Realism is Sexy: Yoga for Real Life

Realism is sexy.

It’s a harder sell than optimism, yes. Love & light sounds totally amazing (and it is…, but not on its own…keep reading). For some of us, the temptation to ignore the hard things, the ugly parts, the shadow and spiderwebs is strong. We want the world to conform with our rose-colored glasses. Because at our core, we are all love, we are all connected, we are all in this together, it can be easy to bypass feeling all of the feels, seeing clearly what is happening day-to-day around the world; to skip the hard parts and go straight to what we think we know of love.

But, this is a dubious path.

Oftentimes, these assumptions are made from a place of privilege or a place of dissociation. And we can only do that for so long before it catches up to us: we only see what we want to, and then reality meets us in a way that we haven’t yet had to manage. We don’t know how to spin it, to plump it up, to pretty it up enough to convince ourselves that as far as everyone else is concerned, everything’s amazing here. In this place, I think, our *real* life begins. Where we are meeting life (or our job, our partner, our kids, our parents, OURSELVES) with open eyes and open hands. Where we really don’t know the answer, and we receive the transmission that maybe that is the point.

When we don’t have everything figured out and managed and summed up, we actually get to experience life.

Only from this place can we begin to touch the truth that is love. Only when we get a clear glimpse at ourselves under fluorescent lighting without makeup after a long night with little sleep can we touch the possibility of contentment.

And that is where love & light (& darkness) is real. And it is amazing.

Looking at yourself honestly takes guts.

Letting other people see you as you really are requires bravery.

It’s worth it.

You’ve got this.

Being all in is the only way.

This is the kind of yoga we’ll be practicing in our next Whole Yoga Immersion. We go DEEEEEEEPLY into the Yoga Sutras to align more fully with our heart’s path.

We begin September 21. Registration is open.

{Flower photo by Silentmind8 on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.}