For about a month now, my son and his family have been living with me while they find a place of their own after moving here to Asheville from Aspen. It is a dream come true, a miracle to have them here in my town. Two out of my three children now live here with their families. After living alone for most of the last 11 years, it is wonderful to have a houseful. (read previous blog posting…) However…

One little thing changes everything. I’ve been feeling scattered, having shifted my own life around to accommodate their needs. It’s what a mama does. Instead of teaching yoga in my home studio, that studio is now my graphic studio space and I teach my students in a yoga studio downtown. I struggled with this change internally. It felt like I was losing some part of me. Yet after making the change I feel fresh and ready to let my life unfold from here. Change, though sometimes pretty uncomfortable and hard to see the benefit of an unknown outcome, is a catalyst for growth and if we aren’t growing we aren’t living…and vice versa.

I am well aware that back in the 1950’s, I might be a candidate for being put away in a sanitarium. I left my husband of 26 years, moved to a little hippie town in the Blue Ridge mountains, starting smoking pot, flew out to Oregon to adopt a dog, left 90% of my worldly possessions and moved to Arizona to be with my daughter who was pregnant, spent all my money and worried constantly about making more, being attracted to men years younger than myself, becoming a yoga teacher and vegetarian, authoring an inspirational, spiritually-oriented website daring people to dream and live their dreams, doing it myself.

Yep, I might have been committed. Perhaps it is this town in particular but I believe that it is happening everywhere. People are waking up to what has happened to our world under our watch. We are leaving a legacy of crooked politicians, corporations, wars fought for fabricated reasons to achieve a goal of ultimate power. People who have behaved badly. We let them, if we were not one of them.

So now what to do? Do we stand by and shake our heads as oil spews into the Gulf. It is too sad to go into all the ramifications. Who are we to mess with another beings habitat? To not ensure the greatest safeguards to keep their home safe. I read an article that said that during the Bush administration a decision was made not to enforce that upon our offshore oil rigs. It saved the companies several million dollars, and this disaster will cost them many billion, along with the deep guilt and despair. I hope the people of those oil companies and those who enabled them, oh which might include us who fill up our cars with $3 a gallon gasoline and enjoy the freedom that provides.

Where have our voices been? Why have we been so silent to let it get so out of hand? Please wake up. Please. Those of us who have been need you to come along too. We need greater numbers of people who are willing to be considered crazy to go against the norm. The norm is ridding our planet of one species at a time, one ecosystem at a time.

Are you thinking “what can I do about it”? It seems an awesome task to turn this ship around. The Renaissance was only 1000 people. We turned the world around then. We can turn it around now. Please join me and, I’m hoping, millions of others around the planet. Wake up and smell the smothering, burning oil in the Gulf, the blood on the battlefields in cities, towns , villages and neighborhoods all over the world. We are killing each other and those that get in the way of that intention.

So what can we do as individuals? We can speak out. Talk about this with your friends and your neighbors. Start a conversation. What you bought at the mall conversation can wait another day. It’s time to ensure there will be another day for someone somewhere. People are starving and we go to McDonalds and eat food kills our bodies[1].

What stops you? I think about what has stopped me and that is fear of rejection. Fear that my children will think I am insane. Fear that others will consider me someone to fear. A general nature of fear, which I have been shedding over this lifetime. I have held a fear of being found out to be the person I have been trying to hide. No one hides for real, only creates a feeling of distrust for a person who doesn’t seem congruent. Something is off. We are the last ones to see ourselves, which is a pity. Enjoy who you are. Be who you are. It is oh so much more than enough.

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[1] Watch Food, Inc. or Jamie Oliver’s program or Supersize Me to find where I get that assumption.

Well we have officially been dubbed the coolest town in the United States, at least for the moment. The President and Michelle are here in our town. Asheville, North Carolina. The “spiritual mecca of the the western world”. People come here to live life in a quiet way. A loving way. We are good to each other. We recognize street people and Presidents alike. We have theatre groups such as Immediate Theatre Project to bring us productions such as the most recent “Dead Man’s Cell Phone”. Lauren Fortuna is our resident star of theatre here. She is brilliant and perfect for stage. And apparently screen too. As well as billboards. Our restaurants are hip and cool, each in their own way. I am partial to Scully’s as my daughter and son-in-law are the proprietors. I know how much they care about serving people well and providing a workplace home for the servers and bartenders and management. And it is good food made with care, prepared as for a comfortable guest. Then there is Beans and Berries, their smoothie, coffee café on North Merrimon. I created the look, logo and graphics from their intention to “build a place where people come and feel happy”. The intention is to offer healthy and tasty food quickly rather than fast, whether driving through or eating inside or on the patio…now that it is spring.

