Qoya: A Compass for Navigating an Embodied Life that is Wise, Wild and Free

dimensions.

PREFACE

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.

—Jean Houston

What if you could trust that you are in the right place?

What if you could trust that the instinct that brought you to this beginning, to this remembering, was not an accident? What if you could receive these words as encouragement that you are heading in the right direction?

In this case, the right direction is inward.

Inward, to access the truth that lives in your body.

We live in a time of great change, and I believe, like many others, that we are being called to hospice what is dying and midwife what is being born. We hold space for change by honoring the gifts of the old paradigms of the past and courageously taking a stand for the new emerging paradigms of the future.

Personal revolution without community is like a root canal without novocaine – painful. If you’ve been doing it alone or are simply feeling alone, this is a place where we can gather and dedicate ourselves to the path of embodying love, together.

Now is the time. All hearts on deck. I thank you for being here, especially if you feel like you are not ready. This is where I trust the call in your body that led you to these words, to this shared moment between us, beyond the realm of time and space and into the always happening-now moment.

Before we start, I should be up front about something. This is not a how-to guide to living your dream-come-true life. There’s no strategy I share that will make you an easy million. There are no efficiency tips on how to be more productive while barely working. There are no Five Steps to Manifest Your Perfect Relationship lists and no tips on how lose those last 10 pounds. I am not promising you success, wealth, the love of another, or any of the other external validation markers of our society.

What I am inviting you into is your soul, embodied.

I offer some suggestions in hopes that as you follow them, more clarity, confidence, and connection will come into focus, but ultimately everything here is a map that charts what I have found; how you travel along this path will be uniquely your journey.

I began dancing as a young girl growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. When I was 18, I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which presents a simple idea: if you follow your heart, the world will conspire on your behalf. In that moment, I decided to live my life as an experiment to see if it was true.

This experiment led me on adventures around the world to the most sacred spiritual sites: studying with shamans in Peru, meditating in caves in India where saints attained enlightenment, visiting medicine men in Zimbabwe and sitting in sweat lodges, fire ceremonies, and prayer circles in reverence to the indigenous Native American traditions of the United States. I attempted a walkabout in Australia, aced a ten day silent Vipassana meditation in New Zealand, and went on a self-guided pilgrimage to reclaim the divine feminine by visiting over 20 different sacred sites throughout Europe and Israel. I have spent the last 15 years traveling around the world as a student and teacher, leading over 4,000 movement classes, facilitating hundreds of private sessions, and taking people on over 30 retreats to 6 different continents. (I’m saving Antarctica for last, as I imagine that trip will help complete the Pangaea of my soul.) Qoya even caught the eye of Oprah herself – or at least her talented team, who featured Qoya in a 2014 Oprah.com article about spiritual workouts that benefit both the mind and the body.

Through the experiment of following my heart, I realized that I was following a physical sensation of truth in my body, where I just knew something was true because I could literally and metaphorically feel it in my bones.

In 2009, my experience as a dancer for 20 years, yogi for ten years, personal trainer, certified massage therapist, shamanic energy healer, and graduate in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts coalesced and I created a movement system for women called Qoya in response to a woman asking the question, How do I get out of my head and into my body? In that moment, Qoya was born.

Qoya

Qoya is based on the idea that through movement, we remember our essence is wise, wild and free.

Wise: calling on the wisdom of yoga

Wild: the creative expression in dance

Free: expanding our capacity to enjoy being in our bodies through feminine movement

Qoya quickly evolved from a movement system into a lifestyle of soulful embodiment that teaches you how to access, identify, and remember the physical sensation of truth in your body through your own experience. Instead of being limited by the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that others impose upon you, the Qoya philosophy offers you the space to explore what is true for you through the concept that your body knows.

Remembering the power of your body’s intuitive ability to heal itself can be deeply powerful. Movement helps you remember your soul’s truth and embody it. Ritual illuminates the sacred thread that weaves together all of life’s moments, even the most difficult ones. Community gatherings create opportunities to celebrate each step of the journey and gracefully grieve each moment of loss. Pilgrimages call on all parts of yourself to trust: yourself, others, and life. Healing takes place when we merge with the present moment and in Qoya, we merge.

This book is a collection of the best tools and practices that I have encountered along my way. I share personal stories to plant seeds of inspiration, but mental seeds are not enough. We must tend the garden and pull the weeds through our own reflection and purification. It is my prayer that through these stories and experiential exercises, you will come to find your own map that is uniquely yours.

