the pale outlines of palm tree that stand like ghosts in the distance. I already feel like I need a shower from the thin film of dirt and sweat covering my body. In the airport toilets I grimace and try not to breath as I use a squat toilet and rinse myself with water from a bucket and plastic measuring cup. This is called “balti bath”.  As an American, I just want the comfort of toilet paper. I drag my suitcase behind me and step out of the airport into the chaos of honking horns and traffic that moves like the arteries of the human blood system. Beat up ancient yellow ambassador taxis and new white indy cars jockey for position and the blaring of horns is the only way they signal their movements. I take my life in my hands as I cross through the mayhem to get to the taxi stand across the street from the airport. Drivers and guides descend on me like raw meat in a shark tank. One grabs the handle of my roller suitcase and quickly begins walking away with it. My driver has chosen me. I follow behind him hoping he won’t try to rip me off too much on the fare now that he is holding all my belongings hostage. We get to his dented ambassador and negotiate the fare.
“Ma’am you will be very happy when you arrive hotel. You will be happy and I will be happy. 750 rupees ma’am”, he bobbles his head from side to side and smiles a huge grin exposing betel-stained teeth. That’s roughly $15 American dollars. I am tired from the flight and don’t feel like a struggle. “Ok, but 750 finished! No more rupees!” I say firmly with my best school teacher voice. I show him the address written on a scrap of paper.
“Sonagachi. Do you know?” he looks a little confused.
“Sonagachi?” he bobbles his head again.
“Yes, Sonagachi”.
He must be confused why a white woman tourist would be going to the red light district, to the sex trafficking slum. He shrugs his shoulders and throws my suitcase in the trunk and we slowly inch our way through the afternoon traffic of an overcrowded city. From the windows of the taxi I can see the parade of naked humanity. Cows, trucks painted bright colors, women in bright saris, old men in filthy rags. The taxi lurches to a dead stop in the congestion and I am privy to watching a group of teenage boys taking a bath in an open street pump. Lathering bright white soap into their black hair and dark skin. They grin wildly at me as they lather under their armpits.

I call my friend Marcia back in America from my Indian cell phone. I can hardly hear her voice with all the blaring horns around me. Marcia is working with my organization Courage to Rise on our campaign to “Stop Sexual Violence and Abuse”. We made a short documentary about her story of being sexually assaulted and her recovery of her power through yoga. “Did you hear about the college student who was drugged and carried from one frat house to another to be raped again and again?” I had not been watching American news since I landed in India a week ago. “No, but it’s the same everywhere isn’t it? It is time for us to stand up and speak out about the problem and teach other women the tools to heal”.  I shake my head and feel exaughsted at the enormity of the issue of sexual violence right under the skin of humanity. I feel tired and it gives me energy for the struggle to change.

The cab finally stop near a torn up petrol pump and the driver says, “Sonagachi”. A pretty woman with a bright yellow top that fits snugly to her breasts and bright red lipstack stares at me with indifferent black eyes. She must be one of the prostitutes, all the Indian women I have met before do not wear tight shirts and such bold makeup. I look back into her eyes and wonder where she came from, and how she became a prostitute? She is so young and beautiful and I shudder to think of a mans eyes looking at her beauty as a sexual favor to be bought and used. She is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, as the old saying goes. I get out of the cab and follow my guide down a twisting alley. It is like being swallowed by a snake, the twisting alleyways zig zag and double back on themselves, the streets not wide enough for cars. Women in traditional saris and modern western jeans and tight shirts line the streets as children play soccor in the trash and rotting vegetables. There is a lot of suffering and poverty in the City of Joy. The alleys are lined with shops selling chai, bright plastic bags of potato chips and hot fried snacks. The air is stifled here since the buildings are tall and lean in on each other, letting in only small patches of the grey smoggy sky. We find the Durbar building, and I wait to meet with Dr Jena, the head of the organization. This is the third year I have come to work with Durbar in Sonagachi. Durbar distributes condoms and health care to the sex workers and fights for their rights with the government. Prostitution is legal in Calcutta and they have a sex workers union in the communist party. Because it is legal, they have lower HIV rates than the other major sex trafficking city in India, Mumbai. Without fear of prosecution, the prostitutes get more regular check ups with doctors and use condoms. The first two years I came to teach yoga to the women who were sex trafficked as way for them to heal their bodies, minds and spirits and feel more self-esteem. Last year I brought my kalari Indian martial arts teacher Laxman to help teach the sex workers self defense. Even though the last two years had been good experiences, the women didn’t continue to practice yoga much after I left back to America. Dr Jena had suggested I create a longer lasting program for the children in the schools Durbar had created for the children of the sex workers. The idea was to train some of the women who were in sex trafficking to become yoga teachers and teach the classes to the kids in the schools. I had gone back to America and raised the money for this program. I had tried emailing Dr Jena to confirm that I was coming to teach the program but had not heard back. I have found from years of trying to get things done between America and India, that nothing seems to happen until I fly here and speak in person. So I am waiting on a hard bench in the Durbar building hallway to speak with Dr Jena and get approval for this program. Women in saris stand in the hallway laughing and chatting. They smile and wave at me and I wave back. Friendships can be formed without words. A woman comes by with a pot of chai and pours me some into a tiny clay pot. These clay pots are completely bio-degradable and make the chai taste more earthy, it is my favorite chai in India to be served in clay. I am not satisfied with the Indian portion, where is my American super-sized caffeine? I hold my clay pot out for two refills and the woman with the silver tea pot laughs at me.

