Meet Hillary Rubin.
That’s her there, practicing yoga.
She’s was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1996, and decided that it was the perfect opportunity to transform her life from the inside out.
Over the last twelve years she’s used a combination of yoga, meditation, and lifestyle to manage her MS.
“I believe that our challenges are our greatest gifts,” is Hillary’s mantra. “When we embrace what we wish we could get rid of then we heal on a deeper level.”
She goes on to say that:
“Sometimes the body hurts and there are other problems in life – we have a choice to tap into it on the physical level to assist us in making a meaningful shift… to evolve, thereby becoming more of ourselves…”
Her practice of yoga evolved into teaching yoga, and has now evolved into an all-encompassing media company who’s intention is:
“To create media products and events to assist individuals to first embrace where they are and see it as a new beginning, then to help empower them by learning new tools to lead a better life and evolve beyond their challenges—eventually see them as a blessing.”
Hillary also offers free Podcasts of yoga classes. She’s a great example of someone who has used life’s challenges as an opportunity to transform not just her own life, but the lives of others. (You can see her speaking in a short 10 minute heart-opening sequence here.)
It’s not the type of story that often makes it into the mainstream media – but it’s the way this world can evolve. When one person like Hillary takes a life event like being diagnosed with MS and turns it right around, she shows other people what is possible.
It also demonstrates that this life is not about sailing through without experiencing anything difficult, painful or just plain awful.
In essence, shit happens.
And it happens to all of us.
It is easy to rail against the injustice, to refuse to forgive the perpetrator, to just accept a diagnosis and allow the body to continue to disintegrate around you.
Anyone can do that. And plenty of people do – read the Sunday papers and they are full of stories about how terrible things happened to people and they’ll never get over it.
But so too can ANYONE choose the other path – the path of acceptance, forgiveness and empowered action. This is the path Hillary has chosen. She has accepted the challenge of her MS and asked, Well what now? How do I work with this? What can I do?
And as a result of her discipline, her commitment and her belief, Hillary now lives drug and symptom free and she’s got a yoga DVD coming out – (called Foundations, it is part of the I Am Not A MESS! ™ Series.)
So what’s going on in your life right now that you wish wasn’t happening? What do you wish would just go away?
How have you been wronged? What has been taken from you?
Can you take some time to just sit with whatever this is and inspect it? Look at it. Walk around it and see it from every side.
As you sit with and inspect what ever it is that you wish wasn’t… notice how just the mere act of BEING with it moves you towards ACCEPTING it.
If it’s too difficult to imagine accepting this thing completely, try accepting it just for TODAY. See what happens if you just embrace this thing for TODAY. If you open up to it, accept it, embrace it, what happens next?
What does happen next?
In that space of acceptance, what begins to unfold for you?
This is yoga practice. This is turning our challenges into our gifts. This is allowing life’s tragedies to give us something to rise up to.
In opening to ALL life has to offer us – the pain, the loss, the heartache, the disappointments – we become stronger, more resilient, more open, more compassionate, more loving people.
We discover that in acceptance of the awful, our experience of the sweetness deepens.
And that is a beautiful thing!
I have not been diagnosed with MS, but I know what it is like to face challenges in the every day life. Luckily for me, Hillary has shown me a way to dance in the face of fear, to surrender to my ideas of darkness, and to erase the limitations that come with such judgement. Offering Bodes of Love and Support, Hillary allows each of us the space we need to create the life we want to live with the tools to do so triumphantly.
Hey Erika,
It sounds like you’ve had a wonderful experience with Hillary. I’ve just received her DVD and am loving the way she teaches – so heartfelt and inspiring.
Thanks for stopping by.
It has been proven that Yoga is a great alternative therapy for MS. This is mainly due to the fact that Yoga teaches self control and, besides that, teaches people to meditate, which implies relaxation, which is a natural remedy against stress, which is know to worsen MS symptoms.