If you skip the exercises, you miss the essence of the book. This text is not a philosophical proclamation that you either agree with or disagree with. It is an invitation to feel what is true when you engage with the material in the context of your own life experience. Ideally, you will be able to share your experiences with a group of trustworthy souls and learn from one another as you gather to discuss matters of the heart, embodiment of the soul, and living with reverence for one’s truth in our modern world.

How to Use this Book

Masculine, Feminine, and the Sacred Marriage Within

During my first trip to India, as I got into a cab, the driver turned to me with a beaming smile and enthusiastically asked, What is your name?

I couldn’t help but smile back as I said, My name is Rochelle.

Ooooh! he replied delightedly, then continued, So, Rochelle, are you married?

I said, No. I’m not married.

His smile turned quickly to a furrowed brow and, with concern, he looked at me and asked slowly and sincerely, to make sure I heard the question, Do you think you will ever be married?

I paused, took a deep breath and said, Yes. Yes, I do think I will be married one day.

Relief relaxed his brow, his smile shone like sunlight through the clouds, and he exclaimed, ADVANCE CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR MARRIAGE! He was happier about my date with destiny than a kid at Christmas. We laughed and laughed.

Many stories in this book are about my desire for such a union; however, the sacred marriage that I celebrate at the end of this book is the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine within myself.

I want to be clear – when I speak about feminine or masculine energy, I am not referring to any theories of gender essentialism, biological determinism, trans-exclusionary radical feminism, or any other philosophies that say men are this and women are that.

When I refer to feminine and masculine energy, I do so with the understanding that every human being (and everything in nature) is composed of a unique mixture of both energies.

When you encounter exercises that offer different activities for men and women, I encourage you to do whichever calls to you based on your own soul’s gender identity or gender expression.

Now that we are on the same page and conscious that we are not making broad gender-based generalizations, while also needing some language to define what I mean when I use masculine and feminine, here are some of the oppositional and complementary ways that energy moves along these spectrums. Think of it like the yin/yang symbol: different energies continuously flowing with each other to create a symbiotic whole.

If possible, look at the list without the preconceptions that either column is right or wrong. Consider that they are simply different ways that the non-dualistic source energy of life – prana, chi, spirit, etc. – expresses itself in the dualistic playground known as earth.

If you look again at the list, you’ll notice that the over culture in which many of us were raised favors masculine ways of being, often explicitly deeming them superior. However, an imbalance of energy – in a person, relationship, workplace, country, or world – is unsustainable. When masculine energy dominates, common themes of exhaustion, lack of fulfillment, and unsustainable growth emerge.

Ultimately, the vision of Qoya is that we can begin to have a more balanced integration of both energies, from the individual level to a global one.

The path of Qoya introduces practices that encourage the embodiment of the feminine – regardless of our gender. When we begin to integrate the wholeness within ourselves, we will have a much better understanding of how to return to wholeness in our relationships, communities, and world. It always begins with the one and only thing we can control – ourselves.

The Directions on the Medicine Wheel

For thousands of years, shamanic indigenous traditions around the world have used the directions to organize the primary set of elements and archetypes that govern our physical and spiritual world. Invoking them is used to call in sacred space and prepare for healing rituals and journeys.

In Qoya, the four cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West represent the masculine path of action through traveling outwards - where an idea becomes manifest, where something that lives inside of you can begin to be witnessed, measured, and shared outside of you.

The four intercardinal directions of Northwest, Southwest, North-east, and Southeast represent the feminine path of reflection through traveling inward, where metaphor and meaning infuse the layers of experiencing one’s inner life.

The center spiral of Qoya represents the infinite call to remember the eternal essence from which we came, to which we will return and that is always available to us.

It is said that you do not call yourself a shaman, but others may call you a shaman. I completed shaman school at the Four Winds Society. Some may protest, You can’t go to shaman school. You either are a shaman or you’re not. I was not born into a lineage with a thousand years of extant healing traditions. I am a white girl from Minnesota with an insatiable desire for knowing the divine. There was no lore of past traditions presented to me in my childhood other than reminiscences of the good ol’ days (the 1950s), so I went out to search for my soul’s indigenous roots in every corner of this world.

During the Spanish Inquisition, the ancestors of the Q’ero shamans with whom I have studied fled to the high mountains in Peru and spent the next 500 years preserving their traditions, following the prophecy that they would return down the mountain to share their medicine with the world now, during this time of the great transition. It is in their mythology to share, with their children and community and also with any outsiders who come with earnest hearts.

