I love seeing connections, I love exploring connections and I love connecting with others. This is what makes my YHC journey tremendously special and inspiring.

Teaching Yoga for close to 20 years has led me to explore different aspects of the art, but I keep coming back to my favourite. Teaching Yoga in combination with Ayurvedic principles to ensure my vinyasa krama (sequencing) is practical, aligned and supportive to those showing up to class. Over the years I realised that my love of the elements and spiralling through them with the chakras is one of my all time favourite places to teach from.

I’ve endeavoured to explore the connection of the chakras to the habits. These are my interpretations for now.

Habit 1: Earlier, Lighter Dinner (ELD) and Root Chakra

Muladhara chakra, the base is all about nourishment, stability, groundedness and balance. I find when I am grounded I am able to nourish myself well. When I nourish myself well I am grounded. Sometimes it’s the energy that needs to shift the physical, and sometimes it’s the physical that helps shift and settle the energetic.

I invite you to observe, test and play with it.

Habit 2: Early to Bed (ETB) and Your Feet Chakras

Habit 1 and 2 work hand in hand. If we have an ELD then ETB is easy. If ELD doesn’t happen, my bedtime takes strain. I relate ETB with the star chakras in my feet. The energy of our feet is directly related to our root centre. On evenings when I do my foot massage I sleep deeply.

I invite you to experiment with massaging your feet this week as you refine your evening routine.

Habit 3: Start the Day Right (STDR) and Sacral Chakra

I relate STDR to the sacral chakra. Physically because it’s got to do with deep hydration, and energetically, because it’s the softer, more gentle feminine energy of creativity and flow. I find when I awaken with the sounds of the birds (not an alarm) I start my day with ease, softness and flow.

I invite you to explore your sacral centre and starting your day well.

Habit 4: Breath Body Practises (BBP) and Solar Plexus Chakra

When I breathe, I ignite the flame within me. I create heat, I create strength, I create power. When I move regularly I feel more toned, more alive, more energised. I have more clarity, purpose and drive. On the days I go into a slump, the mornings I feel like I want to curl back into bed (and trust me there have been plenty of those), I feel heavy and dull. I know that if I move, I can shift the energy and that feeling. Sometimes it’s as simple as a walk, a yoga practice or just dancing.

I invite you to explore, experiment and ignite your manipura chakra as you build on your BBP this week.

Habit 5: Plant-Based Diet (PBD) and Heart Chakra

To have Connection, Compassion and Love for all that is around us, within us and within what we eat is what builds us physically and energetically. When we buy, grow, harvest, prepare and cook food with love, operating directly from our heart centre, it brings forth depth and integrity. It makes us feel whole, content and deeply nourished. When we’re in this space we feel less likely to crave sweet things, snack or feel disconnected from our food, from our community and our relationships/family.

I invite you to explore that feeling of deep love while you nourish yourself this week.

Habit 6: Self Massage (SM) and the Chakras in our Hands

Energetically our heart centre runs the line down to our hands. This is why when we bring forth into the world we should do it with love and when we receive, it should be with gratitude and love. For me, the hands are such a powerful tool, and using them on ourselves in SM brings forth that deep nourishing self love.

I invite you to vigorously rub your palm together to awaken your energy before giving yourself your daily SM.

Habit 7: Meditation and Crown Chakra

Sitting in Silence connects me to my crown chakra, Sahasrara. When I take the time to connect with that which is beyond me, beyond my understanding and beyond that which I think is possible I am often pleasantly surprised by the insights gained, my intuitive words in writing and the advice that arises in coaching sessions.

The more I sit in silence and open up to that which is beyond my understanding the more I feel like I’m doing my dharma. It makes me feel fulfilled, whole and deeply aligned.

I invite you to connect with the subtleness of your crown centre in your meditation this week

Habit 8: Healthier Eating Guidelines and Throat Chakra

Our throat centre of communication is linked to the ether/ space element. To me it’s all about creating space. Key, creating space in our eating schedule to allow for rhythm so that digestion can happen easefully.

When there is rhythmic eating, I find I’m able to communicate with more clarity, purpose and honesty. When I’m cluttered, this centre takes strain and I override my inner voice and knowing. It’s always such a fine balancing act between the two scales.

I invite you to explore your connection with your throat centre, speaking your truth.

Habit 9: Sense Organ Self Care and 3rd Eye Chakra

I love Angela’s article on Aligning Intuition with Intelligence, where she shares that inner knowing needs to be aligned with intelligence. Intelligence comes from learnt experiences, these we gather from the stimuli we take in (yip, you guessed it, stimuli from our senses). When our senses are healthy, vibrant and functioning optimally, the stimuli we take in are pure, honest and not distorted. We see clearly, we hear properly, we taste, smell and feel with satya (truthfulness). When this happens we are able to relate from a more authentic, intuitive space.