            
After an hour in the hallway, I am ushered into Dr Jena’s office and he tells me he is glad I was able to raise the money for the project. One of the schools for the children is just outside of the city and is a hostel where they also live.
“It is too difficult for them to study here in Sonagachi. It is too noisy and their mothers have to do sex work in their homes so it is best for the children to live somewhere they can focus on studying”. I remember the first year I came, one of the woman sat in the front row of my yoga class and fixed me with an intense stare, she wanted me to see her. I sat with her after class and asked her about her life. I was filming for a documentary to tell these women’s stories to open the worlds eyes to the lives and struggle everyone wanted to ignore. Through bearing witness, we become aware of suffering and can call for change and reform.
“My husband died and I have to feed my daughter alone’ the translator explains.
“My daughter lives with my parents many hours away and I do the sex work and send the money for them to take care of her. They are ashamed of me and the work I do, they will not let me see my daughter anymore”.
Big tears began to fall from her intense eyes. I held her hand and my heart broke open with hers and we cried together. I had been a young single mother who struggled to feed my child as well. I knew the pain a mother feels for her child, the desperation to help them survive against all odds when the odds are stacked against you and your child. It is difficult enough to go hungry yourself, it is impossible to see your own child go hungry as a mother. The truth is, I too had used my body to make money when I didn't feel like I had any other options. I had carried the shame for many years until I was able to heal through yoga and begin to feel my power again as a woman in my body. I am here to do some small thing to help reach out a hand to lift another woman up from the darkness. It is part of my own ongoing healing process to try to help share with these women the yoga that helped me find my voice, feel my worth and change my life. People say, "You are doing such good work". The work i do to help others is really for my own benefit. 

Dr Jena fixes the date for me to come back and teach yoga to the children of the sex workers. I will teach the older children around 15-16 years old who have a strong interst in yoga to become teachers and lead classes to the younger children while I am gone. My organization, Courage to Rise will send monthly salary for the teachers and that will help them get out of the cycle of sex trafficking that traps generations into sex slavery here in Sonagachi. From interviewing sex trafficked women for the last 2 years here, so many of them are the children of sex workers who never had a chance to get out of this sex slum. Many were born, live and will die here. “It is easier to train the children who are not so set in their ways” Dr Jena tells me. I will also have a similar program for the adult women to transition from sex work to teaching yoga classes. It will be a 6 month program and we will see if the continue the classes after I am gone. I have high hopes this year.

Why teach them yoga rather than work to get them out of the horrible conditions they're living in altogether?

I am hoping that we can do both, help them to get out of the horrible conditions they are living in and also help them to learn and practice yoga, which helps to heal not only the body, but also the mind and the spirit. Once a woman is out of the horrible conditions of sex trafficking, she will still have to heal her Mind-Body-Spirit from the trauma, yoga heals all levels of the person. 

Make love not war

Sex vs. War: The Temple of Hathor

Make love not war, that was the belief in the ancient temples of the Egyptian Goddess Hathor. Priestesses were trained in the arts of pleasure, art and sacred sensuality to distract men from war.

The legend is that, Ra the sun god was growing old, and became angry when people stopped worshipping him. He consulted with the other gods and decided to turn his angry gaze on the world. The wrathful Goddess Sekhmet emerged from his eye to bring his punishment to the world. She had the body of a woman and the head of a lion.

Sekhmet was fierce and turned men against each other so that the earth ran with the blood of war. She enjoyed the taste of blood so much that Ra became afraid she would destroy the whole world. He could not stop her, so he played a trick on her and poured beer dyed red with pomegranate juice onto the battlefield. Sekhmet drank it up and became so intoxicated that she slept for three days. When she woke up, her taste for blood had been appeased. 

She transformed into another form, Hathor, who became the goddess of pleasure. The daughters of Hathor were priestesses who taught men the art of pleasure and lovemaking to distract them from violence and war. Lovemaking also transformed the negative energy of the soldiers into healing love and bliss.