Please know that what I share of these traditions, I do so with gratitude for those with whom I have studied, the encouragement of those who taught me, and the hope that gathering wisdom from all parts of the world and integrating them in a modern accessible way will serve the highest good of all.

The Qoya Sacred Geometry symbol is a reflection of the medicine path that has revealed itself to me as a way of living in harmony with self, others, nature, and the divine.

This book doesn’t travel around the nine directions in linear order, like the face of a clock. Instead, I follow an intuitive movement through the directions, pairing the cardinal direction with its corresponding feminine principle.

For example, True North, trusting the physical sensation of truth in the body, is followed by Northwest, accessing your inner wisdom. South, anchoring your truth through doing your sacred work in the world, is followed by Southeast, accessing your inner creativity, and so on.

You can read these chapters in this order or however they call to you, remembering that all paths lead us to the same spiral in the center.

This is a map to find ourselves, guide and be guided, and remember that every direction brings us home to the feeling of truth, of love, and of being in our bodies.

Shamanism and the Four Levels of Perception

Shamans are considered intermediaries between the different worlds. They have one foot in the world of physical, tangible reality and the other foot in the world of energetic reality of spirit.

One of my teachers told me that if someone says they are a shaman, simply ask them, When did you first die? An ego death must take place to allow one to cross the bridge into eternity.

Shamans are also considered mapmakers who adventure into different realms of consciousness, not for entertainment or recreation, but for visions of what to create in this physical, tangible world that serves the highest good of all. They are often stewards of the land and well-versed in healing modalities based on the model of inherent interconnection.

Shamanism teaches us that we have four different levels of perception: physical, mental/emotional, spirit/soul, and energetic. The exercises in each chapter are designed to engage each level of your perception:

* Movement exercises allow you to feel the physical sensation of your truth and remembering in your body.

* Ritual initiates your mental and emotional awareness back to the present moment.

* Community practices honor the individual soul journey’s place within the collective journey of spirit.

* Pilgrimage is a living prayer to engage with your outer world while staying connected with your inner world.

All four practices combine to take you deeper into a physical experience of trusting yourself. You will prove your own hypothesis that you are – we all are – a source of incredible wisdom, infinite creativity, ever-expanding freedom, and eternal light.

Once you tap into the feeling of your truth, you can follow it as the North Star on the soul journey of your life and use it to anchor your unique gifts in this world through your sacred work, take action to follow the call of your soul, time and time again, and devote your life back to the divine as a living prayer.

Travel

You’ll quickly notice the theme of travel in my stories – here’s why. When you set out on a trip, you have a general idea of where you will go, but you can’t predict what will happen in places you have never been. Novelty tricks you into the present moment. Buddhists talk about beginner’s mind as an ideal state of being curious and open. I know it’s not for everyone, but for me, travel has always been a metaphor for the soul’s journey of embodiment. Traveling has also allowed me to realize that no geographical location was ever my destination. I simply travel different roads that all lead me back to myself. Traveling the world is not the ultimate goal; the goal is to follow your soul wherever it guides you.

Relationships, jobs, pets, homes, and circumstances will come and go – but from your first breath to your last, your one constant companion is your body. Reflecting on and experimenting with your own understanding of embodying your unique truth is one of the best investments of time and energy you can make.

I am grateful for your willingness to meet right here in the forever-now and I send you blessings as you explore this book and on all your journeys, inner and outer.

One quick reminder: you can’t rush remembering. Things are revealed at the right time. Trust that when you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s not a time to beat yourself up, but to be gentle and honest in the space between. Your clarity will come. Prepare for it here and enjoy the ride.

Because we all deserve to Remember.

Chapter One

TRUE NORTH

Finding True North as the Physical Sensation of Truth in Your Body

Before you can hear, much less follow, the voice of your soul, you have to win back your body. You have to go on a pilgrimage beneath the skin.

—Meggan Watterson

Your body is your soul’s address in this lifetime. It’s where You live. From the moment you are born in a physical form to the moment you die, your body is what makes the human experience possible. When we reconnect with this truth, we can remember to see the body as a temple, a threshold to the sacred, and an embodiment of the love from which we are created.

Embodiment is when our spirit – the eternal aspect of ourselves, the part that can never die, be lost, or be harmed – finds an impermanent, ever-changing home of bones, muscles, skin, and breath. Embodiment weds two ends of a binary spectrum – the eternal and the ephemeral.