I invite you to take extra care in your senses this week and notice what happens when you go into the world with well oiled organs.

Habit 10: Easeful Living (EL) and the Chakras

This is the culmination of all our chakras being in balance, open and aligned so that the energy can flow freely through our Sushumna Nadi (central energy channel). When our chakras are vibrating at their optimal frequencies, all that we do feels perfectly aligned with our dharma and our goals.

In life there are always challenges that tend to throw us off course. When we physically use our habits to bring us back on course, we orientate towards EL. To me, EL is seeing and understanding which chakra is needing attention in the present moment. If I’m craving love, self massage gets upped a notch. If my digestion is feeling sluggish, I address my eating times. If I need inspiration and guidance, I sit in silence. When I need more creativity, I hydrate… It’s really simple. I see where I’m stuck and I use a physical trigger to see if I can move things energetically. It’s an easy, tangible way for me to operate from. I invite you to explore, experience and see which of your chakras and thus habits are needing attention in any given moment so that you too can continue orienting towards thrive.

Intro:

Yoga Health Coach, Debbie Grover-Slavin is also a Chef and Ayurvedic Health Counselor who has served as Managing director for big companies.  While she has much success guiding clients through the stages of transformation, she is finding some hiccups guiding potential members through the stages of the Enrollment Process.

Listen in as Cate guides Debbie to get specific in the different stages of Sales, Marketing, and Enrollment and how to create a process for the different needs of potential members.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How to create a sales process. 
• How to optimize the marketing funnel. 
• How to take the seat as the leader on an enrollment call.

Links/CTA:

• Upcoming Workshops:
  • Yoga Health Coaching – May 4
  • Master of You Workshop – May 12 – 13
  • Body Thrive – May 5
  • Living Ayurveda Course – June 9
• Join Cate’s LIVE Workshops:
  • Lisbon Live Event (Lisbon, Portugal) – June 3 – 5
  • Alta Live Event (Alta, WY) – July 28 – 30
• Debbie’s website: https://www.ayurvedaholisticlife.com/
• Recommended reading: The Introverts Edge by Matthew Pollard

Highlights:

• Cate talks about the Yogahealer Marketing testing process.
• Cate tells a story about interfacing with chronic inflammation.
• Debbie talks about a pilot member getting off medication.

Topics:

• The stages in sales. 
• Building a process built from the result.
• Breaking down beliefs.
• Breaking down symptoms.
• Creating content from beliefs and symptoms.
• Associate with the brand.
• Networking with other doctors as a strategy.
• Defining what they need to believe next.
• Taking the seat of the leader.
• Lead tracking spreadsheet with stages.
• Changing beliefs as different stages in the funnel.
• Intuiting through your own process.
• Getting testimonials for marketing.

Quotes:

• “If you have chronic pain now and you’re 60, let’s fast forward to when you are 75…”
• “The only way we know the process is through testing.”
• “Don’t underestimate care in the day and age that everything is a commodity.”
• “What happens when people go too fast through a sales process is that there is buyer’s remorse.”
• “There is no way you are going to get people across the finish line unless you have a system for it.”

Guest Bio: Debbie Grover-Slavin

Ayurveda Counselor, chef, Life Habits Coach guiding clients through the stages of transformation incorporating Holistic Habits managing director- multi-million-dollar company, board-certified

Ayurveda Health Counselor, Chef, Wholistic Wellness LLC

And when I do this in community with my intentional health inspired comrades, it’s lightning for the soul—we strike it rich, finding new vitality and direction together. In a word, it’s electric.

This time I’m also reflecting on Easeful Living as a keystone Body Thrive habit—a choice to be softer and more gentle with my inner boundary setting during intentional detox time. I have the archetypal Inner Rebel always within me. She keeps me focused on my freedom. How can I become even more sovereignand self-loving within all of my cells?

Getting lighter with meals I come to these memories: I am 12 years old when I first gather in my rebellion the ability to say NO to over-eating. It’s 1991.

My dad regularly demands that my brother and I finish all the food on our plates. Food is important to him. He genuinely puts his love into it. He’s grown up in a poor immigrant family and his mother is in the habit of saying “You don’t have a pot to piss in” like it’s her number one mantra.

One evening at dinner my dad drills us with his usual finish your food speech.

But this time I say, “NO!”

He says, “Finish your food; there are starving children in China!”

