Your Moyo Knows: The Body Doesn’t Lie

Why don’t we follow that still small voice inside ourselves?

Why do we ignore our hunches and urges?

Why do we not live the life we truly are?

Why? Because we were programmed NOT to.

I didn’t know this… until I learned that the body doesn’t lie.

The universe had to help wake me up from what now seems like a coma, to realize I had created a life that was not me. It looked like the wonderful life I had been programmed to choose, but it was not who I was or what I truly wanted.

After being hit by four different drunk drivers in a 20 month period, losing much of my recruiting business on 9/11, and a near death experience, I had to face the truth… I was not authentically being me and living an authentic life.

I then had to do the most courageous thing I’ve ever done: tell myself the truth and begin to listen to my own heart rather than the programmed messages and beliefs running inside my head. I needed to begin the work of finding my way back home to who I am. I had to learn to love myself fully and release the negative beliefs that I carried.

There’s a famous Rwandan Proverb that says, “You can outrun that which runs after you. But you can not outrun that which runs inside you.”

Neuroscience has discovered that we reprogram our brains. But we must first identify, name, and question the outdated beliefs that are running within us, and then exercise our will to DROP IT and replace the old patterns and beliefs with new alternative positive ways of being.

So, what runs inside you?

For me, it was a fear of being selfish if I did what was best for me, plus some old buried hurts that were unconsciously eating up my focused energy and vitality.

Here are some simple steps you can use to question your beliefs and replace your old thought patterns with ones that better align with your purpose:

  1. Name what is running inside you that doesn’t serve you. Allow your body to tell you the whole truth. What outdated thoughts do you have about your self or others, old hurts, excuses, fears?
  2. Feel compassion and empathy for where you are and where you’ve been.
  3. Identify how much time is spent running these old negative programs.
  4. Write the vision of what life would feel like if you could drop these programs and replace them. What might be possible when you are free and open to following your heart?

How to hear what your heart wants:

  1. Breathe into your heart space and feel your curiosity and openness to learn what your heart wants right now.
  2. Remember that the body doesn’t lie. You may be surprised by what it says.
  3. Receive whatever your heart says in this moment.
  4. You may dismiss what you hear as “crazy” or “impossible” if it’s something you’ve not imagined you would ever want or could achieve. Or you may not be up for taking action at this moment. It’s ok to acknowledge whatever is real for you as you listen to your heart.

The first time I tried this exercise, “song writing” is what my heart said it wanted to do. I will share with you the brief dialogue that came immediately after I heard this:

“I don’t have TIME to song write and I’m a single mom and need to make money, so no to songwriting.”
End of discussion.

Fast forward 2 years after my MOYO said “song writing,” and you’d see me teaching a group of executives to “listen to their hearts and reclaim their gifts and passions.” I felt my body cringe with hypocrisy… I had tuned my heart out even though it had spoken so clearly. So I picked up a pen and paper late that night and wrote the words to my first song, “Love Your Self.” It took 10 minutes. After laughing out loud at myself and my programmed resistances and excuses for not trying songwriting, I began following my heart more often. I had to let go of the program I ran inside that said “anything worth having or doing has to be hard.” In less than 4 months, the song became a complete album called Love Your Self. Then it became a one-woman show and benefit concert, and further evolved into a book called The Inner Traveler’s Guidebook to Moyo: Discovering the Power of Listening to Your Own Heart

I believe the most self-loving thing we can ever do is to choose to come home and BE who we are so we can live our authentic, passionate, and purposeful lives.

Mark Twain said, “The two most important days of our life are the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.” Our soul’s purpose is what we long to fulfill for this lifetime.

Moyo means heart, spirit, and life in Swahili. Discover the power of listening to your own heart. It’s a practice in trusting that your Moyo knows and that the body doesn’t lie.

What would be possible for you if you could trust that your Moyo knows?

Miracles began to happen as I took the steps to reclaim my gifts and give myself what my heart wanted. The same thing can happen to YOU.

My whole life now makes sense. Everything I’ve ever done and all my gifts are now engaged in my life’s passion and work:

To help Inner Travelers™ emerge and become authentically who they are so they can live the life they truly are.

Learning to trust your MOYO is a practice. The more you engage, listen, and act upon the truth your hearts speaks, the more congruent you become.

***If you’d like to work with Linda, she is offering a 3 Session Coaching Package for Emerging Women for just $399 if you sign up by December 31, 2017. This is a 50% discount. Email her at [email protected] or phone her at (805) 729-1663.

Finding Myself Outside of Motherhood or Infertility: The Wisdom of Self Compassion

I once believed that I was less of a woman because I was not a mother.

