YARROW'S STORY
The Synopsis:
Everything is Connected…
Hello…
My name is Yarrow, and I am the creator of The Art of Connecting and Expanding, a healing method that combines traditional spiritual practices and energetics with psychological and somatic healing techniques.
I grew up in a fairyland amongst the rivers and Redwood trees of Northern (way Northern!) California. Currently, I’m based in Manhattan, New York where I’ve been teaching many of these modalities for almost twenty years. With a Master’s degree in Counseling and Depth Psychology and two decades teaching yoga, breath-work, and meditation, I will help you to heal, both psychologically and spiritually. This work brings forth past trauma and childhood wounds, and illuminates the addictive behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms that may have kept you safe, but are holding you back. My goal is to help you shed your these behaviors, so that you feel safe, present, calm, connected, and able to move through life freely and with ease, able to JUST BE.
Everything is connected and by deepening that connection to yourself, others, the world around you, and your vision, you feel safe to receive...
Going Deep with Yarrow:
My journey to creating The Art of Connecting and Expanding began over twenty years ago in an unlikely place. On January 23, 1999, I had a spiritual awakening on the dance floor at a rave. The trancelike beat of the music became meditative in my ears and I instantly felt connected to myself in a way that I hadn’t since I was a child running free amongst the rivers, trees and oceans of Northern California.
Before stepping foot on that dance floor, I was essentially a teenage alcoholic. Lost, confused, and misled, I sought saving in the form of a boy, not any one in particular, just a boy. I numbed myself to find solace, but in a moment every cell in my body came alive and I was able to feel again. I stopped drinking, stopped seeking saving, and began to get to know and understand myself. I immersed myself in my classes at USF and in the rave scene, a warm and love-filled space that became my church.
The thing about a spiritual awakening is that the real work comes afterwards. We think it’s like the fairytales and aspire to the idea of the “happily ever after.” The reality is that it’s not. The awakening is the high, but it’s only the beginning. Afterwards, we are met with the hard choice of where we go next. Do we force ourselves back into the box we had been in and live in denial? Or do we actually do the work and begin to shed our addictions and maladaptive behaviors.
I chose the latter. However, without alcohol and boys as coping mechanisms, I sprouted new ones in the form of intense anxiety and ritualistic OCD.
When you let go of one addictive behavior or coping mechanism, new ones will take their place. That is, until you no longer need them to feel safe. This is not often emphasized in healing communities or therapeutic settings, and yet understanding this is essential to healing.
Determined not to take psychotropic medication, I sought ways of healing these symptoms of disconnect and fear on my own. Not that I judge taking psychotropic medication, but I didn’t want to manage my symptoms; I wanted to find, extract, and heal the root cause of these symptoms.
After a few years fully immersed in all aspects of the rave scene (including founding a rave production company and coordinating 4,000 person raves), I found myself needing more. The experience that had once brought me so much had lost its sparkle and caused me to feel more disconnected than connected. Losing the rave scene left me heartbroken. It had been my place of healing for so many years, my place of connection, and I didn’t know how to exist without it, until I found yoga.
In June 2002, just after I'd graduated from the University of San Francisco magna cum laude with a BS in Marketing, I sprained my ankle in a kickboxing class. I was seeking a low impact form of exercise to keep my anxiety in check while my ankle healed, so I walked into a Bikram yoga studio in San Francisco and fell in love at first sweat.
Since I suffered from severe anxiety and OCD, I had always found it difficult to be still in yoga classes. With the heat and the disciplined style of the Bikram series, I had found a style of yoga that spoke to my soul. I needed this level of intensity so that I could learn to be still.
When I walked into that class, I had just graduated college, had lost the love of my life: the rave scene, was studying for the LSAT because I didn’t know what else to do, was anxiety ridden, and was losing a battle with my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As I mentioned, the spiritual awakening was only the beginning. I was able to ride that high for a number of years, but after graduation, when real life began to creep in, it became harder and harder to keep that connection to my greater spiritual self.
My time on my yoga mat began to take precedence over all other facets of my life. I even quit my day job so that I could practice first thing in the morning, which led to my working in a high-end fine dining restaurant called Fifth Floor. I was studying for the LSAT, working at Fifth Floor, and practicing yoga. One day, after I had sent in my law school applications, I was watching the 3 star Michelin Chef work his magic on the plate, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to go to law school. I want to love what I do as much as he loves what he does.’
This, again, could be one of those fairytale moments where I decided to be a yoga teacher and danced off into the sunset, but that is not how this story goes. While I did attend Bikram’s nine-week teacher training, I opted to torture myself as a fiction writer for a number of years as well. The darkness in my soul was brewing, and it needed a space to release.
