During a single weekend at the beginning of June I signed up for and completed a Vedic Thai Massage training program with Mukti (Michael Buck) , bought a plane ticket to Thailand, and bought a ticket to Colorado. The dreams of doing all these things had been hovering around my consciousness for ages, but I always had some really logical excuse not to pull the trigger. That weekend the universe just got sick of me sitting back and waiting for the "right time" and threw me into some carpe diem opportunities. A bird also pooped on my face that weekend, so luck was on my side, right?

I didn't have any real plan for how I was actually going to follow through with all these things, but I knew that after I'd taken that first step I was already on the path and it would work out somewhow. After all, I was following my heart's call.

What dream have you been holding out on? We all do it. For me, it's usually traveling. I'm infamous for searching Groupon for some awesome deal, looking at flights, seeking out travel partners....and then doing nothing. Most of the time I use work as an excuse, saying I can't take off from my 9-5 in order to leave. The job needs me too much. I've done it with running a race, saying I can't sign up because I haven't trained enough. I held off on calling an old friend to hang out telling myself I've got no awesome plan, and then that friend moved across the country.

Do you know what happens when we have great intentions to follow through yet we don't take action?

...Nothing. Nothing at all happens. Everything stays exactly the same and our dreams get dusty on their safe shelves. We put more work into bolstering the shelf to be sure it stays sturdy than we do toward really turning those dreams into reality. Wrapped up in their comfort blanket of excuses and rationalizations, they never learn to spread their wings and fly.

How badly do you want your dreams to come true? Regardless of how big or small the dream is, it takes an action to set things into motion. I bought my plane tickets to Colorado and Thailand and then told my boss I wasn't going to be around for over a month while I was traveling. Honestly, I was terrified to walk into her office to tell her, but it worked out. I wanted it badly enough and in buying those tickets on a whim, it set the whole process in motion. The universe wants us to follow our heart, and when we take the first step you'd be amazed at how the path begins to unfold right in front of you - if you welcome it.

As you move through your asana practice, how can you take one small action toward something you'd like to achieve in your practice. Maybe you'd love to work up to a full bind in Utthita Parsvakonasana (Extended Side Angle). No one would ever expect you to just do it, but it's also a given that if you don't try working into it, you never will. You would start by lowering the front hand to land inside the front foot and keeping your side body from collapsing, using your core to hold you strong. You could bend the top arm to reach your hand to your lower back, reminding yourself to keep the torso open and heart shining up. Step by step you'd work into your full bind, but you need to take action towards the beginning of the process.

With that, I challenge you to take one step towards a dream this week. Have you wanted to remodel your kitchen? Call the designer and make an appointment? Would you like to run a half-marathon? Sign up (or start with a 5k)! Have you been postponing a vacation? Book the plane ticket or hotel.

When you are following your heart's dream, the process will unfold. Take action. Trust.

6 Things I Unlearned About Love by Steven Budden

Steven Budden created Flow Healing Arts to "help extraordinary people heal childhood trauma and recreate their lives from the ground up so they can LOVE and CREATE". This article is a look into our interactions in a relationship and how we can use our relationships to become the most whole Self we truly are.

I’m not a great blogger. Sure, I write all the time. In fact, I type things out in Word because my mind is generally moving too fast for a pen to keep up (fortunately I am a very proficient typer). However, the last time I consistently “blogged” was back in highschool when I would rant about how cruel my parents were, how excited I was to go to the mall on Friday night, which guy I had a crush on that week, and my new band tees (aka: the important stuff in a teenager’s life). Really it was a lot of whining and most of it was pretty depressing.

Since then, my personal writing has progressed to a lot of run on sentences as my train of thought derails trying to figure out what I’m feeling, why I’m feeling it, and what it all means on a universal scale. My tone and outlook has become far less bleak and more hopeful as I seek life lessons amidst things like the relationships I call into my life and if I should eat ice cream (usually, yes).

The one thing that is still the same though is the purpose of the writing. Back then I’d totally call it bitching, but now I’ve embraced the term “emotional detoxification”.

We all do it in some form. Maybe you write. Maybe you call up your best friend, parent, or therapist. Maybe you yell it across a sticky bar to the oh so polite bartender. Maybe you share it with whoever happens to be sitting next to you on the train. It could be a physical detox like running, yoga, or jumping on the bed. Whatever form it takes, it serves the same purpose: it’s trying to get whatever is eating at us OUT. Emotional detoxing is healthy!

I’m all about venting, but when was the last time you stopped and listened to (or read) what it was you are venting about? Did you notice that we often repeat the same woes, revisit the same annoyances, and relive the things that are eating away at us? We’ll need to emotionally detox and our mind’s first reaction is “Oh! I know how to do this. [Searches through backlogs]”. Maybe the same conversation rehashes each time you see a particular friend. Consider the prefabricated thoughts that run through your mind as you sit down at your desk on Monday morning. We end up revisiting the same stories because that’s what’s been stored in our mental and emotional cache.

Think about your internet browser. You open Facebook and all the sudden there’s ads on Facebook for the maca powder you were just searching on Vitacost, or trying to sell you tickets to the Sixers game because it knows you live near Philly. You go to check out on Amazon and the webpage has already filled in your personal information (creepy). With a few clicks, we can delete that stored information. We reset the cache, defragment. No more autofilling. No more creepy algorithms anticipating what we want to see and read about.

Our brilliant minds like to auto-fill, too. They like to come into a situation and find the stored information – it’s easier and sometimes helps us avoid the real issues that are begging to be brought to light. The mind likes to predict the situation based on former circumstances rather than letting us build it moment by moment. As a result, our emotional detox is just a rehashing of the last time we felt a lot of SOMETHING and needed to release it, and nothing really gets released. It’s not that we are blocked from deleting the information and filling it in fresh, but our mind is given a story right off the bat and sets us off in a predetermined direction.

Not only does the mind keep us locked in the past by pulling up the saved information, but it’s also preventing us from truly experiencing the present. When we step into a situation with preconceived notions, it prevents us from entering with a beginner’s mind – feeling and experiencing the situation with a fresh new set of metaphorical eyes. In our asana practice, we become disconnected from the messages the body is truly sending. We anticipate and just roll through the motions.

 It doesn’t take any clicks or tech savvy to clear your emotional or mental cache. All it takes is stepping back from a situation long enough to accept it as new, as an ever evolving moment. Witness and live in the present rather than reacting and pulling up patterns from the past. Moment by moment by moment. Be here, now. And now. And NOW.

With that, I’m making a conscious effort and promise to myself (and you) that as I blog I will do so with a cleared cache each and every time. I certainly won’t revert back to the settings of my highschool blogger self. Even more, I will challenge myself to be sure that each post is coming from a centered state of what is going on NOW. I won’t let my cache show me what I expect to see, the old information that makes me follow the same patterns. I promise to dump and start anew, reacting to the current situation and living fully in the NOW.

 When was the last time you cleared your cache?