This is a far cry from many of the teachings we learn as children, from our culture, families, and religions. Whispered in our ears from birth are the pernicious lies: Your body is what separates you from heaven. Your body’s instincts cause you to sin. Your body is not good enough, skinny enough, healthy enough, strong enough.

But your body is not what stands between you and your freedom, spiritual or otherwise. Your incarnation is the portal through which your limitless essence can embody eternity.

In 2009, I sat in a women’s circle where the topic of discussion was our relationship to pleasure. A successful lawyer raised her hand and complained, Everyone says I need to get out of my head and into my body. I really have no idea what they’re talking about. If they mean fitness, then I’m screwed because the gym is torture, yoga is boring, I can never find the right level dance class for my ability level, and pole dancing hurts my back.

The most bizarre thing happened. It felt like her soul was whispering to mine and I was hearing the words she was saying aloud, as well as the unspoken question underneath them. She wasn’t asking for the next fitness fad – she wanted to get out of her head and into her body. She wanted to know what it felt like to live an embodied life.

It’s almost as if I realized in that moment that this is how I have always related to movement. I grew up in suburban Minnesota, where my bad-ass single mom did the best she could while navigating her own challenges. Some days were better than others, but through it all, dance was my oasis. It was where I learned movement as a tool for emotional alchemy. No matter what happened on any given day, I could move and instantly feel better. In college, I began a daily yoga practice where I savored the sensation of each breath and learned to focus less on how it looked and more on how it felt. My goal was a sense of integrity where my mind’s attention and body’s actions were moving in harmony with my breath. I had been experimenting with pole dancing as well; I devoured the opportunity to express my sensual self in a safe place, uniquely without pursuit of attention or acceptance, but simply to better know this innate part of myself and its beauty. The woman’s question gave me my first conscious glimpse of the deep reason I loved movement so much:

Movement helps you remember who you are.

I raised my hand and offered to her, I understand the challenge of getting out of your head and into your body. I have always practiced movement as a way to come back to my truth and I can guide you to do the same. Let’s start doing classes on Sunday nights – I’ll lead us and any other women who want to join in a combination of yoga, dance, and sensual movement, focusing less on how it looks and more on how it feels. She smiled, and so did ten other women in the circle. In that moment, my sacred work was born.

The body is your tuning fork to truth. You may read something and mentally agree or disagree. Going deeper, you can learn how to be certain if something is true for you (or not) when you put it into practice, live into that knowledge or belief, and feel how it resonates in your body.

Like a compass you hold in your hand, you will learn that the compass you hold is your body. Once you find North, you can identify every other direction.

Can you think of a time when you felt and followed your intuition? When you trusted yourself and your inner knowing so deeply that you were able to take a leap of faith? Did you move across the country because you just felt it was the right thing to do? Did you turn down that job because of the way your stomach turned when you walked into the office? Did you call someone out of the blue at the exact moment they required your presence?

I know you have.

You can also probably think of a time when you felt but didn’t follow your intuition. Your body shouts to turn right, but you turn left instead, and get stuck in an hour of traffic. The grease from the french fries makes your skin crawl, but you eat them anyway and stay up all night with heartburn.

Though the body and mind are designed to work together, we tend to bypass the body’s information and negate the messages of intuition that it sends. While there is no way to avoid pain or mistakes in this lifetime, following your intuition can lessen the particularly acute pain of knowing that you ignored your body’s wisdom and paid a dear price for it, emotionally or physically. The fastest path to sadness, resentment, and sorrow is when you go against the truth you feel in your body.

A subtle awareness is required to differentiate between impulses in the body and intuitions in the body. Impulses are things like hunger, turn-on, or reflex reactions, like hitting your funny bone and grabbing it in hopes of relief.

Intuition, or the physical sensation of truth, is more like a feeling actualized in your body; while it is hard to put into words, common expressions like I can feel it my bones, I had a gut feeling, and I knew it in every cell of my body come closest to it.

While we use words to describe physical sensations of truth in the body, we must not focus on the interpretation more than the feeling of the experience itself. The body’s feeling is honest. The mind’s interpretation is as honest as it can be.

A common concern about impulses and intuition is that if you listen to the voice of the body, you will eat nothing but chocolate, chase after sex, and quit your job to lay on the couch all day. Our culture has such a bizarre view of human nature and the body’s desires. However, because we do so often deny ourselves small tastes of these pleasures, you might indeed over-indulge at first when you begin to listen to your body.

