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A post shared by Chocolako, MPH, MBA (@chocolako) on Jun 5, 2019 at 9:19am PDT

Hustle and heart will set you apart from the crowd, but surrender will elevate you beyond your imagination.

For me, surrender is a willing, participatory act. It isn’t just about trusting and waiting.

Recently, surrendering has felt like knowing that everything will eventually sort itself out—it’s feeling the space, it’s flirting with the unknown until it becomes familiar, it’s flowing without forcing.

When I was 10 years old, my mother taught me about patterns and cycles for the purpose of knowing when to rest and when to be in the flow—when to act and when to trust. This knowledge is particularly important for when I feel misaligned in my being or values.

When we feel misaligned or confused, that is our open invitation to enter solitude, recalibrate, and reboot our flow.

I personally enjoy meditating in nature and watching how animals exist. A safari excursion is a profound way to witness the nature of animals and how they fit into the ecosystem. Both meditating and observing plants and animals bring me back to the inherent patterns and rhythms of nature. They realign me.

If your guiding compass feels off, tune in, discover why, ask for help, cry, wiggle, demonstrate that you want to reset, and return home, gracefully.

Let these four points guide you back home:

1. Be a Conduit made of Energy

Life’s energy is meant to flow. Learn to ebb and flow with the cycles. Everything changes, so become comfortable with the shifts. Allow movement and observe without interfering.

2. Moments are to be Experienced, Respected, and Released

Ownership is a fallacy. Nothing here belongs to us. Moments are meant to be experienced, respected, and released—not owned.

3. Colors will Continue to be our Friends

When I began to study patterns, colors and shapes would show up, move around, transform, and then dissolve like a kaleidoscope.

These shapes and colors—like chakras, energy vortexes, and vibrations—contributed to me, and then moved on to nourish something else. Think about a rainbow, for example. It rarely shows up in the same spot in the sky. It moves around so that everyone gets a chance to witness its splendor. Rainbow messages show up constantly, we just have to access them by shifting our perspective.

4. Trust the Elements and their Energies

For me, jungle time is humble time.

Being in nature has a way of enhancing clarity, and recently, studies have shown that being in nature for at least two hours a week is good for us. In my experience, gazing at the endless green shades of the trees, walking barefoot through earth’s root systems and cold streams, and allowing the wind to flirt with my skin enhances my vitality. There’s a giving and receiving loop that occurs in nature that has timeless ineffable intelligence, and we can experience it.

These elements existed since the beginning of time. The moment I sync up to that natural energy, kind of like what happens in the movie “Avatar,” a portal to portal connection occurs.

~

Join me and my friends this September in Marrakech for a residential 200-hour yoga teacher training.