COURTNEY ROHAN YOGA

It's time to move on. I will no longer have the "blogger.com" chasing courtneyrohanyoga.  I am excited to welcome you to my  NEW SITE which will offer us an easier way to work together.  For what feels like a long time, maybe 7 years now,  I have been squirreling away creations and filing things to share, waiting. It just never felt like the right time, or things never felt all the way ready. They still aren't. But, they are more ready each year.  I appreciate that about life. We continue to grow and become. We continue to follow the bread crumbs. That reminds me of a blog I wrote here called Intuitive Coaching for a BreadCrumb  . It was 2016. I had just moved to California then. At the time I was wishing so bad to help people find their purpose, while searching for my own. I still feel that way. I want to stand in the gap for people and listen for things that they can not/ do not want to hear on their own because we don't have to be alone all the time. An...

This week I had an opportunity to see more of myself. Living is like that if we take the time to see, hear, use our senses to be present to what is within us, and how we interact with what is around us. What do you see within yourself? Do you see the good or do you see the not so good? Can you see both?  After a meditation with the People of Color Sangha on Thursday, the dharma talk, as shared by Rev. Liên Shutt, was about the "Enso of Wholeness." The "Enso, a Japanese word meaning 'circular form' and usually translated into English as 'Zen circle,' is the symbol supreme of Buddhist enlightenment"(lionroar.com). Rev. Shutt shared that we often forget that the inside of the circle is just one aspect of the whole that we are not trapped or defined by. In some cases the enso has this slight space where the beginning does not meet the end, in which we can see that we are incomplete and yet complete, inside but also beyond as well.  This week as I was s...

  Patience is an important virtue full of ripe lessons. One must be still to behold her, and she must be held with honor or none of her vital juices will be obtained. This is Divine timing in short. We can not force her to give us what we want. Without care, she will not produce.  This year with California being in a drought like never before, I have stopped watering my grass. My once green grass has turned brown. I am Ok with this as I would rather have water to drink and bathe in than to worry about my curb appeal at this time. Still, I have other plants in my yard that need watering, so it has been a trial to discover how much water I can not give them and still have them thrive. How much is just enough?  Opening to Divine timing   For a while, I stopped watering to see what would happen. Weeks went by. The leaves on my lemon tree showed signs of dehydration. Her leaves began to yellow, and her fruit remained small and green, taking much longer this year to r...

For the longest time, when people would talk about joy, the best I could think was that: if I was in joy, I was just really, really happy. In joy meant that I was having the best day ever. I was in bliss. Nothing could bring me down.  But then something would and I would say, I lost my joy .  And though happiness is how joy manifests sometimes, that is not always the case.  Have you ever felt something so deeply, something so beautiful, so heart felt, you couldn't help but cry? Have you ever cried "tears of joy"?  Sometimes, these are the moments that bring us to our knees.  The loss of a loved one, and as a result, the bird that comes to sit outside the window and chirps us a love song. The depth of the experience felt, the connection made, as a result of the pain from losing that which we love.   Joy can be like this too, not just surface happiness because things are going our way.  No, rather we feel the magnitude of our heart and its overflow...

What does it mean to be balanced? What can one do to find balance? And, how can it be sustained? Recently, I have been contemplating these questions because so much can appear to be in or out of balance in the world. If you look with your two eyes, it can seem from day to day that a great many things are not as they should be. The rich can continue to get rich, and the poor can continue in their path the same. No matter how much one might pray for it to be different, for all of us to be free and vital, our eyes show us people who are unhappy, struggling to make ends meet and unhealthy in their body-mind and spirit. Maybe you can relate? We've also seen the rich become poor, bank accounts or life energy depleted. The rich sports athlete does not take care of their income/ energy flow/ body, and at the end of their career, they have none of their once acquired gains to show for their time. Or, the come-up scenario where the poor, who through hard work or Divine intervention reconnect...

You never know what is ahead. Five years ago, we never could have dreamed we'd have come to this juncture. Ten years ago... shoot, a day ago sometimes now, things change very quickly.  I never did believe my parents, till now, when they said that as I got older the boredom that I would often feel, stuck in a situation, would not be but a "blip in the sand." I do believe that "blip" was really the word my father used. And, it's true. The time that has past, though some moments have not felt small, in relationship to the whole that is our lives and collective lives, is just that: a blip.  Thank goodness for blips when we are unhappy!!  This year I have seen a lot of things change. We have all changed. As we reflect, halfway through the year, this blip has thrown me into a letting go of what does not serve. It has afforded me a chance to be more still and discern what is best for me, to listen to my heart in order to make clearer decisions.  Used to be, I was m...