Later religions created a separation between god and pleasure of the body. The ways of the Goddess of pleasure were suppressed and forgotten, although we still feel the desire to merge our bodies with a higher love through sensual union.

Pleasure and sensuality are medicine to heal and empower our bodies and help us evolve beyond negative patterns and stories that no longer serve us. Where pleasure and sensuality are suppressed, there is often violence and fear.

Life should be ecstasy and pleasure. Our own bodies are the gateways to this empowerment if we learn to work with our pleasure.

Tantra and the sacred feminine give us the tools to awaken pleasure in our bodies to heal and empower ourselves.

"He held a gun to my head"

“He held a gun to my head. He punched me and I fell to my knees. He kept holding the gun to the back of my head.”

These are not my words, I am listening to an interview of my friend, Marcia, telling her story for a mini-documentary we are filming for my women’s empowerment project, “Women + Sex + Power- Stopping sexual violence and abuse”.

Her story is every woman’s nightmare. She was home alone in her apartment cooking dinner one night when she heard a noise like a screen falling. She looked around, but didn’t see anyone and went back to cooking, she was making chocolate banana eggrolls she had seen on a TV show. Then she went to lay down and watch a movie. She looked up and saw a big man with a mask over his face. She started screaming.

“Shut up!”

He punched her in the head and led her to her bedroom. 

She had been sexually abused as a child and something in her broke, "I will die before I let this happen to me twice in my lifetime".

I listen to her tell her story, amazingly she had been able to escape by following a voice in her head, her intuition. The voice said, "The gun isn't loaded". She had tricked him and ran from the apartment and called the police. They never caught the man that had attacked her.

Marcia had been training for the LA Marathon when she was attacked. She tried to keep training to meet her goal. One morning when she went to run in her training group, her body shut down on her and she had to be carried back to her car. She realized it was going to take a long time to heal from what had happened to her. “He stole something from me. He stole my joy”. For the first time in her interview, Marcia began to cry. I could see her shell melt, it takes so much strength to tell this story, she had been focused and not emotional. In this moment, I see her breaking down, feeling the pain and loss of what had happened to her. Breaking the silence is part of the healing process. Many women are still frozen in silences from their sexual traumas, and that locks up their power long after the actual abuse has ended.

Long after the attack, the feeling of not being able to achieve her goals had remained, he had taken her power. She had already been struggling with alcohol before the attack. Unable to run for the marathon, she spiraled out of control drinking to deal with the pain.

Sitting silently in the next room listening to her interview, I feel an ache in my own stomach like I have been punched in the gut. My own sexual wound begins to awaken and throb. I feel slightly nauseous. The solar plexus is the center for power and self esteem. Where there has been sexual trauma, power is lost and needs to be found again in ourselves. Even though I have done a lot of work to heal my sexual issues, I still feel pain especially when I am working to help heal others and I feel the pain of their stories trigger the old pain in mine. When I feel that old pain I wonder if I have really healed. I know I have healed though, because in the past I would have fallen into a deep depression, and now I have the strength and energy to help others with their pain. I have my power back. 

When we lose our power, the problem is, we will look everywhere else for it. We will look in bottles, powders, pills and sex to escape through our pain. Where is our value? Where is our power? Inside our core, we have lost the natural God-given connection to Source- our infinite power and worth.

How can we change our fate and earn our destiny? When we have had violence and trauma, we think it sets our lives on a certain negative course. We feel trapped in the fate of these negative patterns. There is a way to change these negative patterns. We must go on a path of healing and empowerment. We must become the heros we have been waiting for. We must go back our worst fears and reclaim the parts of our spirit and power that were taken from us and left behind. We are the heros that will hold us and forgive and love ourselves. And where we have healed, we can help lift others up to heal.

Three years ago, Marcia saw an ad in a yoga magazine of a Core Breakthrough Yoga program I was teaching and signed up for it. She had moved back to living with her parents, knowing that would stop her from drinking. She was so excited to begin my program that she missed the first day. She came every day after that and began to experience deep healing. It was not always easy, there were days she felt the pain and no running, no yoga could make it disappear. Still she had the strength to breath through the pain without drinking, without escaping and she began to integrate herself again.

Marcia has become a healer now, working with women to find their womb wisdom. She is an example of how we can go beyond our traumas and find healing beyond what we have imagined before.

"I promise you can be more powerful than before you were wounded." I said this to a woman in the Courage to Rise women's Leadership program and it has become the motto for the 2013 CTR campaign.

Marcia's video will premier in January 2013. Please support Courage to rise by donating to make more powerful videos of women's stories and a yoga video that can be downloaded from the internet that teaches the Core Breakthrough Yoga technique for healing trauma.

www.couragetorise.com

www.psalmisadora.com