This is what you should ask instead.

My mom is a soul born way ahead of her time. She was teaching me meditation practices decades before it became mainstream, she taught me the value of personal growth by example, she sneaked me into her development workshops when I was a little girl, and she managed to do it all in high heels, as a respected and admired professor and researcher, and under the judging eyes of my dad… you will hear me talking A LOT about my mom.
BUT, every yin has a yang, every coin has two faces, and every mom can turn her immense knowledge against our youthful naïveté.

One night, as I was getting ready for a party, my mom asked WHY was I wearing such a short skirt? A smart girl myself, I had tons of answers ready for her: It looks great, it’s in fashion, all my friends are wearing it (have you ever heard this one before?), I have NOTHING else to wear (and this one?)… After I had exhausted my list of REASONS to wear the skimpy skirt, and while I was feeling triumphant and satisfied, my mom proceeded to ask: Ok, and WHAT are you wearing it FOR ?

Silence… gasp… realization… I didn’t want to answer out loud, I didn’t want to tell my mom I did it so “boys will look at me” or because that way maybe “I would feel accepted” instead of always being this “goody two shoes” I had come to be. 
I pulled the skirt down a bit, but the real change happened inside. Ever since I have asked myself and others: WHY? and WHAT FOR? 

It’s sometimes hard to stay on track, reasons and excuses keep flowing, but don’t fool yourself and don’t let others fool you, find the answer to WHAT AM I DOING THIS FOR? Keep searching until you have a response. Only then you’ll be dealing with your truth. 
As always, please ask me questions about this topic and about its practical applications.

Adriana Dyurich

Set your intention, work intentionally

You might have heard about INTENTIONS very often lately. The first time I was asked to “set my intention” was in my beginners yoga class. Yoga, back then, was uncharted territory. My dad freaked out because he was “losing me to hippies.” But I had been curious for over 15 years and I couldn’t wait any longer. Little did I know the transformational path I was embracing.

Today I can assert I believe in INTENTION completely, wholeheartedly, without a speck of doubt… to the point that I am afraid that flaunting the word so much might cause it to lose its strong, life-changing meaning.

The truth is, in my therapy sessions, in my personal life, with my kids, students, clients... I always set and explore intentions.

Now, beyond the spiritual act of setting intentions, I work on the realization (earthy, simple, profoundly human) of what your intention is behind each and every act of our life. I set intentions before I set out to do something, and I explored intentions when analyzing events after the fact… They ALWAYS lead me to know more about myself. And knowing myself better has put me on a path to find strength, guidance, meaning, and specially peace.

I do believe this is another example of the dialectical nature of life, another example of taking care of the mundane to approach the divine, in whichever form that takes for you.
So today, tomorrow, always, I ask not only why? But also WHAT FOR? (see more about this AMAZING question in my next blog post.

Please send me your questions about INTENTIONS, I will be glad to do my best to answer them.

Is happiness what we are searching for?

In my tale of the foolish gardener

I invite you to reconsider “happiness” as the goal in life. I invite you to give some thought to new goals such as peace, meaning, and personal growth.

To spend a life seeking happiness is akin to the gardener whose only purpose is to get flowers to bloom, hoping they will never whither. The natural cycle of life will cause great distress to this gardener. Flowers will undoubtedly die. This gardener will soon realize she has only a couple of options. She could buy plastic flowers, and pretend she achieved her dreams based on a fabricated, perfume-less, and lifeless reality that will never fool a butterfly. Or she can learn to enjoy the process, the comings and goings, the care she will offer in the meantime, the unshakable hope of what’s to come, and the imminent excitement for her plants’ flourishing, untainted by fear of their inevitable decline.

The good gardener, the one that pays attention to life and it’s rules, the one that admires the good instead of focusing on the bad, knows to honor each season, and learns to enjoy life because of them.