  How do you remember? What do you remember?  This past Sunday, before Memorial Day, I e-hosted in the Elevation Church chat on Youtube. This is my service. I volunteer, enjoying the experience of “walking people to their seats” online, welcoming them with the appropriate links/ information to support their experience, and prayer.  This Sunday while volunteering, someone placed a prayer request in the chat. It was for their elderly friend who has Dementia, who is struggling to remember. It was the woman’s birthday. I thought about this for a while. How much we take our ability to remember for granted. How, in some cases, we go out of our way to try to forget.  Today, Memorial Day, I offered a Memorial Meditation through Revolution Yoga. We used the Kirtan Kriya in which you chant Sa Ta Na Ma in a loud voice, then in a whisper and then silently to yourself and Infinity, while moving your fingers into various mudras. This is a meditation that has been scientifically ...

This blog is for you if you have ever tried to do something so someone else would love you, like you, approve of you, affirm you... This blog is for you if you realized or are realizing that it does not work. I'm with you.  If you are still reading, we are both standing right now. Not to shame ourselves, but to set things right, to set ourselves free.  We are standing on our own two feet right now. And in order for us to be doing so, our muscles and bones and mind have to be working in accord. No one else can do that for us.  So, fellow person who feels like someone else's happiness is more important, I'd like to ask you: Is that person helping you to stand, literally? If not, I want to inquire of us here, then, how could they be more important to the function of our lives? How can their internal guidance system, that is designed for them, be more important than our own? It's not!    What we think, do, and feel comes from us, individually.  No one else know...

  Revisiting some old blogs recently to celebrate my time as a blogger, I have been able to see so much of my history and growth. I've been able to see all the times that I put myself out there. Love is like that. We just keep offering ourselves to It.  In February 2016, I wrote a blog:  Intuitive Coaching for a Bread Crumb . I invite you to read it. Then, I was offering intuitive coaching for free for the month of February. I was thinking, how can I help someone put together the breadcrumbs, so they can have a whole piece of toast, a whole experience of their life. I remember thinking, just put yourself out there. You can show up and carry some of the load for someone in need, be some of their glue, stand in the gap; you can listen.  People were already calling on me to do this. And I was willing and wanting to help. In most causes not for free but on this given February, I was willing to offer. I was going all out.  But thinking back to it now, having five yea...

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we all have had the experience of offering our services to someone who was not receptive, someone who we assumed, after the fact, was just the wrong client, the wrong recipient. We have all at one time or another offered thousands of dollars in energy or time to people who would not catch the ball. But rather, they stood and watched with their arms by their sides as the ball was thrown to them. They are those who let the ball bounce right off their body while they complained that the ball was never being thrown at all. Think back to a time when you offered something free in which the invitation was unaccepted, or when you, yourself, did not pick up what was freely given to you by another, something you knew could have been potentially helpful to you. What was holding them back? What was holding you back? We probably have more than one long list of reasons why we did not or do not respond or show up. I am too busy. I am not ready. I am af...

I am not the only one who knows about grief.  In 2021, we all do-- whether we admit it or not.  We know that it feels like our heart is sore right in our chest as it beats.  We know we want to hide and eat and scream and [fill in the blank with your thing ] till it stops.  Grief is like that.  We can not run from our grief.   The things we do to pacify ourselves don't really take it away.  Grief is a process that we must go through no matter the challenge it presents. We will go now to bear our cross, or we will go later kicking and screaming. Why, it is from within this space that new pathways are made, new ideas are birthed, new structures, atoms are split...evolution takes place.  And, it hurts. I can not lie to you. We will hurt.  But nothing is purified, transformed, even transmuted, without pressure.  And while we feel our grief, we must do just that.  Even if we have a friend to hold our hands, we will feel our grief wit...