What are the birth defect rates?

What is the chance that the pregnancy will go to term but without a live birth?
What is the chance of having multiple births?
What is the success rate of Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injections (ICSI)?
These are the questions, I, matter-of-factly, posed to the doctor of reproductive fertility.

In the National Survey of Family Growth (2006-2010), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 1 in 8 couples (12.5%) have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. In 2005, my husband Phil and I were one of those couples.

Phil and I, as many couples do, sought medical assistance. I daringly faced a rigorous schedule of subcutaneous hormone injections, antibiotics and birth control pills to stimulate and restrict the necessary pregnancy hormones. I endured numerous ultrasounds and blood drawings to monitor the levels. I experienced mood swings that were pretty unsettling and stressful. Phil and I went through uncomfortable procedures for fertility tests and egg retrieval.

After a single cycle of the procedure, the doctor advised us against trying the procedure again — because the probability of success was zero. My questions at the beginning of the process seemed in vain. I felt deflated.

The hard-coding of thoughts begins when we are children

Growing up in the city of Chennai on the southeastern coast of India, I was the youngest of three girls in a Catholic family. As a little girl, a path had been set for me — like many Indian girls growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, finishing school, getting married and having a family were obvious next steps… just as obvious as breathing.

I believed that having children was guaranteed. And in fact, I had an attachment to this idea — it was as if my self-worth was tied to this… as if my value to society rested on my ability to birth a child.

But with one statement from a doctor back in 2005, that surety was ripped out of my hands. It felt like someone punched me in the stomach without any warning. And I was terrified about losing the one thing I thought would allow me to be myself — that would allow me to shine.

Social stigma and personal beliefs are equally stifling.

Every time I received an invite to a baby shower, I cringed. I sincerely wanted to celebrate my friends and so I endured it quietly. Inside, I was screaming to be free. To be free of feeling left out, to be free of the feeling that I somehow didn’t count, to be free of the feeling that I would never be able to truly empathize with someone giving birth. I avoided seeing commercials on TV about babies. I disengaged if I heard someone say that only a parent would understand.

Talking about this wasn’t an option. I worked in the male-dominated engineering world, and there was no room for me to let my guard down — I had to stay tough. Not realizing that I was experiencing a loss, I didn’t really think seeking guidance or counseling was necessary. Besides, socially, I felt it made people uncomfortable — and so, I began to believe I just needed to “suck it up” and stop what I was feeling.

Family and friends were supportive, in ways that I allowed them. I remember one friend in particular. She told me that my feelings reminded her of what parents feel when their kids leave home for the first time; that empty nest feeling of sadness. This somehow encouraged me to feel less alone. It opened a little window for me to explore this differently. My father had been a lifelong meditator and so I began to explore meditation.

Begin exploring how to re-write your code.

I would sit in silence, allowing the anger to pulse through my body, allowing the tears to flow down my face, releasing grief, loss and pain. I was guided by teachers to wonder about the questions that surfaced during meditation. The one question that repeatedly surfaced was this: who am I?

Ready to experience your life outside of others’ praise or criticism?

Was I a wife? Surely if I was only a wife, then how could I explain all these other roles I had. Or how could I explain everything I felt or thought about? So, if I wasn’t a wife, then who was I? Was I an engineer or a senior leader of the management team? Surely I was more than that. So, then who was I? Was I a reflection of my bank account? That didn’t make sense to me. So then who was I? Was I a mother? The answer was a resounding no. So then who was I? You get the idea.

My discovery in these moments of stillness was that there was somebody making all these observations. Somebody that realized I still had value, even though I wasn’t a mother. Somebody that loved me even though I couldn’t play the one role that nature intended for me. Somebody that showed me compassion in the truest sense possible. Somebody who could give me the positive affirmation I needed. Somebody who understood that I was hurting. Somebody that realized that what I was not, was not who I was. This somebody was me. This was the beginning of the answer to my question of who I was.

This realization encouraged me to dig deeper. I started to challenge the notion that motherhood was the only path — as if being childless makes one’s life meaningless. I allowed myself to feel the sadness and the anger and loss — it was my right. Frequently I repeated to myself all the things I was not — to get closer to who I was. I started practicing action with clarity and conviction while staying detached from outcome. In meditation I created space for the knowledge of who I was to emerge — it could only happen in that space of stillness and silence.

Get started right now with this free download – a powerful guided meditation on self compassion. 

