It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that Trump is really going to be President and the Republican party has a majority in the house and the senate. Reading the news feels like being punched in the stomach.  Big money, at every turn, seems to be voting out the collective good.
 
As the administration and “leadership” changes, the story that will be told about America and the world also seems to be changing.
 
But as much power as Washington has, we also have a lot of power, and we can’t forget that.
 
We get to tell our own story. And when we tell our own stories, we have an amazing capacity to come into our strength and our power, our inner peace and our health.
 
In this spirit I want to share an interview I had the honor of conducting with Lewis Mehl-Madrona .
 
I’ve written about Lewis at other times in this space; he is a medical doctor of Native American origin, trained in three different fields, and he brings indigenous wisdom to healing through narrative and the power of stories.
 
Throughout his life, Lewis has bravely told a different story about health, well being, power and history.
 
When we talked this summer, I asked him:  So how do we change the collective story? 
 
His answer was: One elder told me, if you want to change the world start talking and keep talking—keep on putting the stories you want to hear into the world—keep telling them. 
 
We’re going to be bombarded with a lot of stories that we don’t want to be hearing.  Of course we need to pay attention to what’s happening on the big scale. But we can’t let it take up our whole mental space. We also need to remain open to other stories, other avenues of thought, other ways of relating to one another and to ourselves. And we need to also tell the stories of love, peace, and healing, stories of the values and mysteries that we also share.
 
Because our stories—the ones we tell about ourselves and our values— matter. Vitally.
 
I invite you to read the interview with Lewis Mehl-Madrona and to share it. The stories we tell have the power to make us sick and also to make us healthier.

Over the next few days, I will share some things that I love with you. Thank you for reading. As almost everything that we love is going to come under attack, from the environment to the arts, from equality to freedom, let’s all share what we love and let’s strengthen our health and well-being every way we can.
 
And, on the eve of this awful inauguration, I want to invite you to step into your story and into your voice from your aligned center.
 
For the next three days only, I’m offering a 25 percent discount on Align Your Story, my online class that brings together writing yoga and mediation for more aligned expression and being. We begin this week.  This is probably the cheapest you’ll ever get the class. Normally the class costs  $397, but in response to the inauguration, to encourage you to build your voice and your resilience, I’m offering the course for $297 just for this weekend, and once you sign up you have access for life.  If you’ve been on the fence, this is the time to sign up:  http://www.nadiacolburn.com/alignyourstory.html
 
A four week In-person Narrative Healing class I’ll be leading in Cambridge, MA begins January 25th. This is a new opportunity to bring embodied creativity and narrative healing together in a small, in person group community. I’d love to see you there. See more here: http://omnamocenter.com/narrative-healing/
 
And I’m available for one-on-one work, as well as group work in organizations, either in person or over skype. Please reach out and we can discuss possibilities.
 
You can read the interview with Lewis Mehl-Madrona about the healing power of narrative here. It will inspire you. I promise. 

with love and in peace, 
Nadia

​Today is MLK Day. Our world is full of great injustice and suffering, and also great heroism, love and hope. 

This is also inauguration week: we don't know what will come, but we do know that we will be called upon to be agents of peace and hope, that our voices will be more important than ever, and that we will need to stand up for what we believe in. We can do this work best if we clear out the pain that so many of us store in our bodies, if we can ground and come into our own stability. 

A few days ago I wrote about the power of shifting our energy to joy through our bodies. Today, I want to share with you a piece I published recently in Spirituality and Health magazine about learning through my yoga practice to listen to the pain that was stored in my body, and the ways I unlocked and released that pain to clear my body so I could be more available to meet the present moment. 
 
For much of my life, I felt as if the external toxins of the world were lodged directly into my body. But through bringing my mind and my body together in yoga and writing, I have been able to protect my physical body on a much greater basis from those external toxins. 

Sometimes those toxins are chemical. Sometimes they come from direct physical contact. And sometimes, the toxins are emotional/psychological/political.

In this article I talk about the ways in which, listening to my body, I came to know my own story better, and how knowing this story better helped me live with both more ease and more agency in the world. I went through this process largely without a road map, and it's my honor now to help others with by providing more direction than I had. 
 
This is a personal article. I’d love to hear any reactions or questions you might have, and please share it with others who might be interested or who might benefit from it.

