Celebrating Imperfections 

I wrote an email yesterday to our yoga community being very organised and industrious, focused on getting things done my inner striver felt a real sense of achievement.  Only to find out that I had put the wrong date in for some classes and the wrong time for another. 

Oh boy, my inner striver was devastated and my self talk turned into reprimanding my self for being slack dash, not good enough, no one would attend my classes because I was so rubbish.

STOP luckily enough for me with many hours of observing myself I saw quite quickly that my inner striver / my ego was bruised and that its ok to cock up from time to time 😉

Now I know Im not the only one who can strive for perfection, most of us on the yoga path have at sometime strived to get into a pose, pushed a little too far and even injured ourselves. 

Life is full of learning and re-training but it shouldn’t always be about somehow being better.

Yoga is about change, not bettering ourselves, as this has a connotation that we are not already enough just as we are.  This striving can taint our yoga practice we can strive too much to be better, master this pose and the next, to keep pushing, go faster and be better.  In all this striving we berate ourselves for not being good enough, strong enough, flexible enough.

Don’t let you yoga practice be about perfection, instead observe your imperfections notice how your right shoulder is higher than your left, one leg external rotates more than the other, twisting to the right is more congested than to the left etc.

You are never going to be in perfect balance your right lung has 3 lobes and your left has 2 plus your heart, your liver is shifted more to the left than the right and that is only the start.

‘If you leave your striver unchecked, the impulse toward perfection undermines spiritual growth.  It limits your capacity to be kind, nonjudgemental, open, and carefree. It undermines the ability to find simple joy in the everyday.  By accepting our own foibles and failures, we become more tolerant of ourselves and others.  We stop trying to be someone else, someone more worthy, special, or enlightened. If we are not careful, the longing for perfection can close off the very source of light it is seeking’. ~ Tias Little.

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything

That is how the light gets in

~Leonard cohen

Celebrate your imperfections, your human, your learning and your growing, stay humble, kind and above all playful, smile at yourself and others will smile with you.

Stay bright, slightly cracked so the light can come in. 

with love 

Rosemary