Remembering Three Amazing Women & Your Self-Care Enchantments

“What we have not known is how to begin from our own centre, how to begin from our own experience, how to make ourselves as women the subjects of the act of knowing”

- Dorothy Smith (A Canadian Sociologist, known for her work with feminist theory and women’s studies)

This quote is a wonderful reminder that each of us women, has a center point, a still point, an internal place of equilibrium, of power and energy that can fuel us, feed us and inspire us. Inspire us, to get to know ourselves intimately and to get to know each other intimately. A friend, fellow coach and colleague, Debra Rafel, in fact, used this concept as her key business identifier.

This inner center is your “shakti sage” place and I have written quite extensively about the shakti sage qualities over the past year.

During this time of “All Hallowed Eve, Dia de los Muertos and All Saints Day” I want to acknowledge and remember three amazing shakti sage women who embodied their shakti sage essence and inner knowing and have now passed on.

I mentioned Debra Rafel earlier. Debra left us far too early after a brief critical illness. Debra leaves behind young twin daughters and her husband. Debra introduced me to yoga and we shared numerous cups of tea over deep and interesting discussions.

I also wish to remember and acknowledge Anita Roddick (the founder of the Body Shop). I had the great pleasure of hearing Anita Roddick speak in Vancouver in the late 90’s. She walked on stage, wearing a funky understated outfit and totally captivated the audience of over 2000 women. She modeled her “shakti sage” essence to me by standing fully in her powerful presence. It was clear to me then as it has been in the ensuing years that she “wore her skin well”, that she knew who she was and what she stood for and that this “knowing” informed all of her actions.

Finally, I want to remember my mom, Renata Wenzel Johnson, who passed on Thanksgiving Day 1996. Mom introduced me to the “act of knowing” and taught me patience and humility.

So, lovely shakti sages, for this week, your self-care enchantments are to use the following questions to explore your inner knowing:

1. Who do you wish to remember and acknowledge?
2. How can you engage with your shakti sage presence daily?
3. How can you deepen your self knowledge?

peace & namaste,

Zoey – founding hippy at hippy grandma

Zoey Ryan
life, business & leadership coach for women
inspiration * clarity * wisdom * enchantment
www.shaktisage.com
604-323-3700

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”

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“Mothers, Grandmothers & Daughters”

The month of May contains some significant events, “Beltane” and “Mothers Day”, and so the theme for this month is celebrating and honouring the creative power of women and moms and daughters of all kinds. I intend to go deeper into the sage part of shakti sage and discuss sageness, wisdom, intuition and a women’s way of knowing within subsequent e-bulletins. Today though, I want to also write about being a “dog mom” and how animals can be a very significant part of our self-care and loving-kindness practice. Dogs practice amazing self-care!

We picked up a new addition to our family a few weeks ago, Teagan Olive (after Olive in “Little Miss Sunshine”) Luna (it was a full moon the day we picked her up) Ryan is now 13 weeks old and I think we miss-named her. She should have been named Teagan Marley Ryan! It is easy to forget how much work a new puppy is. I feel fortunate that there are five of us in the house to help care for her.

My heart is wide open and vulnerable this morning as we are also saying goodbye to Tasha Cubby Ryan, our 13 year old dog. Tasha has been very ill and as I write this, we are waiting for the vet’s office to open, as it seems that it is Tasha’s time to pass on. It strikes me as being very profound and full of awe that we as a family are participating in witnessing the beginning of a life and the ending of a life at a time that there are so many other family transitions. One daughter is leaving for New Zealand for a work exchange year, another daughter is courageously facing a big challenge, and then will join her sister in New Zealand. Our third daughter is almost finished high school and is excitedly looking forward to her future. It feels like a time of huge change and transition.

So, as a mom of both human daughters and dog daughters, I am treasuring this snapshot in time. This little piece of time today, when we are all still together. We have the chance to hug Tasha and tell her good bye. We can giggle together when Teagan (aka Marley) pulls the toilet paper all over the house. We can be excited together about travel adventures and journalism school and bungy jumping in New Zealand. We can have a group hug and tell our daughters how much we love them and what cool kids we think they are. We can remember 13 years of Tasha and her little habits and the way she followed “her mom” every where. We can talk about our moms, who have passed on and describe memories from our childhoods. We can cherish each other and think of animal moms and people moms and single moms, mothers of the earth, and double moms and the love that a mother and child share.

Being a mom has brought me the greatest joy of my life, has cracked me wide open, taught me patience and humility and has forced me to experience a much wider range of emotions. As moms, we nurture, we love, we care for, we are wise and strong and soft and gentle.