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Finally, just a reminder. If you're interested in exploring how your story is stored in your body, please consider working with me. As always, I love to hear from you with questions or comments!
 
Align Your Story, my online class that brings together writing yoga and mediation begins this week.  This is my signature class, and I'm excited to start it with a new group of students. I have a few more spaces. See more here: http://www.nadiacolburn.com/alignyourstory.html
 
A four week In-person Narrative Healing class I’ll be leading in Cambridge, MA begins January 25th. This is a new opportunity to bring embodied creativity and healing together in a small, in person group community. I’d love to see you there. See more here: http://omnamocenter.com/narrative-healing/
 
And I’m available for one-on-one work, either in person or over skype. Please reach out for a first exploratory session.
 
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THE  WRONG I NEEDED TO WRITE
(published in Spirituality and Health here: http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/articles/wrong-i-needed-write)
 
When I think back on the first years of my yoga practice, what comes to mind first is Pigeon Pose. Actually, when I think back on my experience with Pigeon Pose, it’s remarkable that I stuck with yoga. Because in Pigeon Pose I felt as if I was being tortured. No, this is not hyperbolic speech. Each time I went into Pigeon Pose, I’d have images flash through my mind of terrible situations: women piled onto the train to Auschwitz, unable to move; women crossing illegally into the U.S., jammed together in the back of trucks with no air to breathe; women being held down, against their will.
 
Relax into the pose, the teacher would say, and I’d try to not to come out of the pose. I’d try to stay a little longer.

Most often, when people are in pain in a yoga pose, it’s because they are doing something their body shouldn’t do. But I was pretty sure that I wasn’t overly straining my physical body. In fact, even though I hold tension in my hips, I’m also pretty flexible in my hips and always have been. My Pigeon Pose looked pretty good from the outside. But inside, it sent me into turmoil—and that made me curious.
 
So I kept coming back to yoga classes, and my body became more flexible, and I became more able to focus my mind on the movements themselves—at least until we got to Pigeon Pose. And still I found I couldn’t stay with my body. The more I focused on what my body was feeling, the more I felt a kind of panic. So instead, I moved between the images in my head and some larger space, up above them, some distanced perspective from which I could come in and out of the scene.
 
In retrospect, it is no surprise that Pigeon Pose, which is a hip opener, triggered me. We often store our physical experiences directly in the body—and mine was childhood sexual abuse. Even when the conscious mind cannot remember, the body holds onto its own lived experiences in its cells. Yoga helped me practice coming in and out of this memory—even if I couldn’t put it into words. It taught me, if in a coded way, pieces of my own story that I had not, for a long time, been able to access.
 
We need to listen—and, at the same time, we need to have frameworks and stories to process what our bodies tell us. We need to be attentive and come out of the conscious mind. And then we need to make connections between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and knit our experiences back together.
My yoga classes set the stage for me to listen to my body, but classes didn’t really prepare me or give me a real context or tools to understand the kind of triggers that might come up—or the ways really to listen to the stories as they were unfolding through my practice. Over time, I worked with many modalities. I started to practice Kundalini yoga and then, once my body was more comfortable and had cleared out a lot of the stuck energy, turned to sitting meditation and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. What I discovered is that I needed attention both to my body and to language; I needed both movement and stillness; I needed, ultimately, mind, body, and spirit all to come together….
 
At first I was writing poetry. And then I started also to write prose. No doubt, part of my turn to prose was a growing desire to knit things together, to tell a coherent story. Like Hansel and Gretel, I was able to follow the moonlit pebbles that lead back to my own early experiences and that ultimately lead me back to myself.
And when I did this, I received a great gift: I was able truly to come home.
 
This does not mean that home is always a warm and easy place. It’s not as if, at the end of the practice, we can turn on the lights and all the witches will be revealed as simply a bad dream, a figment of our childhood imaginations. People were brought in cattle cars to Auschwitz, and illegal immigrants continue to face unbearable situations in their search for a better and freer way of life. And women and children and men continue to be sexually assaulted and abused.
 
The fruit of our yoga practice and our spiritual practice is not that we can simply relax in our comfortable, safe yoga studios and drop the outside world and simply enjoy the present moment. The fruit of our practice is that we can come to better see the world as it is; that we can find peace and equanimity even amid injustice and pain; that we can discover our stories and accept them; that we can experience joy and happiness and relaxation and not turn away from our own suffering or the suffering of others.