This town is a place where you can reinvent yourself to be who you have been all along and afraid to live it. We are a town of misfits and out of the boxers. We lead the way for so many to follow.

So what’s our life like from an outside viewpoint? Google Obama’s and Asheville and read the stories. If I didn’t live here, I’d at the very least visit here. And of course, once here I would have to move here. We are a cozy town. We are an arts town. We are the Paris of the South. We are a town that recognizes each other. Those of us who have been here a while are home easily. The family shows up in friendship and taking courageous steps together. This weekend was “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” in downtown Asheville. Men walking a mile in pumps to raise money and awareness for a women’s shelter.

Click on image below to listen to Verbal Remedies podcast.

This weekend was full up with possibilities as the moon rose to full. Yesterday I went to Jubilee!, a “creation spirituality” church in downtown Asheville. I don’t go so much anymore, though when I do I am always touched either briefly or deeply. Yesterday was deeply moving. A friend I hadn’t seen in 6 years came up from Raleigh. When I knew him, he was sad because he wished his life to be full of love, a wife, a family. He came back yesterday with his family to celebrate his son’s 4 year old birthday. To see the peace and the joy on their faces filled me up with love like a rushing river of hope. Howard Hangar’s (the minister) theme for the day was magic. Seeing the magic. When we see the magic, we can have it. If we miss it, we cannot have it. Look for the magic this week. It is all around you.

As much as I want to escape from this feeling that I keep tucking back down inside of me, I know this time I want to stay all the way through. Stay where? Stay in the emotion that keeps nudging my diaphragm. Well it feels like my diaphragm. It’s in that region of the third chakra. The Manipura, the will power chakra. That seems to be the place where I generally stop the feeling and tamp it back down to the netherlands of my first and second chakras. No wonder I have low back pain. Got a bunch of stuff that sits there wishing to be expelled. And so I do, through my yoga practice. I let go. However I had so much stuff from past that needed to leave, I’m just now getting to the current issues at hand with some focus and clarity.

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I wake this morning with that title thought. There is a general feeling of waiting for things to calm down, feeling ungrounded, uncertain. The media treats us like puppies on a leash, pulling us in one direction then another, wherever government or somebody wants us to go. We had this feeling that with the election of Obama we were going to miraculously climb out of the trenches and be back in our technicolor Pleasantvilles again. But the chaos lingers, the fight over healthcare, the gas prices rising and falling, the stock market, blah, blah, blah. And then there is everyday life, relationships, work or lack of it, illnesses, cleaning the toilet. How does one maintain or achieve a positive outlook with all of this and more?

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For the past couple weeks, I have been feeling fairly chaotic internally. Pretty sure it must show up externally. Today I insisted that the chaos end, that a shift be made. A shift into this life that I dream of–writing, illustrating, a speaker of  Verbal Remedies, earning a living doing it. Each month for the last few, since Markus died, my monetary world has been growing smaller. This month I have a little less than last to pay my bills. I remind myself fairly quickly that I am blessed in so many ways, which doesn’t allow me to grieve the life that I have wished for that has yet to show up. So what else is there to do but stop hoping for it? Let it go. Let go of the dream as I have dreamed it and let it come to me as the world has dreamed it. And hope the world knows what it’s doing.

Tune in next time to see if shift happens and Breah can really let go…dum de dum dum dahhhhhhh! Cut to commercial.

I’m not sure I have anything of value to say anymore. Hasn’t it all been said? Over and over again? Last night I went to listen to a free concert offered by James Taylor in support of Barack Obama becoming president. Though I was quite happy to be listening to this man who was an icon of my younger days, I found myself more inspired by the man who gave the invocation speech. Howard Hangar is the minister of a church I attended for several years here in Asheville. It is difficult to call Jubilee! a church as it is a far cry from the Catholic churches I knew so well from my childhood.

Jubilee! is (and the exclamation mark is a definitive part of the name) a place where misfits gather to find themselves again. In fact, Asheville is a place where misfits gather to find themselves again. Asheville draws people here who

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