Yoga for me is…
I am
Yearning to Operate and Grow in Authenticity, Awareness, and Agency.
Living your yoga means having a clear understanding of what it means to you and then committing to that definition by way of attuning your thoughts, words, and behaviors to jive with your understanding.
Living your yoga cannot and will not look like anyone else’s version of living yoga because it can’t. If we are to follow satya, or truthfulness (you can read all about this in my book) then we have to decide that we are going to create a relationship with ourselves that is honest. We must uncover the untruths that we are participating with on a daily basis. This first has to come from the Yearning to Operate and Grow in Authenticity, Awareness, and Agency (YOGA). Once you establish this depth of desire, you now have the opportunity to establish a living yoga practice.
Lets break it down:
Yearning
Yoga asks you to examine your yearnings and desires and what wound they might actually being trying to feed or suppress. It also requires you to decide and desire that your are more committed to your happy than your hell. In short, you have to want it. And maybe figuring out what “it” is, is part of this journey. This could be as simple as wanting to feel more peace in your mind space, it could be targeting that feeling of anxiety that shows up daily, it could be wanting to understand why you keep over eating or under eating, or compulsively checking your SM, or drinking too much, or gambling, or not being able to feel your feelings, or communicate your feelings, or any other behavior that is sabotaging your well being or keeping you from experiencing a life that you deem awesome.
Operate
How we think, what we say, and what we do make up the quality of our ok-ness. This is your operating system and if yours is turned onto auto-pilot, than you will believe life is happening TO you rather than FOR you, BY you. Have you turned your power to accelerate, brake, steer, and navigate over to circumstance? Who is driving your life? Your operating system must be transparent to you and also must be consistently refined and re-newed to function at optimal capacity. The operation of you is up to you, the way you act, respond, show up, give, and receive is completely in your hands.
Growth
The process of development is life-long. We can embrace it or fight it, either way is going to require you to be uncomfortable. You can be uncomfortable because you are stuck, life is stale, and sameness will continue to yield the same story repeated in a vast multitude of ways all resulting in distress, shame, and guilt. OR you can be uncomfortable because challenge and the unknown feels scary and all sorts of insecurities are sure to arise. Possibility, confidence, and aliveness can only result from your decision to grow, to expand past what you currently think that you know.
Authenticity
Yoga asks you to ask yourself: Who am I? How am I? Who do I want to be? What do I believe and what do I know? Why am I doing what I’m doing? Living with this kind of curiosity and openness to, not knowing, gifts you the ability to be real and not some watered down version of yourself who is playing a character in someone else’s show. Consistently asking and answering these questions guides you right into the lap of integrity. When we establish a clear moral compass for ourselves we then get to make choices that celebrate our very own sense of right and wrong. We get to align with our goodness and when our goodness is guiding, your cup will runneth over.
Awareness
If you shine the light into the dark, it can no longer be dark. There are places and parts of ourselves that we have either knowingly or unknowingly avoided. Yoga is the bravery to go there, sit there, and love on the you that has been stuck in there for oh so many years. The more parts of ourself that we are willing to witness from a place of non-judgement, the more parts of ourself we can include in our embodiment of wholeness. Kinda like the crescent moon, the lighted part is what we show to the world, but if we never venture over to the other half, we will never get to experience ourselves as the full moon that we inherently are.
Agency
Yoga asks you to take the seat as the CEO of your life and use your direct experience as your guiding light. When we take our own reins we actually have the capacity to move from point A to point B, intentionally. Without agency life will be once car crash to the next with whiplash in between. Your life is your making and yes of course there will be disasters and obstacles, but the way in which they effect your well being will be the difference between losing limbs or not! We have to be our own agent, CEO, and President. We have to be the one who is choosing to make this life all that it has the capacity to be.