Although painful, if you stay in the awareness of the body, sometimes the best way to know moderation is to know excess and feel its hang over. Literally, you drink too much and feel awful the next day. Your body is telling you how it feels about that experience.

Same thing if you overeat or do more sensually than you really felt comfortable with. The next day of stomach aches or regret can be valuable information in understanding the importance of listening to your body’s intuition versus its impulses.

Begin by slowing down to be real with yourself. Take a sacred pause to reflect on what truly fulfills you. The competing voices in the world around you are loud and have their own agenda for the powerful energy that lives inside of you: they want to control and channel it for their own purposes, not yours. Who benefits from your inherent lack of self-trust? Who can ever have the right to take away your birthright to explore the truth in your heart? Because that is what your intuition is always nudging you towards - the truth that resonates not only in your body, but in all parts of your being.

As you slow down, consider the fear that there is no space for your true self in this world. Lift the veil of illusion that you cannot hear or follow your intuitive voice. You can do this, because the truth is – you already do it all day long.

A Word on Soul

Soul is a loaded term that may spark memories of threats of eternal damnation or promises of redemption. Or maybe you have a healthy cynicism as to what the hippies or new age community are talking about when they say they’re connecting with their soul. To be clear, my definition of soul begins with Hafiz.

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside-down and shake all the nonsense out.

—Hafiz

Soul is what’s left after you shake all the nonsense out.

Soul is relief from the distractions of the illusory world (also called Maya).

Soul is what is at the center of everything when you keep going deeper.

Soul is the spiritual aspect of our human experience that is immortal.

And sometimes, Soul is what speaks to you, louder and louder, until you finally listen.

It was the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and I was perfectly in sync with the absence of light. I could barely get out of bed. I didn’t even have the emotional strength to lift my arm to text my best friend what had happened. I couldn’t reach for comfort or relief. I could only surrender to the heaviness of devastation, betrayal, and hopelessness in my soul that felt like the pit of my stomach was reaching endlessly for the center of the earth. Just an hour before, I felt like I was on the runway in a plane about to take off for Happily Ever After. Now, the flight was cancelled, and I had to disembark.

Wind danced through the trees, branches brushing up against the window of the Brooklyn bedroom where I thought I would continue to live entwined with my beloved, conceive and birth our curly-haired children, and watch them grow.

It was as if a gardener came to pull weeds in this garden of my dreams and pulled my deepest desire on accident. It was only much later, however, that I realized this was no accident.

Like so many of us inquire in those moments of deep despair, I stared at the ceiling and asked, How did I get here?

On June 10, a few years before, I was putting the finishing touches on my amazing birthday plans for the next day. I was born on June 11th, 1980, and I love celebrating my birthday (so much so that my old email address used to be mybirthdayisjune11@aol.com). I love ruminating on the idea that once upon a time, on June 10th, 1980, I wasn’t here. I didn’t exist in human form, and then on June 11th, 1980, all of a sudden, I did!

To celebrate my 28th birthday, I would do a 7 a.m. hot yoga class and a 9 a.m. Jivamukti vinyasa yoga class, eat lunch, get a massage, try acupuncture for the first time, then meet friends for a sunset stroll at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, followed by a small dinner at a French café on the Lower East Side, an intimate concert at the iconic venue The Living Room, and an after-party at a pin-up bar. I’m an ambitious woman when it comes to celebration.

I paused. My only problem was that I didn’t know which men to invite to which event. Dating in New York City in your twenties can be like dating on steroids. The ambitious motto of the city more, better, faster seemed to include relationships.

Though I had an actual full-time job, it felt like I was moonlighting there and putting in my full time hours on the dating scene. Before I got out of bed every day, I’d scroll through a dozen text messages from men on my very first iPhone.

The potential suitor list for my birthday read as:

* Jay, the History Channel TV executive, who took me to nice restaurants where we’d talk for three to five hours over three to five cocktails.

* Alton, the Jamaican Saks Fifth Avenue window designer who was tentative about dating, since he was still healing from his last relationship three years ago. When I asked how long they were together, he said, Two months.

* Laurent, the self-absorbed yoga teacher, who, when I took off my winter sweater in a warm restaurant, said, I know you like me because you took off your sweater, and you want me to see more of your skin.

I suddenly realized: I didn’t want to see any of these men on my birthday. My birthday is sacred, so I only wanted to see people with whom I connect on a deep level. Then I realized that every day is sacred, and if I don’t want to spend my birthday with them, I probably shouldn’t be dating them at all.

So, before going to my friend’s house for dinner on June 10th, I called each one and said