Satyama Lasby is a woman who has dreams, and then she makes them happen.
About five years ago, Lasby plotted out a five-year vision for how her life would look in one, three and five years. She remembers the element of work specifically – that it would be balanced between giving specialized bodywork (massage) sessions, teaching yoga and giving yoga retreats, and earning an income with her painting.
These were the three things that she loved and still loves to do.
“I give credit to my serious study of yoga and specifically meditation,” said Lasby, who left her career with the Greater Vernon Chamber of Commerce in order to study meditation full-time in India in 2009.
“It has given me the courage and belief, knowing that I am the maker of my own movie and that anything is possible with focused intention and manifestation.”
More recently, Lasby has been leading courses and retreats in both Costa Rica and Thailand, as well as in the North Okanagan for the past three years after opening her business, Open to Bliss, in Vernon.
She has been thinking of creative ways to expand her passion about painting intuitively and has displayed her work in B.C. and Ontario, where she is originally from.
“Among the things I teach, I have been teaching classes in painting with acrylic in a spiritual way for a while, but the marketing and time it takes to promote this kind of specialty outweighed any income being made, so it wasn’t a good business model – just something I was doing from my heart,” she said. “I had the inclination to reach more people online for a while. I love people. I just can’t be in more than one place at a time.”
The idea to make an online course came through a fellow yoga teacher while Lasby was in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand this past winter.
“The city is ripe for spiritual practice such as yoga, dance and other therapies, but there was no one doing what I was doing with painting, where meditation and yoga postures are combined with painting for a creative manifestation” she said.
When a friend referred Lasby to a Thai monk who just so happened to have his own film production company, the filming of the course began.
Lasby has integrated an element or type of meditation into each module of the course, called Painting Mandalas with Meditation for Creativity.
Some of the modules teach how to paint, some teach centering meditation or yoga, and some provide experiences for the student to look more deeply into their dreams and goals, and then how to manifest them, said Lasby.
Lasby’s colourful art and intuitive painting continues to thrive on the island of Koh Phagnan in Thailand, where she currently teaches weekly classes to mainly foreigners who are there on holiday, doing body detox programs at Orion Health Centre.
She also gives specialized Chi Nei Tsang abdominal massages at the centre, as part of her passion for the body-mind connection and what the connection does to bring greater awareness to our health.
If you cannot make it to Thailand for a visit, Lasby’s online course can be found at www.udemy.com/painting-mandalas-with-meditation-instruction-for-creativity.
