Synopsis

In her 30s, Alex didn’t buy a house, a car, or have a baby. She left her full time career in design and spent more than $30,000 to go across the world to get as far outside of her comfort zone as possible. She ate carbs, did yoga for hundreds of hours, tortured herself through meditation and vegan diets (despite being a carnivore), and found inner peace in spite of having the most skeptical, motherfucking overactive, rebellious mind EVER created. She discovered inner peace and happiness in the rice fields of Bali and the beaches of India, even though she was the least likely candidate for this kind of bliss bullshit. If she can do it, so can you. Without losing the essence of what makes you YOU.

A coming-of-age memoir (Eat, Pray, Love meets Yoga Bitch), #MommyIssues is the story of two women told through the eyes of Alex, a 35-year-old artistic director-turned-yoga-teacher on a spiritual quest to come to terms with her family’s unique past and her fucked-up relationship with her mother, who went insane after escaping a brutal Romanian dictatorship when Alex was 8 years old. More than anything, it is a story about overcoming her hyper-active mind, skepticism, and fears created by the unique circumstances of her up-bringing.

#MommyIssues is a story of difficult choices, fate, and of personal transformation, as it contrasts the lives of two women: one growing up under a totalitarian regime behind Eastern Europe’s most extreme “Iron Curtain” dictatorship, the other in a land of capitalist consumerism, where overwhelming choices and opportunity abound. It is a story of mothers and daughters, culture clashes, constructed and re-constructed identities, love, loss, resilience, forgiveness, and finding your way in the 20th and 21st century as a “landed immigrant,” living and playing in the “global village.” Alex finds this path to happiness in Asia, through studying yoga and through harnessing the power of the mind.

Alex’s lifelong journey of searching for meaning, happiness, and inner peace (as a reaction to lacking a cultural identity and having a perpetually unhappy and toxic mother) leads her to many unconventional and colorful experiences spanning three decades, three continents, and more than thirty countries.

Why is this story unique?

People always ask Alex: how are you so HAPPY? Where do you get your energy from? How do you have this amazing life where you get to do what you love and things just COME to you? The truth is that things DON’T just come to you. You have the power to create your own happiness and the life that you want, by first harnessing your mind. This is a story about just THAT, the power of mind over matter. Alex's story is one about finding happiness despite overcoming huge obstacles and hardships, having an overactive, anxious mind and having some serious #mommyissues. If Alex can find this happy place, so can you. She wants to share her story with you. 

Told through humorous yet brutally honest narrative and diary and email excerpts, the story highlights conflicting dualities between two stubborn, strong-willed women. They struggle to understand each other and themselves in light of the epic contrasts which have shaped them: the haves and the have-nots, endless choices versus none at all, and the underlying human condition of perpetually searching for a better life, happiness, and inner peace. Don’t we all want to be happy? To find joy and squeeze the motherf#$%ing shit out of it? Like every day?

This book is a unique take on overcoming huge obstacles in life and in the mind in order to find joy and happiness through finding yourself.

The reader will be taken along on Alex’s journey, while simultaneously extracting her life lessons learned along the way. This book connects with millennials, generation X-ers, and baby boomers who want to be happy, inspired, and entertained at the same time. It was written to share the lessons learned through living and traveling abroad, studying yoga, meditation, and spiritual teachings that hold the secrets to finding your “happy place," no matter what circumstances you were born into. Above all, it is about inspiring people to live the life they are meant to live, free of fear. It’s about “finding your free.”

Outline

*At the beginning of each of the 3 parts of the book, a paragraph/quote of spiritual wisdom will appear. At the end of each chapter an important life lesson learned by Alex will be shared with the reader.

Part One: The Hand You're Dealt

Chapter 1: Life Behind the Iron Curtain

Backstory of Alex’s family, home-life, and political / historical context of Bucharest, Romania, under communism. A glimpse into what living in a totalitarian state with almost non-existent contact with the outside world is like. The main characters are established. Alex’s life (birth-8 years old) & Ileana’s life (Alex’s mom, birth – 35 years old).

Chapter 2: Leaving Big Brother, Plunging Into the Abyss

Parents’ decision to escape Romania, family separated for 2 years, limited contact. Overview of two years: father’s experience landing in Canada with nothing and having to rebuild. Alex’s and her mother’s experiences in Romania during this time, the Romanian revolution, and getting out of the country.

Chapter 3: Starting Over (combination of narration and diary excerpts, 9-11 years old)

Culture shock, leaving Romania and being plunged into life in a consumerist society, with no tools to navigate it. Family’s attempts at adaptation, various coping mechanisms. Mother plunges into depression/insanity/alienation, Alex learns to turn on the charm and fit in, while hiding the crazy aspects of her home-life.

