After much soul-searching and uncertainty, I’ve turned the page to a new chapter. This website is the metaphorical title and this post is to share with you what studio luminous is.
My journey in life has taken me along many paths, from building speakers and washing cars to owning a electrical contracting business and teaching yoga. Much of what I have been searching for along this way is how to find contentment through my work and in life in general. The way I understood how to do that was to be as selfless as possible and then somehow, through that, I would find a way to be happy myself… After experiencing the peril of that mentality more times that I would like to admit, I moved to Santa Barbara and I decided to look more closely at my life.
During my ownership of a 10 employee construction business in Minnesota during the great recession, I poured every bit of myself into trying to keep my business alive. It took me working 100 hour weeks for well over a year to realize that wasn’t possible… It also showed me the limits of hard work and determination.
Nearly destroyed by that experience, I knew I needed some time to reflect and recover. When I moved to Santa Barbara I created that time. I also began a regular yoga practice. Yoga felt amazing! It gave me relief, self-reflection and a discipline to heal physically and emotionally. As time passed though, I started to apply that same ideal of ‘selflessness’ and self-starvation to yoga. Rather than an internal anguish this time, I created the dysfunction in a physical form. The beauty of what yoga and giving was for me transformed into something that injured me intensely and felt very much like everything else prior to that in life. In addition, yoga seemed to enable/promote my willingness to give everything to others and leave nothing for myself.
Again, I felt destroyed. Not only did I feel that what I was doing wasn’t right for me, but I felt that I wasn’t able to find anything in life that didn’t hurt. Through this process, as well as the work with a dear friend of mine, Voge Smith, I began to remember events that had happened to me when I was a child that I had blocked from my memory. This ripped apart the foundation of what I had thought my past was and I started to seriously question everything. I saw that what I needed to destroy was my confusion rather than myself. In order to do this, I needed the freedom and space to abandon my belief system as well as the means to give to myself in the ways that I had felt unable to in the past; I sold everything that had tied me down, quit my work and committed myself to following my heart and unlearning my broken beliefs.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve been able to see things in a new way and find some clarity. I’ve realized that I need to give to myself in the way I had thought I needed to give to others. This site is a space for me to do that as well as house the things in life that I find beautiful and inspiring while following my creative process whole-heartedly. I’ve purposefully left the concept of the site open-ended enough to give space to all my skill sets and whims. It’s also a public setting to embody a model of self-love and compassion that isn’t widely supported or even understood. It is my belief that as I do this, the contentment and love that I’ve created will ripple out to the people in my sphere.