>> Here’s the AUDIO of today’s Transformation Tuesday. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed speaking it. 

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You are a creator. 

You came here with the uniquely human superpower of being able to think about something that doesn’t yet exist, then to cause that thing to exist.

Your expansion is inevitable. 

You are on the right track. 

You are in the perfect place at the perfect time.

Wherever you’re at right now?

Is juuuuust right. 

There’s nowhere else you should be. 

There’s nothing else you should be doing. 

You haven’t messed this up. 

You can’t even mess this up. 

Every delay, every experience that seemed like a wrong step or mistake? 

They served a purpose. 

They were getting you clearer.

They were preparing you. 

They will ultimately turn out to be beneficial to you, if you set down the struggle version of your story and allow the wonderful version to unfold.

There are millions of ways your path into an elevated, joyful life experience could look. 

There’s not just one way.

And if you think you should be doing more, you’re wrong. 

If you identify as an action-oriented, achievement-oriented human who loves to get things done, I hate to break it to you — strike that — I actually love to break it to you: Doing less is generally how the best things will come your way. 

If that leaves you confused about next steps, here’s my prescription.

Sit still. Every day. Just for 5 minutes. Or 10 or 20. 

De-chaos. 

Get still. 

Listen. 

Receive your inspiration. 

And when you do? 

When you have those Big Bright Ideas or even those small but resonant little hunches? 

Get after them. Milk them for all they’re worth. 

Because there is no efficiency like the power of inspired action.

You are creating all the time, whether you know it or not. 

Whether you’re creating what you want or not.

Let inspiration find you, and fuel your creating. 

Let the process unfold, as it needs to unfold. 

Let your inner resistance dissolve and dissipate all along the way.

Let it be easier than it has ever been.

Await your inspiration. 

When you do take action, do it wholeheartedly and do it with a spirit of excellence.

But do it allowing for grace. Do it allowing for Divine Timing. 

Do it watching the path light up ahead of you. Watch the other components of whatever it is you’re creating just line up and light up before you. 

Then take the natural next step.

Make peace with the process. 

Stop withholding approval of your own delightful self until such time as you’ve accomplished something.

Get nonresistant to your own greatness. Loosen up. Relax. Receive. 

Love and approve of yourself starting now and all along the way, not just when you’ve lost the weight or started the business or written the book or you’ve done or been or acquired whatever it is that you want to be, do or have. 

Love and approve of yourself starting now.

Look for and find the joy in the process as it plays out. 

And let the Divine handle the how. 

Release attachment to the granular specifics of any one way your path might unfold.

There are millions of ways things can and will work out for you. 

So release attachment. Receive inspiration. Milk it when it comes. 

That’s how you’ll learn to let it be easy.

Let it be easy.

Let it be easy.

Let it be easy.

Then watch what happens when you decide to let it be easy.

I predict a snowball of wonderful things will begin to be the order of your life. 

And they’ll almost seem like magic, the brilliant creations and transformations that will unfold in your life, by grace and in a wonderful way when you stop fretting and regretting and start allowing instead. 

In your next season, I predict that miracles will follow miracles and wonders will never cease. 

Never.

I declare it. 

P.S. Two quick announcements! 

1. I’ve extended enrollment window for my School of Upliftment through next Tuesday, April 9th at midnight. 

It’s not too late to join us for an everyday infusion of energy, transformation and elevation!

Here’s the link: https://soultour.com/sou

2. I’ve just decided to bring back our DIY/self-study option for enrolling in the School. For just $39/month, you can get a daily dose of Tara-style inspiration, meditations and writing prompts, 6 days a week in my Daily Ritual and Saturday Sacred Space emails.

Note: The DIY/self-guided option does not include access to our live classes, group coaching sessions or book study groups. 

Here’s the link to enroll in DIY.

Head up + heart out,

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

>> Here’s the AUDIO of today’s Transformation Tuesday.

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Brilliant One,

I heard someone say that self-care is not about manicures, it’s about creating a life you don’t want to run from.

And I agree.

Except I’d go one step further. 

Self-care is about all the loving ways we can feed and nourish and move and dress and adorn and adore our bodies, taking in as much as possible of the beauty we can put in, on and around them.

But at a soul-level, self-care is also about making all the lavishly self-loving, self-expressive, delectably unrepressing choices we can make in every area of our lives.

It’s about awakening and unfurling into a life free of self-judgment and self-criticism.

It’s about creating loving work, loving relationships, loving ways of operating in the world and in your body, and in your home. 

Self-care is about fully and joyously inhabiting your physical spaces, to quote Louise Hay, filling your rooms with the vibration of love so that all who enter, yourself included, may be nourished by it.

