Do you ever catch yourself strategizing your whole life to make it as predictable, risk-free and comfortable as possible?
“If only I ____, my life will be better.”
a) get a new car (after 9 hours of reading reviews online)
b) get a better job (or the promotion you’re almost brave enough to ask for)
c) date that guy/girl (can you look at this text and tell me what it means?)
d) go on a vacation (we’ve got a great one right here)
Does it feel like no matter what you do, there’s always a blank to fill?
When one blank gets filled, does the buzz of accomplishment satiate the longing of your soul more than a week or two? Or do you check one thing off your list only to start pining for the next?
Danielle LaPorte’s The Desire Map is the best book, program, and lifestyle I’ve found to help you stop chasing your life and start living it. In the same way that you know you’re doing a Qoya movement right if it feels good, The Desire Map delivers a decision-making process that’s super simple: how do you want to feel?
I make my Qoya Intensive teachers read The Desire Map as their first assignment to prepare for their training and experience how Danielle’s work directly relates to Qoya. They go so perfectly together, there are already Qoya teachers who are signing up for Danielle's licensing program to teach her work and get tapped into her network to gather groups of likeminded souls together to rise and shine. You can, too.
Whether you are entertaining the thought of becoming a Qoya teacher or are already teaching, I cannot recommend getting your facilitator’s license enough for how it will deepen your Qoya teaching and practice as you guide others intellectually through honoring their feelings, as well as in their body.
The first key point in Danielle's book is, "You're not chasing the goal itself. You're chasing the feelings that you hope attaining that goal will give you." Another way I've heard her explain it is, "You want the journey to feel the way you think the destination is going to feel."
This is really important to me in Qoya, because Qoya is all about feeling. Just as Danielle’s first point is to cultivate the feeling versus the goal, the first essence of Qoya is shifting from your idea of how something should be (external validation) to the feeling of resonance in your body with how it is (internal validation).
That shift into feeling absolute truth in your body, whether in your life or in a movement class, is what Qoya's all about. In the same way that we focus on how movement feels in Qoya, The Desire Map continually slows us down and encourages us to stay connected to our core desired feelings.
Ultimately, feeling is the thing that keeps you awake for your own life. So many times when women are craving community and authentic connection, I encourage them to start their own community and invite one another to move together in truth. If reading this feels like an omen or a sacred message in any way, or if you've been feeling the desire to start a goddess group, conscious collective, book club, even just host dance parties, let this be the message from the universe, "Yes! Listen to your intuition!" Click here to see if being a Desire Map facilitator resonates with that call inside of you. And if you haven't read the book yet, be sure to check that out as well.
For those who are called to sign up, I’m offering a sneak peak membership to my online 14-Day Qoya workshop to learn how to create your own home Qoya practice or begin your Qoya teacher training journey, because Qoya and The Desire Map are amazing dance partners.
Feeling expansive, pure-hearted, divinely connected and free,
Rochelle