I grab a manila envelope, dump all my chicken and pasta into it, address it to “CHINA”, lick it shut, and toss it in the middle of the table. “Fine! Send it to CHINA!”

Clearly, “China” is a space inside my dad’s mind, shaped by past lived-experience, an ethos about food or the lack thereof. There are ancestral stories upon stories in this encounter. But my truth is that overeating is not working for my body.

A few years later I am with my first boyfriend. His parents are divorced and his dad is emotionally checked out after three tours in the Vietnam war. Their empty refrigerator makes a deep impression on me. There is nothing in it, save for a bottle of generic mustard or a Diet Coke. He comes to our house to eat. Maybe my dad is right, maybe I should eat all the food on my plate.

I’m 19 living in Thailand after I graduate from high school. I stay for a time at Wat Pah Nanachat International Forest Monastery. I walk barefoot at dawn through the nearby village with the ordained monks receiving alms in giant brass bowls. We bring the abundant food offerings back to the monastery to distribute for our one meal a day. In my first week I take too much food for fear of becoming hungry. I force myself to eat it all. I am sick for five days. I cannot breathe to meditate. My tissues gasp in the discomfort of excess.

I am 21 and living in a college dormitory at the University of Wisconsin. I dine three meals a day on Food Service of America cafeteria food. The trays are large. A mountain of food enters my experience. I fall asleep in composition class after overeating. I realize that food consumed beyond fullness is food wasted on my body all the same. If the food is heading to a landfill and I overeat it to stop it from going there, then I become the landfill. No thank you. Game changer!

These memories come to me as I make space in my body to redefine my identity according to my inner NO—with foods, relationships, with tasks and activities and the timing of them. Why is the NO sometimes harder to define and stand tall in? Excess appeals to our sense of value in yes and more. For me, the desire to please others has led me to many unaligned YESes. The fear of not-enough makes me say yes to things I’m not actually yearning to experience.

During this detox I arrive at my truth. No more unaligned YESes. They just become messes. And it doesn’t have to turn into a fight inside of myself, a throw down, a food stuffed envelope smacked on the table with shouting and pinched faces. Or a sacred duty to accept more into my experience than I need. Or a self-hatred induced impoverishment of imagination. I can become who I want to become.

Rhythm brings peacefulness and ease. And with ease, my Inner Rebel becomes a willing disciple of aligned FLOW. And it’s an undomesticated, uncultured flow. My flow. Inner Rebels help us keep our innate wildness intact.

Who are we now? We are the supple, unadulterated ground of the Cosmos choosing its future shape.

Go detox revelations! Go steady, ever-ready identity evolution!

Once you have the resources, they are yours. You can continue to be a member at a lower investment (about $2k a year) to continue to get access to the live coaching calls. I make it easy for people to stick around in all my courses because it builds community and momentum. I’ll teach you to do the same in your business ecosystem.

2) I am interested in expanding beyond teaching yoga and really developing my business with health and life coaching.  Is the program we are learning flexible or adaptable or is it really geared only towards yogis?

Very adaptable. I’m a huge cheerleader and guide for my YHC’s creating their own signature system once they get the business model/income strategy/coaching skills.

3) I have been studying various nutrition theories for many years and although I love many MANY concepts from Ayurveda, I do not love or follow many of the dietary guidelines… I gather from some of your past work that I have seen that you do support a living foods diet. I am way into living foods and green juices and all that but my ayurvedic mentors were super against it and really promoted warm foods etc to calm my vata… I get it in theory, but I am a big fan of live foods/juicing etc and I am not into dairy or ghee at all… DO you think this presents a conflict?

Not at all. I teach both living foods and traditional Ayurveda. My philosophy is that people should figure out what works personally, instead of dogmatically.

4)  I was really leaning towards a life-coaching course but then your course appeared in my inbox and it is sooooooo tempting!  Are coaching skills covered in the course?  Because most of my students know they should have a light dinner, drink warm water in the morning etc etc… But they don’t do it!

Exactly. You learn inside out how to get yours students to change their habits in real time. This is crucial to get your students the end results they are investing in. Habit change science is a big component of the YHC curriculum. It’s a very progressive program also with emphasis on building and guiding evolutionary groups.

5) How many of your YHC coaches meet their income goals?

Great question. I have YHC students who went from teaching public and private classes go from transitioning their income to a way that is leveragable and saves time. I just got off the phone with a YHC coach who is 6 months into the program. She oversold her pilot group, and took 3 one-on-one coaching clients. She made her tuition back already. Other coaches may do the same or take more time. Everyone that I know of is selling their programs and making more money per transaction than they were before the program. Because YHC is new, we don’t have long term statistics.