“Come as you are, not as you what you think you should be,” Baron Baptiste says. What a concept. Baptiste, an international yoga leader whose practice is quite powerful, says that growth can come from allowing. In fact, more growth can come from allowing.
For most of my life I was taught that self-improvement would come only when struggle was present: If I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t working hard enough. Yoga opened me up to another possibility – that ease is a potent foundation for growth. It’s in ease that we begin to feel what is present. When we’re feeling, authentic change can begin.
Every corner of the world seems to be in struggle right now, but we can help. Each one of us. Every time we allow ourselves to pause and breathe and become present, we release a little struggle, and that ripples out into the world. We become examples to those around us – “It’s okay. Breathe. Relax. Feel.”
If around the world people could truly feel what all this violence, this hate, this war, this fighting is doing – to others, to themselves, to us – people wouldn’t be so violent.
Do something brave and bold today. Come as you are. Pause and breathe and allow yourself to feel. We just might start a revolution.