What you are is not who you are.As a woman leader, if you find yourself at odds with your beliefs or social stigmas, like I did, I encourage you to:

  • Practice first and foremost, self compassion, self acceptance, and self love.
  • Challenge the notion of a “normal” or “standard” path to solutions, goals, or life.
  • Gently ask yourself if you show up in life as more than the roles you play.
  • Practice decision-making with conviction and clarity while staying detached to outcome.
  • Explore your relationship with being uncomfortable… your relationship with discomfort.

I learned what I was not… but that does not stop me from being who I am.

Rita Devassy
About the Author
Rita Devassy, the founder and CEO of Deva Seed, brings leadership experience from the tough corporate world of tech. Conforming in a male-dominated culture left her personally depleted, but then called to bring mindfulness back to the corporate space. Now, she builds up business leaders who believe that self-inquiry, generosity and compassion are required hallmarks of an effective, successful leader.

Rita holds degrees in Business Management and  Computer and Information Science along with a certificate in Authentic Leadership from Naropa University and is on the faculty for The Foundations program at the Authentic Leadership Center.She lives with her  husband and their miniature pinscher dogs, Oliver and Oscar.  She meditates often, can’t parallel park to save her life, and seeks the American culture she missed in her childhood vicariously through re-runs of The Brady Bunch and Leave it To Beaver.

Juicy Bites: Connecting with Your Authentic Self

It’s the alignment that creates the blossom, the alignment that creates the energy of emergence. Every moment you make a choice to align with the truth of who you are, you’re making tiny little emergences towards your authentic self. You know, in your life, when you’re aligned with your values and when you’re not. Let’s work on strengthening that knowledge and fueling that emergence together!

This week in Juicy Bites, we discover:

 

  • Why it’s important to be true to ourselves
  • How our 6th sense can help us align with our most authentic selves
  • Why Jane Fonda is switching to waterproof mascara
  • How daring to be different can lead to success
  • A call to put your true self out there NOW from Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of this post, we encourage you to join us for a conversation. This week’s Juicy Bites question for you, dear emerging women, is:

1. How to be your authentic self via aQuarius

 
It can be confusing and disorienting to discover you’ve become out of alignment with your true self. But the important thing is to stay on the path, and know that there are others who are making the same powerful journey. This article highlights changes in self and society that occur as we turn our attention towards authenticity.

 

“It is OK to lose your equilibrium when others think your life should be smooth sailing. It is OK to question your life’s purpose. It’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ It is better to ask the questions and seek the answers than to live a numb life. Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. Some call this a mid-life crisis… I call it the Heroine’s Journey.” – Marcia Reynolds

 

Continue Reading …

2. Interview with Sonia Choquette: Raising Six Sensory Kids in a Five Sensory World via Mindful Parenting

 
Sonia Choquette, speaker at Power Party Chicago, April 10, 2014 is a transformational visionary guide, known for her delightful humor and skill in quickly shifting people out of difficulty and into flow. In this interview, she shares her thoughts on helping children (and grown-ups) listen to their truest selves, along with some practices to enhance our sixth sense, intuition.

 

“When you are connected to your Spirit and intuition, you don’t get caught up in the noise of the world. You’re able to differentiate between your authentic voice and everyone else’s.” – Sonia Choquette

 

Continue Reading…

3. CRYING via Jane Fonda

 
Many emotions wait for us on the road to authenticity. In her beautiful blog post, Jane Fonda talks about how she is touched by these emotions living closer and closer to the surface as she grows older.

 

“I’ve listed sad things but what startles me even more is how I get emotional about nice things… Maybe because I’m older my heart is wider open, like a net that wants to catch all the things that matter.” – Jane Fonda

 

Continue Reading…

4. ‘I Have Been Told That I’m Different’ via The New York Times

 
We’ve all wondered, as we work towards self-alignment, ‘what if what emerges is too freaky for people to accept?’ If you’ve ever felt that way, take inspiration from Alison Chung, who never compromised her authentic self to conform to society’s expectations and now runs an awesomely unique tech detective agency.

 

“I have been told that I’m different, that I’m wildly eccentric and I think some of that might be true. I am proud of that.” – Alison Chung

 

Continue Reading…

5.  Elizabeth Gilbert’s Advice to Women: Get Out of Your Own Way via The Shriver Report

 
After Emerging Women Live 2013, getting advice from Elizabeth Gilbert feels like getting advice from a most trusted friend. Here, she reiterates her belief that perfectionism never kept men from “putting it out there,” so women can’t let that stop them either. As we take those “Frankenstein steps” toward our authentic selves, it may not be pretty, but it is progress.

 

“Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

 

Continue Reading…

We are excited to start a conversation and learn more from YOU, dear emerging women. Please join in with a comment below:

Like what you’re hearing? Dive deeper with us this October at Emerging Women Live 2014. Register now for Early Bird perks!