Chapter 4: Fake It 'Til You Make It

Alex forging new identity while blending in and rebelling against her past. School and high school life (parties, boys, drinking, drugs, and liberation, while mother sinks further into depression and craziness). Contrast between a “fake” identity on the outside and domestic reality, hiding what’s happening at home. Total schism between capitalist/consumerist values and education/culture/values of mom. Father is carrying family, building career, harnessing power of his mind, and optimistic attitude. No barriers.

Part Two: Musical Chairs (Moves & Travels)

Chapter 5: The Second Migration (narrative and diary excerpts)

While Alex is discovering work and independence in high school, mom and dad move to Holland to work on the ICTY tribunal, which prosecutes crimes against former Yugoslavia. Alex’s life as a partying, straight-A student and Hooters waitress. Living as a self-sufficent adult from 16-23. Double life: student, quasi-celebrity, party girl/academic. Between childhood and adulthood. The travel bug starts, as she discovers travel to Europe, begins developing an even thicker emotional shield, and creates an identity of being a self-sufficent “island.”

Chapter 6: Playing Dress-Up (anachronisms and dualities)

Alex is on her way to achieving the North American dream. University and career prospects in law – boys, boyfriends, sex stories, and fear of commitment. Playing house with an older boyfriend in a cookie-cutter life: a house, 2 cars, and 3 cats. Law school looming, Alex feels something is off but keeps on this course until a sudden existential meltdown and a strong gut feeling cause her to make a split-second decision (fueled by her gut) to escape it all and move to Asia.

Chapter 7: The Hamster Wheel: Culture Shock and Living Upside Down (emails and journals)

Hilarious experiences spanning 3 years of living in South Korea. Escaping marriage, falling in lust with the man who “ruined” her. Extreme highs and lows, beginnings of spiritual discoveries & finding glimpses of a life purpose, through Asian travels and adventures.

Chapter 8: The Quarter Life Crisis

Europe and Asia travels, escape from Asia and reverse culture shock after moving to a new city back in Canada with a manic-depressive boyfriend. Awaited bliss turns into an existential nightmare: at twenty-six, Alex is living in a new city, making new friends, living as an Anglophone in a French province, working new jobs,and freaking out because she’s twenty-six and, while all her friends are well into careers & families, she still doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing with her life. She discovers design, which ends up saving her life and sanity through what is about to happen.

Chapter 9: Glimpses of me (Heaven and Hell) (narrative & diary excerpts)

Alex is pummeling through design school, new friends and travel, following her passion while keeping her home-life and dealing with a manic-depressive drug addicted boyfriend a secret. Her relationship with her parents evolves while she is facing astounding career possibilities. The course of hers and her mothers’ life shifts as her father is diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early 50’s. Her boyfriend, Drew, free falls into drugs, mother and father move back to Canada, Alex navigates huge internship with boyfriend’s exploding alcoholism/drug addiction & design/creativity.

Chapter 10: The Career Trap

Alex starts her dream job at a top advertising agency, while not dealing with the heartbreak of Drew & dad. Workaholism & alcoholism (wine-ism). Confessions of a single gal, as she works, dates, and fakes identities in exchange for one-night stands. Life is rock&roll, new career opportunities with Madonna and top fashion label while trying to survive mysoginistic bosses, work pressures, and not dealing with anything.

Chapter 11: The Boiling Point

Career ascent, physical breakdown, and discovering yoga after a work-related burnout. Horrible bosses (mysoginism, idea-stealing, and workplace harassment). Women’s struggle in advertising - it’s still a man’s world. Alex meets John, a 45-year-old television director and copywriter - 6 year relationship teaching Alex about love. Relationship spans Alex’s career, yoga journey, discovering herself and transforming.

Part Three: The Awakening

Chapter 12: India & Popping the Emotional Pimple (The Boiling Point, The Beginning of the End) (blog posts & narrative)

Alex’s yoga practice takes her to India for two months for a yoga teacher training, which is a transformative experience. She returns home to her “regular life” with a total shift in her perception, as she navigates through 2 opposite worlds: ego-driven advertising world vs. ego-less yoga. This is the beginning of her spiritual journey, and the beginning of her spiritual journey.

Chapter 13: Aftermath & Exiting Comfort Zones

Alex returns to Romania for the first time in twenty-six years and begins to understand her mother’s struggle, as she is the same age as her mother was when she left Romania. Following her return, she faces her biggest fears and plunges out of all her comfort zones: she freelances and has new adventures, success, and a life of freedom, yoga, and travel. New opportunities arise: Cirque du Soleil, new clients, yoga retreats, becoming an entrepreneur, making a great living by merging all her talents into her ventures. As she finds freedom, her relationship with John begins to change. She meets a new man who forces her to question her safe relationship and to open herself up to love and the possibility of heartbreak. She decides to go to Bali for a few months to go further into her yoga teacher training, intense meditation, and to find out who she really is. She has some tough grown-up decisions to make.

