The first day of the rest of your life...

Welcome to Happy Frog!
My name is Dawn.  This is the first day of the rest of my life....how about you?

A little about me: I'm a 45 year old mother of 2 teens, presently living in Michigan after 5 years of living in China and Australia.  I've moved many times in my life living in Florida, California, Michigan, Shanghai and Melbourne.  I'm a Midwestern Hungarian girl, raised in a tight nit family south of Detroit.  I have had a successful professional business career, owned my own business, but my main role was caregiver to others in the past few years.   Yoga was and still is the one thing in my life that has consistently brought me peace.   When I decided to train as a teacher I did so for my own understanding of why when I practice yoga, do the breath work, still the mind, come into myself, could I leave my mat and go and face my life with joy and contentment.  In 2015 I begin the journey to the why.  I'm still on this journey today and this blog will be filled with these self discoveries and my hope is that by revealing my observations during the path it may help someone else along theirs.  I didn't understand previously that my role should not be just caregiver, but should actually be teacher, and that only through self care/love can you heal.  No one else can heal you.

Founding the Happy Frog Yoga Co in 2016 was my life preserver.   It has been the little glimmering light of hope that I can be at peace within myself.   That self love is the ultimate goal in life.  That giving to others is truly what we are meant to do on this planet.  To elevate the vibration of good energy should be every teacher's goal.  Because from good energy comes good energy.

So why Happy Frog? this silly name sounds a bit light, childlike even, but the intention behind it is much deeper.

Happy to me is equivalent to peace.  When I feel happy I am content, non-attached to the outcome of a situation, an observer of the life that goes on around me with no desire for anything to be different...just to accept things as they are.

Frog because we go through several transformations throughout our lives.  People can and do change, but not without conscious effort and focus.  We can all lazily fall into habits and personality traits and blame them on needs not met by others, or we can take ownership for whatever it is that we were lacking and find fulfillment within ourselves.

It is a process becoming aware or awakened.  But when you start to go through the transition from "things that happened to me" to "things I manifest" its an enormous powerful life changing metamorphosis...hence the frog..  Frogs begin their lives as eggs in water to embryo to tadpoles that adapt to living in water through their gills, lives off the food in its tail and absorbs the tail into its body to grow legs.  Legs grown to adapt to living in a new environment.

(artist unknown)

We as humans do the same, we are constantly adapting to our surroundings to survive in any given situation.  Humans are the most adaptable creatures on the planet because of our enormous will to live.   The third eye, often associated with our pineal gland, seems to see the world as it should be lived. But what does it mean to live? That is in fact the question I've been pondering for the past few years.

 

(The Serpent’s Egg in The Seat Of Consciousness” by Shawn Thornton)

You see I was going through the motions of living.  On paper it looked like an amazing life.  A loving husband, a boy and a girl, a life filled with travel, good friends, a strong family bond, adorable pets...but I was not happy. I was kind, conscientious, thoughtful, a volunteer, a charitable minded person.  I was healthy, had strong relationships with friends and family.  I had worked and done things that stimulated my brain, yet I always felt in limbo, unsettled, unsatisfied.  My life was a facade of happy family Facebook posts, mundane drool like so many others out there.  Faking at living because I didn't know how to live.  I did what was expected of me.  Played a role to perfection.  But felt really empty inside.  Like there was something more to life that I was missing.

I went on an internal journey of self discovery, still am, and have come to this blog to share my experiences and to ask the questions out loud that I ponder for myself...

So today my question is :

What if you woke up today with all the wisdom of your 45 year old self, all the life experiences, but none of the emotional baggage?  What if you woke today with the idea that the world was in fact your oyster and that anything, anything at all was possible?  You are guaranteed success.  There are no limitations.  You can in fact live the exact life that you dream of living.  You are going to make an impact so forceful that people around the world are going to feel it. Or maybe you will deeply impact just one soul?  What would you choose to do?   This is a very difficult question to turn around in your head and one that is not meant to be answered on a whim.  This question is not about anyone else but you?  What would bring you the most incredible sense of self, well being, peace?