What makes someone offer their time and attention to someone else? Do we feel love? Obligation? Both? Some would say: even an apology, meant for someone else's ears, in for the giver. To give means to receive. I believe this. This truth was made more clear a couple weeks ago when I went to go enjoy a massage from my favorite therapist at Osmosis Day Spa. The trip to this venue is long (though beautiful) and the treatment though always beneficial is expensive. I try to treat myself to this every so often as it is a healing modality that truly eases me on many levels.  This day, unbeknownst to me, I had received calls while I was teaching my Zoom classes. Osmosis had called. My appointment was cancelled! So, needless to say, after driving in traffic for over an hour to get to my appointment, I was disappointed when I reached the doors for this news.  Walking toward the door, I noticed a black woman putting on her shoes to leave. Since there are so few black woman in this area of...

Our lives are calling us to action, but we can not create lasting change without the feminine, nurturing aspects of ourselves. For too long we have overlooked the benefit of our feminine power. We have misunderstood its importance, its strength. So, I am spending time exploring the idea of softening. This idea is not for suckers, the way it was once imagined to be. When I was younger, if you were soft, people would walk all over you. Or so it seemed. However, what I have come to realize now is the illusion: Being soft is not for suckers. It takes real strength to live softly. The illusion to dispel is within the opposition: hard, cold.. so for this let's consider the word "fight." To shift our thinking about softening, we must reconsider what fighting looks like. When we are younger, fighting is physical. Then, we develop words, and fighting can become more involved. There comes a time when we all will fight in our truth and for our truth. But as we become more w...

This Sunday, I attended two live stream church services. I went first to Pastor TD Jakes and then to Pastor Steven Furtick. I enjoy what they have to say, and most Sundays this is a part of my morning. I listen to many teachers throughout the week, but I like to hear the Bible on Sundays, and when the stories are taught well, that makes me happy. It fills my day and can carrying me well into the week. It makes me feel connected to Jesus. It makes me cry sometimes. Sometimes I sing, if I like the music, I pray, I lift my hands. I thank El Shaddai, the Almighty God, for and in, spirit and truth. That’s how I like to start my Sundays, now since I can not go to a building, which for years I have only done maybe every couple months. More recently I have enjoyed being in the chat rooms with people during the service. I like this chance to share and listen and hold space in a new way while being in my home, yet at church. I love when my son walks in and hears something that resonates wi...

I spend a lot of time contemplating. I have always been a thinker. The people who know me best know that words have always been my outlet, words in song. Yes, I'll take that. (Ask my family, they'll tell you that I used to rap all the time. LOL.) No really, singing was my first love. But I was scared to sing in front of people, so I would sing when my dad would ask me to sing, when I was in the forest alone, or when I was at my high school performing arts school. Going to a performing arts school, led me eventually to share my poems. I had been writing poems since... hum, I can't remember. It has been a love affair, an act to share love, for myself and with others. When I started writing blogs some years ago, I realized that sharing my words in this format was helpful. I was not just writing in my journal, but sharing something that someone else could use. I love that about words. They can help. They can resurrect, and they can also do just the opposite. Hurtf...

How interesting to find ourselves in this most precarious circumstance. I hope you are doing well with it all. I hope that if you found this website for the first time, it is because you are ready to do something special, irregardless of the things that look damning. Truth is, we are not damned. We are just getting started. I know that I am.  Our time is so precious. I feel that more and more each day.  Do you? Each moment that we say NO to is one more moment lost to possibility, to opportunity. I don't mean to suggest that you should say YES to everything, but I do suggest that you say YES to your life! Saying YES to your life means seeing that in each moment there is something you can do, even when the stakes are down. Saying YES means opening to seeing what can be good versus saying NO, which is defeated. From NO, the only option is NO.  So I am inviting you to say YES today to you, to growth, to the possibilities in this moment and the next. It won't hu...

In Uncertain Times, What is Certain? I have been asking myself this question again since this pandemic became a part of our lives: what is certain? I know what I know about uncertain times. I have had many in my 40 years. I have had to grieve the mortality of my mother, my aunt and best friend, and my grandmothers and grandfathers on both sides of my family. I have had to consider my own mortality on many occasions as I have been challenged with an incurable form of chronic cancer. I know my story is not special, necessarily. I know that many can say they have experienced worse. I share this story of mortality only to shine light on how in each experience this question of certainty emerged and emerges again for me. Considering what is certain is for me a rock in the mucky water of life and death. If we have not practiced feeling the intensities of life or had to feel them to the degree that we are feeling them right now, right now may be even more challenging. If you’ve numbe...