Beautiful Being!

I wanted to share with you a fabulous piece from writer Anne Bokma for the UC Observer (the oldest continuously published magazine in North America) about me and my Life Reboot Program… It’s called “Meeting my soul coach”.

Anne is writing about a 12-month experiment she’s doing called “My Year of Living Spiritually”, and as part of that she decided to dive into my 7-week body/mind/spirit intensive.

If you’ve ever wanted a look behind the Life Reboot curtain, this is your chance!

Anne has written about me before for another magazine (she’s such a talented writer!), but this is the first time we had the pleasure of working together on this deep level and I loved reading about the Life Reboot experience through her eyes.

I’m including a preview of the article below linking to the full blog. If you enjoy it, be sure to leave a comment under the article. And you can sign up here to follow Anne’s wild 12-month journey to living more soulfully!

Hope you’re enjoying the delicious spring, Dearest!

P.S. My last Life Reboot Program before the fall starts in about two weeks (May 2)! The early bird pricing is on for one more week.

I’m nervously perched on a red velvet couch, in the comfy, second-floor loft of a spacious Toronto duplex. The scent of white sage wafts through the air and a fire blazes in the hearth while the February snow whips itself into a froth outside. Flickering candles and white tulips — a delicate promise of spring — adorn the mantle. Surrounding me are eight strangers, who will be my fellow sojourners as we dive into our psyches over the next seven Tuesday evenings. We’ve signed up for a course led by Kimberly Carroll, a mind-body-spirit coach known as the “Divine Redhead,” who promises to kick start our spiritual mojo with her 49-day “Life Reboot” program. Carroll’s a personal trainer for the soul. Instead of hoisting weights, she’s gets you doing some uplifting heavy lifting; rather than seeing how you measure up on a scale, she has you assess yourself in terms of how well you are living your values. Her mission: “To help you find your centre, love your life, and ignite your world.”

I’m ready to be fired up.

As the ground thaws over the coming weeks, I’m hoping to plough into the soil of my soul and plant seeds for new spiritual practices that will enrich my life.

But this is the sort of thing that baffles my husband. “Why don’t you just take up gardening?” he asks.

There’s no shortage of mystics, yogis, shamans and sages to set me on a more soulful path. I didn’t need a guru, but I wanted the help of a spiritual guide. Carroll promises “loving support and kick-ass motivation” if you’re willing to “clear out the crap and jump start your life.” So I plunk down $700 in the hopes of gaining enlightenment.

In the celebrity world, gurus are as common as Hermès handbags. The Maharishi became famous as the spiritual advisor to the Beatles. Long before that, Yogi Rao caused a sensation when tobacco heiress Doris Duke, one of the richest women in the world, became his pupil. He taught her, among other things, how to use a neti pot to clear her sinuses. He also performed stunts such as eating nails, biting the head off a viper and swallowing acid, before heading back to India a much richer man.

I wasn’t in any danger of being duped, though. Carroll came highly recommended (Just check out the website testimonials of those who say she’s changed their lives.). She’s got a passionate personality to match her Jezebel-red locks. She combines the warrior-like attitude of the Biblical Jael (who was known to hammer a tent peg through the skull of an enemy in battle) with the ethereal essence of a worldly-but-saintly, alabaster-skinned Mary Magdalene. Carroll, 45, has lived many lives: a yogi on an ashram, a bohemian travelling Europe and doing performance art, and a high-profile host of the W Network home reno show, Take This House and Sell It. About 15 years ago, she realized that she was spending all of her energy chasing achievement. “I wasn’t happy; I was a mess,” she says. She began a journey of self-exploration that included practising Buddhism, personal development retreats such as the Hoffman Process, and a course of study with Denise Linn, founder of California’s International School of Soul Coaching. For the past eight years, she’s been helping people renovate their lives by restructuring their scaffolding. Her clients are stuck in challenging relationships, dissatisfied with their jobs, despairing over unfulfilled dreams, hurt from past wounds, aching for clarity about the future, mourning the loss of love and searching for more meaning and connection. “I’ve learned from doing this work that most people are in some sort of pain, no matter their background or privileges,” she says.

Our weekly gatherings include a group check-in, activities such as drumming and cathartic exercises such as writing a “venting” letter to a parent (that will never be sent or seen by anyone), followed by writing a letter of defense from that parent in which we imagine their particular struggles and regrets. We create an elaborate life timeline on a sheet of poster board, filling it with all of the positive and negative turning points that we’ve experienced, and look for treasures in the rubble — the opportunities for awareness and growth that might have come from any difficulties.

Carroll leads us in powerful guided visualizations. In one, she asks us to go back to a vulnerable time in our childhood. I think about when I was 10 and how I felt that I had lost some part of my mother after getting a new stepfather. I’m transported back to the small kitchen of our apartment and I see my old self, gangly and full of energy, simultaneously in love with my powder blue 10-speed and teen idol Leif Garrett — and working hard to mask the discomfort with my new family living arrangement. Carroll tells us to whisper a message in our child’s ear. My adult self leans into this girl to tell her that everything will be ok and to keep her spirit strong. When the lights go up and we open our eyes, I see that my face isn’t the only one streaked with tears.

There’s daily homework, too: a 10-minute recorded meditation and instructions for a couple of exercises. Some are straightforward: taking “breath breaks” by setting an hourly alert on our phone to remind ourselves to inhale deeply throughout our waking hours, clearing a corner or closet of clutter, eating a meal mindfully, making a list of our fears and our joys, experimenting with saying “no,” scheduling times to unplug from social media, committing to a small daily act of service and considering whether there’s someone in our life who we need to apologize to or forgive.

Other exercises are more challenging… READ MORE