Let’s celebrate moms of all kinds and ponder the following questions.

1. Write and/or think about your mom, what did you learn, what are you still learning from her? How has she influenced you?
2. Write and/or think about your grandma…, what has your grandma left you as a family legacy?
3. Honour the mother in you, honour that caring, nurturing, loving, feminine part of you, that “Great Mother” that is a part of us all.

P.S.
Just got back from the vet’s where we all shared in saying goodbye to our darling Tasha. Please forgive any typos or grammatical errors for this week, as I am proofing my writing with tears streaming down my cheeks.

Namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan
founding hippy at hippy grandma

life & business coach for women

inspiration * clarity * wisdom * enchantment
www.zoeyryan.com
Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business!

604-323-3700


Keep the hippy love flowing with purchases from Hippy Grandma: an Eco-Boutique selling fair trade, earth friendly treasures.


We have been exploring the concept of life patterns and the notion of paradox, yin and yang.  I attended a wonderful Diwali celebration last night and there were lights and candles, beautiful bright sparkly colours, exotic aromas and wonderful people.  My daughter and I got mehendi henna designs on our hands and I was adorned with traditional Diwali makeup including a vibrant blue and pink eyeshadow and a bindi  spot on my third eye.

 

It is a powerful time of the year with Diwali, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and All Saints Day.  It seems to me, that what these celebrations highlight is the juxtaposition of light and dark, life and death.

 

We do not talk about death easily, yet it is so much a part of our experience of life.  Our community recently lost a vibrant young man in a tragic car accident.  We drive by the accident site almost daily and we and our daughters know the family.  The sharp point of the pain is really sharp at the moment for our community and while there is a memorial at the accident site and there will be a service, it seems “too small”.  It seems like we should be gathering closer and talking more and doing more for the family.  It feels like the whole community should be wailing and keening and sobbing, yet life goes on.

 

It is a very powerful practice to consider both life and death; light and dark.  Your enchantments for this week deeply honour this notion and in the spirit of shared intention, I offer the following “enchantments”.

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Remember and honour those who have already passed on.  If you choose to, learn about the Dia de los Muertos (day of the dead) Festival as celebrated in Mexico and adopt one of the rituals.

 

2.  In your personal life, what patterns are asking to be let go of or are ready to “die”?

 

3.  Dressing up in costume can be incredibly fun and liberating even if it is simply wearing a wild scarf or bindi spot, so, go for it, dress up in a costume and balance the dark with the light, bright and sparkly.

 

“The true harvest of my life is intangible – a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched” – Henry David Thoreau

 

We would love to hear about your experience with these enchantments.  Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments in the comments section!

 

namaste,

 

Zoey

 

Zoey Ryan

coach . catalyst . shakti sage

life & business coach for women

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com

604-323-3700

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Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

 

I am very aware that this blurb in not intended to be about me, it is intended to be about you.  Yet, the only life that I can speak about with any assuredness is my own, everything else is projection.  So, may I continue to speak from my wonderfully wounded heart?  It truly is perfect that I can literally feel a soft little tender wounded place in my heart.  The tenderness reminds me of so much!

 

I used to think that a spiritual path involved a challenge or initiation, completion of the challenge and then mastery.  This was my interpretation of Joseph Campbell’s writing of a “hero’s/heroine’s journey”.  Another way of saying this is that I thought that a major life crisis provides a doorway into deeper spiritual growth and that we each get one of these per lifetime.   I think this is a very “western” view. I had already had my “challenge” with a huge family crisis many years ago, felt that I was on my way towards mastery and see how my interpretation was incomplete and one-dimensional.

 

What is perfect about both my husband’s recent health issues involving almost dying and a serious diagnosis and my heart attack is that our lives have been shaken up so completely and so totally that there is no choice but to re-evaluate everything.  We are face to face with “the fear of death.”  This has resulted in me expanding my view and belief about spiritual life and in fact, the meaning of life.  I realize that I had used my good health, my husband’s good health, my relative youth (I’m 51), our 2 income status, to give me a sense of security and perhaps pride or entitlement.    We had a plan and it was working!  Feeling like the “rug has been ripped out from under my feet” has been scary, no, terrifying.  All the awful, horrible feelings, images and fears that I had kept solidly stuffed down inside a hardened heart are free.  I have come face to face with my fear of “being a bag lady”, a single parent, a disabled person, homeless, a widow.  How perfect!  I am so far away from life mastery that I can laugh and chuckle and my, how expansive and gentle and funny (in an honouring way) this feels. 

 

Your self care enchantments if you chose to this week, are about further exploration of “you” and developing deepening “unconditional friendship with yourself”.