And, I gave it one. I allowed my deepest darkest self to emerge through the characters on the page. During which time I continued to deepen my healing through yoga, meditation, and breath-work practices and teachings.
This left me straddling two worlds within myself— one of healing and wholesomeness — that wanted to do yoga, live in the light, dance in the sun, and go to bed at a reasonable time. The other was dark and expressed through my desire to to stay up until 5AM hunched over my computer while demons danced on the page. I hadn’t yet learned the art of paradox, that both of these sides could exist and that I could honor them both. But once I started to understand this paradox and accepted both sides of myself, I no longer felt the split.
This was the summer of 2014, I had just finished writing my third novel (the only novel that was in good enough shape to query agents about). I was lying on a blanket next to the turtle pond in Central Park, below Belvedere Castle. I looked up at the sun-drenched, puffy cloud filled sky and said to my friend, “I don’t want to write fiction anymore. I just want to help people heal.”
Again, the change was instantaneous, I stopped writing fiction, signed up for Dharma Mittra’s teacher training, got certified as a Reiki healer, and started leading healing workshops called Alchemizing Pain into Light. In those workshops the attendees came forth with childhood trauma and psychological questions that I felt unqualified to answer. It felt unethical for me to continue doing healing work in this way without getting my Master’s in Psychology.
This was a HUGE decision to make. I hadn’t intended on going back to school, but my heart called for me to make this choice. I had just enrolled in Ashley Turner’s Yoga Psyche Soul teacher training and realized that she had gotten her Master’s from Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Synchronicity gave me the push I needed, and in September 2016 I made the choice to go to Pacifica Graduate Institute to get my Master’s in psychology. Pacifica is in Santa Barbara, California, and I live in New York City, which meant I would be flying to campus for four days each month for the next two and a half years.
I didn’t think about it. I just knew I had to do it. So, I decided that fairies would pay for it, and I applied, was accepted, and started attending classes at Pacifica all within a three week time period. I took a leap and trusted that I would be caught.
As I got deeper into the program, my whole world unraveled. And, I realized that in order to let go, we must first learn to healthily attach. Attachment, the dirty word of the spiritual community, became the missing key in my own healing. Through my internship of being a therapist at an addiction center, writing my thesis about Instagram addiction, and my own history with addiction and addictive behaviors, I realized how these addictive tendencies had been a mask for my deeper attachment wound, which can only be healed in relationship. For years, I had been focusing on individual healing without realizing that what was truly going to help me to feel safe enough to trust and let go was relational healing. This wound had been driving my life for years, and I had no idea.
I graduated from Pacifica Graduate Institute in August of 2019. In that program, I was able to see where I had unconsciously spiritually bypassed my childhood trauma, my attachment wounds, and my ability to express my very real human emotional needs. This was not intentional. I believed I was doing all the right work, but the thing is, I needed to not only be doing individual healing work, but also relational healing work. We need both.
From this place, The Art of Connecting was born. The product of a 20 year healing journey, The Art of Connecting and Expanding merges traditional spiritual practices with psychological and somatic healing techniques and well as quantum field energetics and manifestation.
My wish for you is that you heal so you feel safe to be seen, receive, EXPAND, and just BE.
I have been heartbroken, betrayed, and destroyed over and over and over again. I have sat with my pain, examined my addictive behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms, only to realize that there were sneaky ones hiding in my shadow running the show. I have spiritually bypassed, over-intellectualized and obsessed until there was nothing more I could obsess about, but then I would find some reason to obsess some more.
I have learned, mostly the hard way, how to sit in stillness with myself, to deepen into my pain so that it could tell me its story. I have leaned into discomfort, the spaces that we most often want to avoid, and I have learned to be with them until they transform. I have done the hard work of examining my childhood trauma and attachment wound so that I could break the spell of its power over me. Through this process, I have been humbled again and again until all I could do was surrender to the process.
I have dedicated my life to healing and I use my education, practice, and experience to help you to heal too. I have traced the lines to the origin of my wounds, and I have learned how to spin them into gold. My greatest gift is to help you learn to be still with yourself, so that you may examine your own wounds and spin them into gold too. I want to help you shed your addictive behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms that are keeping you stuck.
What once may have kept you safe, likely no longer serves you. I want to help you to develop a deeper connection to yourself, to others to the world around you, and to your vision for your life – to feel safe to experience connection in that way so that you may be free. Everything is connected and connection is everything.
Join me on this journey to deeper connection, love, feeling safe, abundance, freedom, and receptivity…