In 2012, my husband and I took a cargo boat, which was way overloaded and inches from taking on water, for 3 days on the Niger river to Timbuktu. It was the most amazing adventure.

If you look at the photo for this podcast (taken in the Sahara), we look so in love – but what’s not apparent is that we are fleeing a Touareg takeover in Timbuktu and driving across the Sahara to escape. We stopped once to pee (and took this photo). And we weren’t even supposed to do that!

You may or may not know that my jam is helping people live a life of no regrets. Literally, it’s the first thing you see on my website. It says, “live a life of no regrets” because I’ve learned that it’s one of the things I do NOT want to feel after I’ve lived my life.

One time I was complaining to one of my teachers that it was so much harder for me to progress spiritually since I became a mama. I wasn’t willing to leave my daughter for months to go on a retreat, and I barely found time to sleep, let alone meditate daily. I asked the teacher, whom I deeply trusted, “What should I do?”

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend who thinks the whole thoughts-feelings-actions thing is too cerebral, and she said, “emotions are intelligent and show us deep truths!”

And I thought, totally! They show us our thoughts which show us our most deeply held beliefs -some of which we may not be conscious of. Deep truths.

Emotions and thoughts: They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Karma… it’s not necessarily a concept that many of us think of every day. More than likely, that word pops into our heads when we’ve caught ourselves acting like a bitch to someone who definitely didn’t observe it. “Just wait till karma catches up with you…!”

The limbic brain controls our primitive instincts. It is hard to pause before those “doings.” We need to control and manage threats. Of course, there ARE threats that we should act on/avoid. But we get hooked on that action. We think there is ALWAYS SOMETHING – locked into incessant doing. Just the way the fire needs air and space to burn brightly, for our lives to burn brightly, we also need some space, right?