It’s about opening yourself to receive the loving abundance that is your Divine Inheritance, in your finances and also in every way abundance shows up in the world. 

It’s about giving yourself permission to bring 100% of yourself to the world, withholding less and less, gradually… then, over time, withholding nothing.

It’s about practicing radical acceptance of yourself and your experience of life, and your process of growing and learning in life, and even accepting the way the world works. It’s about no longer fighting the waves of life, but learning how to surf them instead.

Self-care includes doing what inspires you, just because it inspires you. No other reason, no other justification, no monetization needed.

Self-care is about indulging in nature. 

Indulging in music and movement and travel: making the whole world your personal playground and becoming a citizen of the world, with a global point of view. 

Self-care includes setting down your portfolio — the baggage — of grievances, grudges and struggles, so you can move forward in life with freedom and ease. 

Indulging in revelry on any subject, any time, with anyone, just because it feels so good.

Self care is about giving your dreams, desires and creative callings the chance and the resources to come to life.

Which means self-care is also, at the core, about releasing and rewiring the habit of resisting or refusing your callings.

So self-care is about watching the fear of your own dreams and desires rise and fall, without letting it run your life or drive your decisions. 

It’s about about creating a life — not just a life you don’t want to run from — a life you’re eager to live, a life you love to look at when you wake up in the morning.

Self-care is about trusting life. 

It’s about lavishing openness and warmth on yourself. 

It’s about pouring attention and affection and appreciation into yourself. 

Giving yourself the time and space and resources to get ready and then to start doing what you deep down know is calling you, over and over again. 

Because this life is not a one-and-done journey. 

It is eternal. Just like you. 

Which means that congratulations are due, because you literally have all the time in the world to practice becoming more and more you, through self-care of every shape, form, flavor and degree. 

So if you want to start down this journey into soul-level self-care, start by giving yourself unconditional love for exactly who you are right now, exactly who you’ve always been, exactly who you’re becoming, and exactly wherever you are in the process. 

Start by reminding yourself that you are a masterpiece and a work in progress. 

Always, in all ways.

That’s who you are.

Head up + heart out,

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

NOTE: Today’s newsletter is a lesson and meditation I sent to my students as part of one of their Daily Rituals during our month of focus on the physical body. Consider it my gift, as I work and play this week in Malaysia. 🇲🇾

>> Here’s the AUDIO for today’s Transformation Tuesday.

I’m not one of those “life is short” people.

Because you are eternal. Your soul is eternal.

And so are all the elements of your body: the carbon, the nitrogen. They’re not making any more of that stuff you know. In our Universe, matter just shifts form. It never dies.

So you can never, really die.

That said, some of us are in these physical bodies for a shorter season, and others for long, leisurely extended ones.

Yet I’m not a big fan of fetishizing death as a cudgel for motivation.

“Hurry up and get it all done!” that story goes. “Check all the boxes off on your bucket list!”

“Achieve, accomplish, life is short”!

Eh. That’s not my jam. Because that’s not why we’re really here.

We’re here for freedom, growth and joy. For connection. For love and wisdom.

Yet, all the same, we are only in these beautiful, intelligent meat-covered skeletons made of stardust for a season.

A precious and powerful season.

We can find love and energy, satisfaction with right now and eagerness for more, when we meditate on the impermanence of life.

We can find freedom from the fear of death during our lives when we follow the words of Ram Dass, who advises us to “keep death on your shoulder and identify with your soul.”

In preparing for one of my talks, I found myself re-reading the old Steve Jobs commencement speech, which had several passages about the brilliance of our mortality.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

He went on:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Everything else is secondary.

Inner peace lets you hear your own inner voice.

Another reason to release any inner struggles or self-judgment.

Another point in favor of lavish self-love, which reverses inner judgment and creates an atmosphere of inner peace.

Another argument to wholeheartedly engage with the subjects of your fears. To have the courage – the heart – to follow that inner voice.

So today, let’s take an Inner Retreat to become more at peace, more open and more at ease in your own beautiful, resilient and temporary body.

Take three deep, delicious, leisurely, grounding breaths.

Inhaling, filling your lungs all the way up, and exhaling, emptying them out.

Two more breaths just like that in your own time, as you allow your body to begin to ground down and sink in for today’s Inner Retreat.

Slowly scan down your body from the top to the bottom, just noting how it feels as you go.

Don’t try to change anything. Just note.

Today, I want you to do the exercise of focusing on your body’s different muscle groups, one by one, and shut the active energy in them down, one by one.

Start with your feet and your lower legs, shutting them off. Letting them sink in.

Then your upper legs and thighs, and your pelvis. Turn the power off. Shut the tension off.

Sinking in.

