This is the final post for my manual: The 12 Steps to Personal Transformation. It follows the first eleven: Surrender, Patience, Yoga on and Off the Mat, Stop, Community, Self-Care, Self-Love, Desire/Dream, Acceptance, Forgiveness and Joy.

First confession, I was out late last night and had fun and drank red wine and got home at 1:00am! So, technically, I was already in today. Love and Service to Others needed my full non-tipsy attention, I felt. Last night, I decided to wait until today and decision thus made, promptly fell asleep!

It all starts and ends with the heart.

And when I say it I mean the whole kit and kaboodle. I don’t mean to get too heavy here, but Love and Service to Others can completely overwhelm me, consume me, sometimes even scare me.  And yet in spite of my own ego and my desire to push aside the journey of my heart, I know deep down inside of me that it is always upon that path that I find myself truly unfolding, blossoming out, expanding and gracefully dancing in loving partnership with others, authentically alive and breathing deep.

For really the very first time in my life, I love myself with a ferocity that surprises the hell out of me. I really and truly believe in the strong and compassionate woman I have become and I feel blessed that I have been baptised by the showers of a powerful rainstorm to emerge self-actualized, awake and whole. It’s bliss.

But it doesn’t mean anything if I don’t offer it up to others. Loving myself as myself is a pretty empty relationship without a unique and funky coinherence with a person, place, thing, moment even, in my life that invites the magic to reach penultimate heights. Life for me has to be lived in relationship evoking and inspiring the best in me and yielding to and feeling awe from the bright glossiness of all that is other. It’s numinous, untouchable, hard to wrap my brain around, and so easily affirmed and embraced by the heart.

And that is where I shall stay, sometimes in spite of my more murky inclinations, deeply embedded within the heart, and fully upholding  the truth of this perichoretic swirly love that emanates from a life founded in service, faith and trusting the love-filled process that beats so profoundly, humbly and forever, forever, forever.

LIVE BIG, LOVE BIG, TRANSFORM EVEN BIGGER: The promise of The 12 Steps to Personal Transformation.

WOW!

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