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Explore when you feel secure and when you feel insecure?  What contributes to your security?  What if it was no longer there?

2.  How do you feel about your heart, is it hardened in any way, do you feel you are protecting an area of your heart?  Play with the images of a cold, hard, rigid heart and a soft warm melted heart.

3. In preparation for Thanksgiving, on a daily basis “give thanks” for something difficult in your life and observe the results. 

 

“May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in beauty and joy each day.”

 

- Native American Proverb

 

Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments on www.thepowblog.com in the comments section of these enchantments!

 

namaste,

 

Zoey

 

Zoey Ryan

coach . catalyst . shakti sage

life & business coach for women

“Coaching for your heart & soul and the heart & soul of your business”

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com

604-323-3700

 

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

 

You may have noticed that POW was not published last week.  I was having a wonderful personal adventure of having my life be my spiritual practice and was unable to publish POW.  For this week, I wish to speak from my heart and soul and share with you about this experience.

 

 As you know, the book for this month is Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.”  I picked this book specifically as we are going through a difficult time with a serious health issue with my husband.  As one may imagine, I have been “broken hearted” about my husband’s diagnosis. 

 

Well, my heart is broken, literally.  I developed a small tear in an artery of my heart resulting in a heart attack.  What I find fascinating is not just the fact that my physical body responded to my empathy and compassion for my husband but that I was reading the chapter in Pema Chodron’s book about “Nonaggression and the Four Maras”.  She says that the yama mara is rooted in the fear of death and continues by saying that it is when we feel we have gotten to the “good life” that we are actually not fully alive.  Here are her words “We finally feel that we’re a good person.  We have good qualities, we’re peaceful, and we don’t get thrown off balance when arrows are shot at us.  We’re the person who knows how to turn an arrow into a flower.  We feel so good about ourselves.  We’ve finally tied up all the loose ends.  We’re happy.  We think that that’s life.”  This is where I was at a few weeks ago.

 

Pema Chodron goes on to say “…rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death.  It doesn’t have any fresh air.  There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that.  We are killing the moment by controlling our experience.  Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit…The essence of life is that it is challenging.  Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter…..To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

 

I have certainly been thrown out of the nest!  I share this with you not because I want or need sympathy, rather, I share this with you as a reminder of the inter connectedness of life and from the perspective of our lives as our spiritual practice.  Rather than running away from pain, hurt, fear, anger, anxiety, unworthiness, we can use these feelings to go deeper in our relationship with ourselves and use the reality of our lives as our spiritual practice.

 

So, this week, your self care enchantments if you chose to are about gently exploring both the sweet and the bitter, the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, the groundedness and the groundlessness.  This is a continuation of the practice of “unconditional friendship with yourself”.

 

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Explore what you believe about life and pain and pleasure?

2.  Very gently ask yourself how you “run away” from pain, fear, anxiety.  Do you use shopping therapy, food, exercise, alcohol, work for example, to take yourself out of your feelings?

3.  Honour the fall season and prepare for “the harvest” by acknowledging what you are harvesting in your life this season. 

 

“May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in beauty and joy each day.”

 

- Native American Proverb

 

Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments on www.thepowblog.com in the comments section of these enchantments!

 

namaste,

www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com

www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com

604-323-3700

 

 

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

I have been deeply affected by the tragic and unseemly passing of a vibrant, “misbehaving woman”, Debrah Rafel Osborn.  Debrah, age 47 was a mother, wife, yogini, life coach, luminary and a very special person.  At Debrah’s wonderful “celebration of life” service, we were all reminded to hug our loved ones close, live life fully and HAVE FUN.  This is how Debrah lived her life!  I am reminded of Jack Kornfield’s words in “A Path With Heart” when he suggests that at the end of our time here on earth, we ask ourselves three questions: did I live life fully, did I love well, did I “let go”.  I believe that Debrah could have answered a resounding YES to those questions.  Can you?

So, your sacred self care enchantments for this week are all about living life fully, loving and having fun!

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

1.    Do something “wild and crazy” this week.  Maybe take a trip on the spur of the moment, do something that scares you, dye your hair blue, it doesn’t matter what it is, it just needs to feel wild and crazy to you!
2.    Answer the three questions above starting like this: how do I live life fully; how do I love well; how do I let go?
3.    Give your loved ones extra hugs!

namaste,

Zoey

Zoey Ryan
coach . catalyst . shakti sage
life & business coach for women
“Coaching for your heart & soul”
www.positivelyoutrageouswomen.com
www.entrepreneurialsuperstars.com
604-323-3700

“I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles”  – Anais Nin