I don't wear a bra.

I bought the kimono in North Carolina years ago. The invitation to teach at Serendipity retreat came just after I wrote on my dream list, be asked to teach at a retreat. At the last minute I added the words North Carolina to the top of the page. I hadn't been back to my childhood home since I was 10 and I was finding myself inside of a huge awakening which felt like a pull back in time as my layers were peeling back.

Less than a week later I had a message about teaching at the retreat. In North Carolina, just a couple hours away from where I grew up. No one had seen the vision page I made. I didn't talk about it, though often I do, because when our desires are known by others, they can help us manifest them into reality.

I've become a powerful manifestor. Using that word used to scare me. I would go out of my way to not say manifest or sales in my teaching. I was sure that using those words in my two Magic Making circles would scare people away. So I danced around them.

It also scares me to say, I've become a powerful manifestor! I have moved through discomfort in droves over the years. Writing blogs. Posting pictures of myself on Instagram. Telling big truths on social media. Showing my life in mostly real time and using that life to create my programs and build community.

When I stopped wearing a bra and jeans and 'fancier' clothes I was nervous. I wear yoga pants daily. My belly and legs feel at home in them. Layering tanks became my bra. I adore looking and feeling like me. My red lipstick phase made me initially nervous. I have a draw towards constantly challenging myself to be uncomfortable, on edges, so that I can feel fears and strengthen my spirit from those feelings. 

And so the word manifest is now a word I embrace. Some teachers call it core desired feelings. Some call it the vortex. You've heard the phrase, your thoughts create your reality. These things are all lessons and practices in manifesting. Nothing is more important than how you want to feel. In your home. In your sexuality. In your work. In your body. What I teach starts with the feeling inside our dreams. It is a practice.

If you don't feel (good, turned on, lit up, empowered, blessed...) selling or marketing your work, you won't be dancing with abundance. If you don't feel (good, adored, beautiful, spirit connected, ease, joy, bliss, love...)  looking at your naked body in the mirror, you won't have the kind of sex that opens you up to the kind of intimacy and vulnerability that comes with feeling gorgeous in your skin.

I've become so good at manifesting that for a while I was scared to keep going as purposefully as I had been. Because when we call in what we want, we can never know quite how the journey will look getting there. When we choose to live inside of powerful questions and secret messages and make space for magic what shows up will take us to new edges. And living on edges can be a tiny bit exhausting.

Manifesting isn't pinning pictures and words up on a board and then waiting for it to happen. It is the way we want to feel pulled into our now. It is the work we put behind the dreams. It is the ratio of action versus visioning inside of the ways we want to feel.

Manifesting is living your I am. Taking off your bra to become the version of you that brings you into how you want to feel... when you work, when you love, when you mother, when you make home. Feel lit up by I am. Flow into your becoming from all that you have risked to be in this space now.

Every time I put on that kimono I feel its gift as a result of my manifesting. Of how I make magic inside my life, call my dreams into reality. I feel sexy and abundant and blessed and soft and so grateful to this life.

Now when I teach sales I use the word. I infuse it with the feeling I want to have. I know that I if I had no one to sell to, I would not be teaching women compassion, lifting, sorting, surrender, sanguine, awakening, creating, dreaming, action, permission, vulnerability, truth telling, dharma, soul-infused business. 

If I don't share my stories. Like 2 years ago sitting at my own retreat in Maine, on a dock, on a lake I said, "I will have my own retreat spot on a lake. I can feel it inside, this is my next dream." And how 6 months later my beloved sat on my couch in The Loft after one of our early make-out sessions where you feel like you are electrically charged to the other person (I actually still feel that), and he told me about his lake house. The one he had had as his dream since he was 8 years old, and how he made that dream happen. The house he now calls our home. The house where I have been gathering women on the lake to lift, to tell stories, to retreat together. The house where I first told him I loved him. The house where two dreams collided.

I can pull myself back into my blessings and the feelings I want to be inside of now, on the days when it is a struggle and feels so hard. I slip my legs into my yoga pants. I layer on some tank tops. I add some leg warmers and boots. Then I wrap myself in a kimono, look in the mirror, and find my feeling.

Then I sit down with my mug of tea, and type my stories. On a Tuesday. On a Sunday. 

Sometimes even on a Friday.