Halaway’s New Seminar Dive into Karmic Destiny

Ragan and Alex Thomson met Dale Halaway more than a decade ago, when Alex signed up for a business coaching seminar and immediately felt a connection. Over the years, the Montecito power couple kept working with Halaway, a veteran transformational life coach, in a variety of public and eventually private seminars and coaching sessions – a practice they still maintain to this day. Along the way, they even asked Halaway to co-officiate at their wedding.

About two years ago, the Thomsons, who are raising their three children in a estate high in the Montecito hills, have been inspired to bring Halaway’s offerings to their greater community. The couple has sponsored more than 10 workshops with Halaway over that span, covering two different series of five weekend seminars encompassing such topics as romantic relationships, money, the inner child, and more.

Next weekend, Halaway returns to town with a new edition to the series, one that focuses on the yearnings of the soul. Karmic Destiny with Dale Halaway takes place January 12-14 at the Healing Hub, the community space the Thomsons opened in La Cumbre Plaza last fall. The seminar is open to all, including those who are new to his work, as long as the desire to make significant changes are palpable.

“(The seminars are for) when it’s time for you to start making serious changes in your life, real changes, on a cellular level,” Halaway said. “Perhaps it’s been time for several years, but you don’t know how or are just downright afraid of going there. Which is normal, as across the board – business leaders, entrepreneurs, anyone – most people resist change, either consciously or unconsciously. And as long as you maintain a level of resistance, the only change that will happen is for the worse. It only increases at those times when we’re truly meant to be changing but resisting.”

The problem, Halaway noted, is that even then we take the easy way out – though it only leads to deeper suffering.

“Because we live in such a medicated culture, whenever we’re in pain, we go medicate. The culture has taught us so well that most people aren’t even aware when they’re medicating. Pharmaceutical drugs are the most obvious, but it’s also too many cigarettes, eating too much candy or otherwise stuffing with food, surfing the Internet, or doing too much yoga.”

Which is why the initial sessions at any of Halaway’s seminars – regardless of the theme – are designed to “lift your awareness,” he said. “It’s crucial, because you have to see things as they really are in order to change them. We look at how and where you make your choices from. Are you going down a path of distraction and dis-empowerment? That’s what leads to feeling heavier and tired.”

That sense of awareness always arrives early on in the seminars, Halaway said. “You see within the first hour of Day 1, everyone’s awareness starts to lift. I can tell the moment it’s happening, because the energy shifts in the room.”

Then it’s time to “get elevated in your own consciousness. That’s what empowers you to make different choices and make changes,” Halaway said. “That’s where the magic starts to happen.”

The centerpiece of most of his seminars is the Transcovery Process, one of Halaway’s creations that he said is “based on good quality self-inquiry. It takes you inside and helps you to make the connections of what is coming up for you in your life to what’s going on inside. It helps you understand yourself on a deeper or newer level that keeps expanding the more you use it.”

For Halaway, that magic has been happening since early on in his life. “I was born to do this,” he said. “The signs were all over the place. I was meant to be helping people transform themselves.”

Serious health challenges in his 30s forced Halaway to embrace his own concepts, when he survived the last of three near-death experiences, healing himself naturally and organically via his own techniques of ultimate awareness and action.

“Anyone who knows me well will tell you my teachings are not things I heard out of a book,” he explained. “They come from a place of experience. That’s why they’re so powerful. Nobody gave this to me. I earned this. It was my dharma. I had to learn the hard way. The painful paths led me to discover more truths, more universal laws, and that’s where my teaching come from.”

The upcoming Karmic Destiny seminar offers a specific focus on the soul’s code. “It’s about our greater purpose,” Halaway said. “How from a DNA level goes it gets released into the body and the core of our lives? It’s about getting in touch with why we’re really here and what life’s expression is truly about for each of us as individuals and collectively – experiencing, achieving, and ultimately embodying it in this life.”