Chapter 13: Open, Release, Surrender: Bali (diary excerpts)

As Alex goes through her Bali experience, her entire existence and assumptions (about her mother, her past, her relationships, and her future) are in question. She is at a pivotal crossroads in her life, as she works on releasing the past, forgiveness, and being honest with her heart. There is hilarity and depth in her discoveries about herself and her adventures. After a transformative two months in Bali, it ends by blowing up in her face. Alex, for the first time in her life, experiences true heartbreak.

Chapter 14: Opened, Released, Surrendered. Now Love.

As Alex returns home after her spiritual awakening and in a total WTF state, she must decide whether to stay with John or break free of her last safety net. As life deals her circumstances through which she is forced to truly practice mindfulness and surrendering (actually living her yoga), she clings to the idea of stability (John), while creating a new life for herself. In this vulnerability, she finally finds a way to release the past, mend her relationship with her mother, and truly learn to open up her heart. She discovers strength in vulnerability, and a state of bliss, despite what happens on the outside. This story ends with love, found in the most unexpected places.

*At the end of the book, a summary of the life lessons will be recapped, as well as a final inspirational paragraph and afterword by Alex about happiness.

Audience

This book connects with millennials, generation X-ers, and baby boomers who want to be happy, inspired, and entertained at the same time. Therefore, it appeals to anyone who wants to be happy and break free of fear and the constraints of their terrorist minds in order to live an authentic and joyous life. The readers are people who want to be inspired in their lives and want to live a meaningful life. Whether they are seasoned travelers or people who would like to travel but have not yet, they are people who are curious about the world and the self and are either at the beginning or middle of their own spiritual journeys. They are either free spirits or people who would like to be; they are yogis, meditators, or people who have always wanted to do yoga but are too scared. They are open-minded, they question the status quo, they are inquisitive, and they don’t want to settle for the norm. They are searching for ways to release toxic relationships, ways to resolve childhood wounds, and for love. They believe that there is a happier version of themselves out there, but they just have not found out how to attain it. They have a sense of humor.

This book is relevant to them because it is funny, deep, inspiring, and merges real-life experiences and learnings from psychology, eastern spirituality, and Western realities. Alex has lived through many experiences that others often say they wish they could have but have not, and she shares her story in a way that can inspire and empower her readers to find happiness and peace. If SHE could do it, so can they. Alex, throughout the book until she begins to delve deeper into yoga, was a skeptic, had an overactive mind, was emotionally blocked, was angry, was scared, and was moving ahead at lightning speed. If it had not been for her burnout and discovering yoga, she would have died within a few years. If she was able to transform herself and tap into the unlimited potential for joy and happiness inherent in all of us, everyone can do it. Because she lived it, she is able to share it with her students, her loved ones, and people she doesn’t know, and inspire them on her blog, through her classes, and now to a wider audience through this book. It is a memoir that facilitates self-help.

Promotion

Facebook Page: YogaBender: 760 followers

Instagram Yogabender: 1,730 followers

Facebook Page Personal: 705 followers

Facebook Page: YogaJetaways: 409 followers

Yogajetaways email list: Yoga practitioners interested in Alex’s yoga retreats - 200 addresses

Yoga studio clients email lists: Alex’s yoga students & other yoga practitioners in various Montreal studios - hundreds of addresses

Yoga, Travel, and Meditation/Spirituality Facebook groups: Thousands of Audiences

Alex will use her blog and social media platforms, as well as her email list and existing yoga studios where she teaches to promote the book. Alex is also a graphic designer and art director, so she is very well versed in leveraging social media to promote a product, as well as creating content, since she does this for a living, both for her own business ventures and for promoting the visibility of her clients’ brands and products. 

Competition

Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

By Suzanne Morrison

Published by Three Rivers Press; Original edition (August 16, 2011)

When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra—a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God. But things don’t go quite as expected. Once in Bali, she finds that her beloved yoga teacher and all of her yogamates wake up every morning to drink a large, steaming mug…of their own urine. Sugar is a mortal sin. Spirits inhabit kitchen appliances. And the more she tries to find her higher self, the more she faces her cynical, egomaniacal, cigarette-, wine-, and chocolate-craving lower self. 

Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Published by Riverhead Books (January 30, 2007)

In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want—husband, country home, successful career—but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works -- A True Story

By Dan Harris

Published by Dey Street Books (March 11, 2014)

After having a nationally televised panic attack, Dan Harris knew he had to make some changes. A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists. Eventually, Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had propelled him through the ranks of a hypercompetitive business, but had also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out.

Eventually Harris stumbled upon an effective way to rein in that voice, something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless: meditation, a tool that research suggests can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain. 10% Happier takes readers on a ride from the outer reaches of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news to the bizarre fringes of America’s spiritual scene, and leaves them with a takeaway that could actually change their lives