I Just Wanted All The Noise To Stop

Hoia!! Hola!!

My name is Heidy Allende.  For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a working model in NYC.  I love my job (never a typical day), as everyday something new is going on.  I get the opportunity to travel the world and meet amazing people from so many different cultures.  I am blessed to have the chance to attend a lot of cool events.  And I am always getting a lot of nice goodies from the clients, from clothes to shoes to bags and more.

But it is not always so glamorous, in fact it is actually a lot of hard work. Most of the time I am away from my loved ones. A lot of times, I am alone.  Sometimes, I get caught in the wrong crowds, seeing and experimenting things that aren’t good for me mentally or physically. What I want to say is, like any other job, it can be very stressful.  The stress built up so much, that a few months ago, I knew something was wrong when I couldn’t sleep and when I had so much noise in my head that I couldn’t stop it.  I just wanted to put my hands in my head and try to control all the madness and shut it down for a sec.  It was also leading me to hurt myself physically.  That’s when I knew I needed help.  I was like, okay I’m officially crazy and I need to urgently go to a psychologist. But I never believed in telling someone my problems. So I would just pray to God to help me through what I was going through…depression, craziness…I didn’t know what it was. I never spoke to anyone about it. I was just roaming around trying to deal with it. Then one summer day, I got an invite from a dear friend I met over a year ago to do yoga.  I've always been an active, spontaneous girl but I was never interested in yoga.  But I was like, okay let’s try something new that I know is not going to kill me.  First, he spoke to me about meditation.  I thought...'this sounds sooo boring, sitting down for 20 minutes saying aaauuuuuummm. Are u serious??? I have better things to do.'  But I still decided to try it.  I sat on my towel, looking at the ocean, feeling the nice summer breeze and listening to the waves. I closed my eyes and repeated my mantra over and over again. Twenty minutes later, I opened my eyes, had a smile on my face and felt inner-peace.  Surprisingly I did it and caught onto it fast, because within five minutes into the meditation, I wasn’t thinking of anything.  It was like that feeling I wanted to have by getting my hands inside my head and organizing and shutting down all the noise was easily done by meditating. I was like, wow this is not boring after all. Then came the physical practice of yoga.  Which I tell you the truth, for some reason every name of the different positions to me sounds like “cowabunga dude.”  I g