In order to make the changes, it’s necessary to investigate the patterns that often run our lives,” Halaway said. “It might be a karmic pattern from previous lifetimes, or a low-energy one that you created from your childhood. You make your own discovery. What I do is help people make that connection to what’s going on inside of you in ‘now’ time, and where it is that we can change it up. Then you can transform and heal so that we experience our lives in a newer, more refreshing and radiant way.”

(Karmic Destiny with Dale Halaway takes place January 12-14 at the Healing Hub, 121 S. Hope Ave., D111B. For more information, or to register, call 453-7281 or visit www.healinghubsantabarbara.com. A $200 discount is available through Saturday, January 6.)

OM-G! Free Yoga to Kick off 2018

Power of Your Om, the yoga studio located at 1221 State St., suite 201 (just across the corridor from SOhO), is offering four free yoga classes between 8 am and 1 pm this Saturday, January 6. All levels of yogis are invited to sample the studio’s sessions, including its popular “Yoga Shred”, a mashup of yoga and circuit training, which is nonheated because the workout alone raises the temperature. The studio is warmed for both “Power Basics”, which has an emphasis on the foundation postures, and “Playful Power”, which portends a fun approach to a traditional power vinyasa class. Bring a mat, towel, water bottle – and an open mind (mat and towel rentals are available). Visit www.powerofyourom.com.

Wednesday, January 10, brings Community Appreciation Night at YASA YOGA, an evening of food, libations, and fun that follows three free mini-classes beginning at 5:30 pm, with half-hour sessions covering beginning yoga, meditation, and candlelight yoga. The meet-and-greet portion begins at 7 pm with introduction of the newest members of the YASA family: Dr. Jeffrey Edman, M.D. of Mission St. Medical Spa; Beth Wettstein of KaiaFit; and Thea Goepfert, Ph.D. of Sound Healing. Events include a sound healing session, Tonic Latte Tastings by Essential Medicina, Conscious Kombucha Tastings, and more. The studio, located at 22 W. Mission St., is also offering free yoga all month for firefighters. Call 845-4626 or visit www.yasayoga.com.

Now that the wildfire has abated and air-quality advisories lifted, Rachael Quisel is back to hosting her free yoga classes, with the next session also slated for Wednesday, January 10. The 5:30 pm gathering takes place at Just Communities, 1528 Chapala St., suite 308. Call 966-2063 for more info.

Emotions in Motion

Stace and Brie Ehret Barron, the founders and developers of Avraprana EmotoSpiritual Healing, are offering an introduction to the hands-on energy healing work this month. Avraprana is “based in the primacy of emotivity as that which makes us most soulfully human,” an integrative approach to the relationship between “unconscious emotive congestion, pranic turbulence, chakral dissonance, physical disease, and intuitive-based access of all kinds to the subtle realms of being”.

The workshop has a three-pronged target audience: current purveyors of energy healing, for whom the class may provide ways that can deepen and broaden skills sets; prospective healers, who may glean practical ways to assess their gift and provide a basis for further development; and anyone who desires more knowledge of what actually occurs in alternative energy/hands-on healing to be better informed and prepared when seeking such treatments.

The timing for the course is still up in the air, thought it will encompass six weeks of two- to three-hour sessions, and accommodate a maximum of nine students. The fee is $35 per class or $195 pre-paid for the full six-week course. Email stace@avraprana.com or call Brie (541) 326-8093 by Wednesday, January 10, to indicate your interest and desired dates and times for the meetings.

Finding Freedom

Santa Barbara Bodhi Path Buddhist Center’s resident teacher Dawa Tarchin Phillips launches a new course for the new year that’s especially suited for newcomers. Finding Freedom, which takes place at 7 pm on three Thursdays, January 4, 11, and 25 – addresses how to avoid the three biggest mistakes that keep a spiritual practice from bearing fruit and connecting to the authentic teachings of Buddha in modern times. The class introduces the meaning and aim of the path of awakening while offering guidance on how to avoid the three biggest pitfalls of modern practitioners and take joyful first steps toward reducing your own and others’ suffering. Bodhi Path is located at 102 W. Mission St. Call 284-2704 or visit www.bodhipathsb.org.