Achieve Your Dreams! ... now go change the kitty litter.

“I literally just got home from producing the festival of my life and now my girlfriend is telling me to change the kitty litter.” ~ Fabian Alsultany, co-founder of Tadasana Festival

Co-founder Fabian Alsultany gets painted at Tadasana as teachers Hemalayaa and Parashakti supervise

Fabian and I looked at each other and laughed hysterically after his girlfriend tossed those instructions down the stairs just moments after we walked in the door. Sweet, sweet Kiyomi wanted to make sure I had a scent-safe bathroom to shower in after an amazing week working Tadasana with Fabian. 

That’s life. Achieve your dream and bask in glory. Now go clean the kitty litter.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about how everything has its glorious moment of bloom before inevitably fading away. Remember? The post started with “Mind-blowing sex ...” Remember now? 

I could have included “your entire life’s dreams” in that list of life events you may experience in their fullness before they eventually fade away. The point of that blog was to explore how to allow joy into our lives no matter what happens.

Not surprisingly, one of my favorite moments at Tadasana happened at "The Daily Love" Speakers Tent when TDL contributor Kute Blackson spoke (the TDL Tent was a huge hit with the Tadasana crowd!). Kute is brilliant. He’s On Fire. He’s exciting to listen to, funny, authentic, insightful. He just radiates empowerment.

At the end of his inspiring talk, Kute shared a powerful mantra with the audience; a mantra brought back with him from adventures amidst the majestic Himalayas, at the feet of the Buddha’s Bodhi Tree while entangled in the robes of India’s great Gurus; a mantra designed specifically to help us BE LOVE and BE IN JOY no matter what happens. Since Kute specifically asked us to spread the mantra, here it goes (you’ve gotta sorta hum it with a low guttural tone):

“Sooooooooooooooooooooo Fuuuuuuuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!”

Yup. “So fucking what?!”

(by the way, if you're sensitive to edgy language, use what Krishnamurti said: "I don't mind what happens.")

As Fabian and I sat there in his basement belly-laughing at the hilarity of his being asked to clean Sage and Meenu’s stinky kitty litter box just moments after his hour of sublime triumph, a final rapturous main tent ceremony celebrating the hard-fought realization of a lifelong dream, Kute’s mantra reverberated loudly through my head ... “Sooooooo fuuuucking whaaaaat!”

Finally achieve your lifelong dream ... or go broke trying. Or play it safe and risk experiencing neither. Any choice you make, so fucking what!

Now let’s be clear this is NOT an excuse to give up on your dreams or take no risks, as if it doesn’t matter whether you go for it or not. No! No! No! Quite the contrary. It totally matters for your health and the health of our planet!

Tadasana Festival was a delicious, sustained moment of beautiful community, love, celebration, joy, sustainable living, mindfulness, and essentially people just showing up and appreciated for being their brilliant authentic selves. Although I was exhausted on the last night of the festival after a string of 4-hour-sleep nights, I felt remarkably alive, vibrant, deeply fulfilled. I was running on love-fumes!! (still am)

From the dynamic speakers I saw at The Daily Love tent; all the brilliant yoga teachers who showed up and shared their sacred teachings; the world-class musicians whose soulful rhythms and melodies created sonic stairways to heaven upon which bodies rose upwards into healing bliss; to Tadasana’s enthusiastic, heart-centered sponsors like The Daily Love who helped make this event possible; and of course, all the people who bought tickets and simply showed up in joy and willing to give themselves to this experience ... everyone involved made Tadasana really a 3-day Festival of Unconditional Love.

Now it has come and it has gone ... and so fucking what!? We’re already excited to create the next Tadasana experience. It will involve some different ingredients because we’ll build on what worked and learn from what didn’t. Tadasana will ignite even more fires in opening hearts, sending more and more love ripples out into the Uni-verse.

Our world, YOUR world, is thirsting for mind-body-heart expanding experiences like Tadasana. It’s essential that each of us ... that YOU ... own your truth and create from your heart’s deepest longings, like Mastin did with The Daily Love; like Fabian and Tommy Rosen did with Tadasana; like so many of you are already doing. Keep doing it, and if you're not already doing it, start today.

For me, the real juice in Kute’s mantra is its light-hearted invitation to simply have fun along the way. There were a lot of moments in creating Tadasana when important things just did not go the way we wanted. Just as things in your life don’t always go the way you want. 

When the festival was all said and done, after dancing through every crisis, overcoming every challenge that presented itself, after a community of beautiful beings finally gathered for 3 days to honor their bodies and each other, laughing all the way ... after all that came to be, the festival co-founder wrapped it up, went home, and cleaned the kitty litter.

Create from your heart and don’t worry about whether things will go your way. Many of them won’t. Even when they do, you’ll still have stinky kitty litter to deal with. And with Kute’s wise mantra in your head, you get to laugh deeply and move through most anything in blissful stride.

Enjoy the journey!!

Fabian's wise, kitty-litter loving Sage and Meenu