Now your belly and your chest, powering any active energy of holding or tightening down.

Next your lower arms, then your neck and your shoulders: power them down. Turn all activity in these muscles off.

Shut it down for these moments.

And finally your jaws, your face, your cheeks, your forehead and the crown of your head, even your eyelids and your gums, power them down. Turn any activity in those muscles off.

In this space, muscles fully relaxed and body sinking all the way in, all the way down, for the rest of your time this morning, focus on the word AT on the inhale, and EASE on your exhales.

Noticing how, even when you are fully unguarded, fully relaxed, fully deactivated, the breath of life still flows through you.

With no effort required from you.

Your lung still breathes.

Your heart still beats.

No effort needed at all.

The entire Universe continues to collaborate in your survival and thriving, even when you let yourself be in the state of ease.

When your mind wanders, come back to these words: AT EASE.

Allow yourself to hear the sounds and smell the smells around you, as you inhale and exhale, opening yourself to more and more ease.

REMINDER: If you’d like a little more clarity, freedom and spaciousness in your life, this is your last call to join my 10 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders and Creators.

>>>  Join us, here. It’s free. 

We started today and will close registration at midnight Pacific tonight.

But know this: Whenever you sign up is right on time.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

>> Here’s the AUDIO for today’s Transformation Tuesday

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There’s a new condition on the block in the world of sports medicine, and it has a very funny name: Dead Butt Syndrome. 

The idea is that our modern lifestyle places us in a state of near-constant front-body muscle contraction — think sitting at a desk, in a car or on a couch, and even exercising in forward motion or while facing a mirror.

As a result, most of us have actually forgotten how to fully activate the muscles in our backs and, particularly, the large muscles of our glutes. 

In other words, our butts are dead. 

Sports medicine doctors and physical therapists care about this because it can cause all sorts of pain in the, um, butt, but also all sorts of other injuries in our hips and hamstrings, calves and even feet. 

Fortunately, this pain can be relieved by learning to fire your glute muscles fully and stretching and strengthening them regularly.

But I think there’s a deeper lesson we can all learn from Dead Butt Syndrome. 

To fully inhabit your life — to live wholeheartedly, shrinking from nothing, exploring even your shadows and fears and thus causing them to dissolve — you must fully inhabit your body, and learn how to hear the wisdom it contains. 

This can be challenging for those of us who are very cerebral or very verbal, those of us who have a practiced habit of living in our heads and those of us who prefer talking about our feelings to actually feeling them. 

A wise woman set me on the path to learning how to feel my feelings, asking me over and over again to translate my detailed, verbal, thoughtful descriptions of my inner experience with these questions: 

“How does that feel in your body?” 

“Where do you feel that, in your body?” 

She also taught me not to push unwanted feelings down or reframe them immediately, but to allow them. To feel them. They pass much more quickly that way. 

When you allow yourself to feel your feelings in your body, you also get access to a new Inner Wisdom another wise woman taught me to see. 

My friend and colleague Monisha regularly issues our students this challenge: 

“Can you investigate and find the gift in that feeling?” 

I say it this way: “What is your body trying to tell you?” 

Or when someone is struggling with a decision: “I suspect your body already knows the answer.”

Yet one more wise woman, Martha Beck, taught me to use my newfound ability to feel my feelings as a deep, inner wisdom containing the answers to almost every question, from what to wear today to whether to get into partnership with this person or that one. 

Her advice: When an option or course of action you’re weighing feels like “shackles on” in your body, DO NOT DO IT.

Overrule or argue with your Inner Wisdom all you want. 

People do this all the time, making lists of pros and cons and Googling for backup, and even asking the whole entire peanut gallery for advice or emailing me to see if they can “pick my brain” when they actually know what they want to do, deep down. 

Catch this principle: When you get a “shackles on” feeling, your body already knows the answer, whether it seems logical or not. 

And your body’s deepest, Inner Wisdom is never wrong.

In all my conversations with transformation-seekers, I have never once heard someone who followed their Inner Wisdom regret it later. 

But when something feels “shackles off”? Feels like opening, expansion, freedom in your body? 

DO THAT. GO THERE. THAT’S A YES.

Even if it’s a little scary.

Over the years, that has translated into one of my personal life rules: “I’m a no on most projects, until I’m a YES.”

I felt no and said no to my last job for six months, until it because a resounding, inner YES. 

And when it did become a YES, all the people and circumstances and learnings and everything else I would need for that job to be the best job I’d ever had had lined up and fallen into place, and not through my hard effort or forcing.

At the center of your Being, there is an infinite well of wisdom that will guide you along a beautiful, unpredictable path into the life you came here to live. 

So learn to listen for that still, small voice. Don’t let the chaos of your calendar or your Inner Critic drown it out. 

