Samyama as a Way of Life

Even though Leah's death was my portal into living daily in my heart, Samyama affected every other aspect of my life. Through Samyama I was able to access parts of my self, my inner child self that I never could before. The key here was allowing her to feel what she was feeling in the moment. I had done inner child work many years before, but never with the feeling part. By allowing my little girl to feel what she was feeling, no matter what age she appeared in a given moment, I was able to meet parts of myself that I had never met before. I knew they existed, but only under the the guise of fear, or anger, or some other was of acting out or trying to control outcomes. Samyama was the key that unlocked access to myself, for the first time I was coming face to face with mySelf. When I was able to relate to myself, and listen to myself and allow myself to feel all of my relationships with others began to change, not because I was changing them, but rather my attitude was changing, I was integrating parts of myself that had been in shadow. When I began meeting these shadow parts of myself in my heart they were great teachers. All parts of ourselves want to be met. Samyama gave me the technology to meet them as they are in my heart. This is a huge gift.


The biggest relationship changes occured with my husband Dan, and my son Peter. Pete was 20 when he lost his sister. I cannot imagine what it was like to lose your only sibling, at that tender age.

The three of us all dealt with our grief in our own way, and we were always open to each other. The wisdom in that was each of us knew we had to attend to ourselves first. It was several years before Dan and I could comfort each other. In the first few years we did most of our grief processing in private. Once we emerged from the day-to-day shock of losing Leah, we then came smack up against places in ourselves and our marriage that were not serving us. We began a multi-year process of just sitting with our shit day by day, burning and burning. We even held a ritual we called our spiritual divorce to meet and surrender all that was no longer serving us in our relationship. The next part of this journey was an intent to enter into a Sacred Partnership. This was followed by a couple more years of sitting and burning. None of this was comfortable and a lot of it was downright painful. We were no longer willing to make due, we spoke our intent to meet each other from our own Truth and integrity, each bringing a whole person to the other, not looking to the other to make us complete. Two years later, we committed to each other at sunrise on a beach in Cozumel. We did not plan it, it organically arose during the time we were in Cozumel. Today, we continue our journey first taking care of our own work, and meeting each other consciously in each moment as it arises rather than bringing up stories from our past, or fabricating new ones. Or maybe what really happens is when we do find ourselves in the stories we now know where to find ourselves, and how to meet the stories and get beneath them. These days we do not begin any important conversation without first sitting in silence with our intentions for outcome in our hearts. The outcome is always without attachment of how we are going to get there. It is amazing to me where these explorations take us after we sit.