International Lifestyle Magazine Issue 56 | Page 60

Victoria, a True Life Coach and
Transformational Retreat Leader from
Durango, Colorado, now offering
retreats in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has
decades of experience with this path.
Her passions have led to careers in
dance, adventure travel, coaching and
leading transformational retreats.
While she’s found success in all of
them, it’s the transitions that she
says are the hardest. They’re where
she’s had to dig the deepest within to
understand that things fall apart so
they can be re-made. The dissolution
of our life structures is what pushes
us to create a new story. Here is
where Trust and Hope triumph over
the easy road of the safe life.
“The spiritual teacher Eckartdt Tolle
has said, ‘life sends you whatever
experience is most helpful for the
evolution of your consciousness’,
FittsMilgrim recounts. I believe that
we carry a double-edged staff through
life - etched on one side are all the
painful times we’ve had, but on the
other is our deepest and greatest joy.
One staff, one life. They are eternally
intertwined.”
When speaking of the challenges
of The Heroine’s Journey she says,
‘Of course we are going to feel fear.
Whenever we step outside our
known world, the one that makes us
feel competent and successful, fear
will come up. It’s remembering that
we have a choice, and aligning our
choices with what truly matters that
creates the inner presence to guide
us forward.’
We all have been conditioned to
follow the popular path. It starts as
very small children in school. Rarely
are you rewarded for not having all
the answers. But to live authentically
there will be times when there
are only questions. And that is a
good thing. In living her best life,
American painter Georgia O’Keeffe
said, ‘I decided to start anew, to strip
away what I had been taught.’ If you
are going to answer the call of The
Heroine’s Journey, you will have to
begin again with the fresh eyes of
renewed mind.

This past winter FittsMilgrim traveled
to Thailand for six months on her
own Heroine’s Journey, seeking a
beautiful place to call women to who
want guidance for undertaking this
sacred passage. Although at first she
didn’t find what she was seeking, it
all seemed part of having the faith
to continue and keep asking to be
shown.
Then towards the end of her winter
there, she discovered Tharn Thong
Lodge, forty minutes outside of
Chiang Mai in the north. ‘The minute
I saw it, I knew it was the place of
beauty I was seeking.’ Tharn Thong
Lodge provides rustic/romantic
accommodations, delicious food and
an exquisite natural setting.
And synchronistically, there she
met with a new form of movement,
Christopher Harrison’s Anti-Gravity
Fitness/Yoga/Pilates.
The AntiGravity aerial experience
has lit up everything from the Oscars
and Grammys to the Olympics and
presidential inaugurations. “Weaving
the AntiGravity experience into the
Heroine’s Journey offers women
worldwide a new groundbreaking
opportunity for self-expansion and
freedom – a path to grow beyond old
limits of influence and impact in the
world,” FittsMilgrim says. “AntiGravity
founder Chris Harrison says that the
AntiGravity experience allows one
to move freely in all directions of
open space and not only opens the
body, but also the mind, and this
is a beautiful fit with The Heroine’s
Journey model.”

Harrison’s exciting aerial program
originates from New York but also
trains instructors at Tharn Thong
Lodge. They use soft hammocks
suspended three feet off the ground
as apparatus for decompressing
the spine and strengthening one’s
core. But even more coincidental,
the principles that guide the AntiGravity experience are the same
ones needed to take The Heroine’s
Journey.
Trust…. Acceptance…

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