Ask yourself: 

• How does it feel in my body? 
• What is the gift of this feeling?
• What is my <breath holding, jaw clenching, stomach sucking in, constant fidgeting, hard rock in my chest> trying to tell me? 
• Or, what is this <opening in your chest, warmth flooding through me body, feeling of solid, grounded, okayness, exhilaration or sudden expansion inside me> trying to tell me?
• Does my body know the answer? 
• When I think about this course of action, do I feel “shackles on” or “shackles off”? 

There’s one more step.

When you get a Divine Download, which is what I call an idea, a desire, a bolt of inspiration or even just a hunch that feels so “shackles off” you can barely restrain yourself from taking the natural next step? 

Milk it for all its worth.

Head up + heart out,

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

>> Click here to listen to today’s Transformation Tuesday AUDIO, or read on!

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Have you ever heard of the tardigrade? 

You might also have heard it called a moss bug or water bear.

The tardigrade is a microscopic, translucent creature that lives damn near everywhere: from the tops of the Himalayas to the grody moss you keep meaning to scrub off the pavers in your backyard. 

Eye of Science/Science Source

Like the dust mites that were en vogue when I was a kid, tardigrades are today’s bug du jour.

They’re beloved by teachers and kids because you can find them anywhere and you can see them easily under the microscope. 

Under the lens, tardigrades look like the Michelin man would if he had claws.

Despite their fame, a tardigrade is just a moss bug that lives for a year under normal conditions. 

It’s what they do in abnormal conditions that’s remarkable. 

See, when subjected to harsh environmental conditions, a tardigrade jettisons almost all the water in its body and slows its metabolism to .01 percent of normal.

When it does this, the tardigrade takes on a new identity. It’s new name is the “tun.”

And tuns, it turns out, are extraordinarily badass. 

From the New York Times (bullets mine):

• Tuns have been reconstituted after more than a century and brought back to life as tardigrades, looking not a day older.
• Tuns can be subjected to atmospheric pressure 600 times that of the surface of Earth, and they will bounce right back. 
• They can be chilled to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero for more than a year, no problem. 
• The European Space Agency once sent tuns into space and:

Two-thirds survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the vacuum of space. Without water, “the damaging effects of freezing cannot happen,” Dr. Siddall explained. “It protects against heat because the water inside cannot turn into a gas that expands. Even radiation needs water to do damage,” he said. “When cosmic radiation hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive form of oxygen that damages cell DNA. The tun doesn’t have this problem.”

As far as I’m concerned, the tardigrade should be everybody’s spirit animal. It exemplifies resilience and thriving after extreme trauma and stress of the nature that would do anybody else in.

Here’s the part I find particularly fascinating: The tardigrade’s whole identity changes when it sheds the water that would make it vulnerable to damage or destruction in extreme conditions.

The tardigrade doesn’t fight the conditions that it can’t control.

It doesn’t text its tardigrade complaint buddies and spiral into feeling even worse.

It doesn’t get on Facebook and post to anyone who’ll listen about the unwanted conditions.

Catch this principle: The tardigrade goes with the flow of life, shedding what no longer serves it along the way, evolving and transforming, morphing from tardigrade to tun, then back to tardigrade, depending on what’s going on in the world around it.

The tardigrade doesn’t just Google for solutions.

Under circumstances that would obliterate any other being in the Universe, the tardigrade sheds what it no longer needs, and uses its innate strengths to evolve into a new being that is the solution.

Think about this:

There are only two kinds of humans: those who’ve been through trauma, or those who will someday.

Think about a time when you went through an adversity and came out changed for the better, the more conscious, the more alive, the more resilient.

Think about your post-traumatic breakthrough, or write about it if the spirit moves.

How did your identity change in the process? Who were you before? Who did you become? 

Who are you now?

Heads up: If you want to refill your clarity, motivation and inspiration tank for whatever you want to be, do or have in 2019, this one’s for you.

I’m presenting a live encore of my 2019 Goal-Setting workshop next Tuesday, March 5th at 11am Pacific/2 pm Eastern (See your timezone here). 

It’s free, and I’d love for you to join me. 

Last time I taught it, over 800 people joined me live and it was 🔥. 

Right afterward, Tanya emailed me in all caps for emphasis 😂: 

“THAT WEBINAR WAS EVERYTHING.”

Kirsten also attended, and said: “Thank you Tara-Nicholle. You always deliver action steps. SO very grateful. recommended a few people to this program today, saw a few names, and I hope everyone got something golden. I know I did. Thank you.”

>> Click here to join me for a free workshop where I’ll share my 3 Secrets to setting intentions that work.

Head up + heart out,

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday