When will you be happy? When you have a better job? When you have saved enough for retirement? When your children have flown the nest?

Where will you find inner peace? Painting landscapes of the countryside? Traveling the world? Meditating in the Himalayan mountains?

What will make you love unconditionally? When everyone that has wronged you has atoned for their misdeeds? When you are “ready”, truly “ready”?

What if I told you that all you needed to know is already in you? That your peace, love, happiness, joy are already primed and ready, awaiting your noticing. There is nowhere to go really! Your inner peace is already here, ready and waiting for you to turn your attention inwards. Unconditional love is right here, right now, yours for the taking.

You really don’t need another road sign or mystical message from the Universe to nudge you on your path or show you what your next step needs to be. If you pause to listen, truly listen to your inner divine,...

"Too cool for school." Raise your hand if you remember using that phrase when you were a kid. You know the kids I'm talking about...the ones who always wore the best brand name clothes, drove the fanciest cars, and sat at the "cool kids table" at lunch. I think we all knew of a clique of people like this growing up. When I look back on some of the kids I knew who were part of this group (and who weren't very nice to me and several other classmates), I now know that, in many cases, these kids were dealing with deeper issues at home that they never let on about at school. Acting out or playing the "too cool for school" part was just a cover up; a way to make themselves feel better when what they really felt was devastation and loneliness.

There are adverse effects of coping with childhood trauma that surface in us as adults. We too think we are being COOL, but in fact, we also may be compensating or perpetuating a coping skill we used when we were kids. Children...

Human beings are creatures of habit. We generally feel the most comfortable, safe, and secure when our lives are orderly and we are on a schedule. We spend millions of dollars on planners and calendars and reminder apps so we stay on track and don't miss a beat.

Part of living a well-organized life is developing habits. We set our alarms so we wake up at the same time every day. We go through the motions of our morning routine; go to the bathroom, make coffee, check our email, Pause with Richa...almost as if we were robots in a sense. Think of what would happen if you did just one of these things out of order, say you made your coffee before you went to the bathroom, would that completely throw off your day?

Of course, not everyone functions in this manner. There are those of us who function quite well amongst chaos and madness; those among us who burst out of bed in the morning and take the day by storm...those "fly by the seat of your pants" kinds of people, the "whatever...

If I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me to teach them how to simply “turn their mind OFF”, let’s just say, I’d have hundreds of dollars.

At the beginning of my career as a personal transformation and spiritual teacher, I would patiently and lovingly explain how it was not possible to “turn one’s mind OFF”, but instead notice, witness, and be an observer of the mind. I’d say things like, “Picture you are in the audience and your life is happening on stage….”! A few years into my practice, I developed a more direct way to illustrate this.

Turn your mind off? If you want to turn anything off, wouldn’t it help to know where it is?

When I ask such questions, some reply – the brain.

The brain?  The brain is your cerebral cortex, frontal lobe, gray matter – the brain is an organ in your skull.  Your mind is not the brain.

So where is your mind?

Does the mind have a physical form, shape...

Being sexually abused as a child by my father put a crimp in Father's Day for me. You won't see heart emojis being posted on my Facebook feed or anywhere else praising my father for being the #1 dad in the world! Unfortunately, no. Never happened, nor will it. I say this with all the unconditional love for him though. Interesting, isn't it?

Same goes with my mother. Over the years we have worked deeply to heal our mother-daughter relationship and have learned to truly relate with each other in an authentic way. For many years, Mother's Day and Father's Day were just another Hallmark holiday, but my greeting cards weren't exactly "sealed with a kiss"! It has taken years of deep work, looking into and healing my past hurts of abuse and neglect, practicing forgiveness, self-care and love to make room for a new paradigm with my parents, and I am so grateful for it.

In reality, grateful merely begins to describe how immensely humbling and empowering this journey has been. I am...

I remember being a young girl in school and worrying about my grades. I always wanted to give my best, so I would study hard in order to get high marks on my tests. Fast forward about 20ish years (give or take a few, but who’s counting), and while I am no longer in grade school I am still being tested. Unfortunately, the tests that life throws at us aren’t exactly the ones we can study for. There are no notes, no reading assignments, no practice tests. It’s the real thing 24/7 whether you’re prepared or not.

Logically speaking, we know that no one is perfect. We know that ultimate perfection in any aspect of life is not reality. What is a part of our reality, however, is the one word we all work our hardest to avoid: failure. Yep, failure. The big, bad “F-word” of life. The funny thing about failure is that even though we bust our butts to avoid failing, inevitably at some point we are destined to fail at something. Why? It goes back to that point...

Ever felt frustrated, resigned and cynical? Why is everything falling apart? How is it that despite my best efforts and intentions I cannot be happy in my life? I keep going round and around in circles, spiraling, getting nowhere! Ever asked these kinds of questions or second guessed yourself?

Stranger things have certainly happened, but there might come a moment when you notice a shift in the energy of your life. And do you know how this shift comes about? It comes about when it's time.

You think you know, based on your individual human intelligence, why your life is the way it is. You think you know. And you think with what you know. And what you know comes from your past experiences. All the internal knowledge you possess in your mind is knowledge accumulated over the years. You are totally and utterly conditioned by those events and memories, aren't you? Conditioned to view your life from the lenses of...

This past weekend I attended a felting workshop with a wonderful group of women called WOW - Women of Wisdom! I met artists, healers, creative entrepreneurs and women from all walks of life. We made a sacred cloth with natural and dyed sheep fibers. Assembling the fibers and transforming them into a piece of fabric was a tactile meditation in itself. It gifted me the opportunity to use my fingers, handling fibers so delicately and arranging them in the way that my piece of sacred cloth could look the way I wanted it to look!

I was compelled to go with something in the shape of a heart and one fiber at a time the fabric came to life. First I laid down the foundation or the base layer. Then I built on that, fiber by fiber, color by color. I could choose whatever color and create whatever I wanted with simply those fibers, my fingers, and my imagination.

It is hard to put into words how profound this experience was for me, it was nothing short of a cathartic...

The effects of meditation are cumulative. Every little bit of time spent in quiet contemplation will replenish your mental, physical and emotional energy. For this reason, there isn't a need to be attached to the outcome of each individual meditation but rather notice the overall climate change in your way of being.