You don’t need a church to pray.

You don’t need a church to pray.

or a house for a place to call home

Or a job to do the work

Or a yoga teacher to cue your core

Its the embodiment of intentions and the actions they inspire.

Its the dedication to getting the pen to the page even if it feels like you have no words.  Its the discipline strengthened by your commitment to doing what you say.  And its definitely the willingness to own your life in the paths you chose.

I realize that life gets busy and excuses are as real as I cling to them, but I also know that I am in charge of where I invest my energy, how I design my life and what habits really inspire my best self.

Learning to hold space for myself, a place where I can drop in to my body and see the rigid spots of dwelling, the sleepy areas of neglect and the uncomfortable sites of afraid, has meant my sincerest compassion towards myself yet.  To value myself no matter what schedule I have overbooked, where I am confined in small spaces or too many stares from eyes that were once only curious, and no matter how many other things are left to do on that damn list, that is what showing up to my body and breath means.  That I love me in spite of all my flaws and flops, and I love me even when I am lazy or bland, hyperactive or obnoxious.  That my state is not who I am it is how I am choosing to express the things I might have overlooked and it can always change if I am open to the truth that a daily practice offers me.

You don’t need someone else to make you happy.  And you don’t need anybody to show you how to move and breath in the expansive playground of your joints and connective tissues.  These were built in from the beginning of your development.  Without a schedule or a plan to tell you how to feel it and be it.

In fact the more time you spend planning your practice into your schedule the less you are truly able to meet your needs right now.

Our lives are becoming one big agenda with things to do.  The mind loves the schedule, the things it thinks it can control and arrange.  But truthfully life doesn’t always work out the way we planned.  All your thoughts don’t have your best interest in mind.  And the only place we can really find clarity and intuition is beneath the noise of it all, in the feeling of fascia and neurons forging a connection to your highest frequency.

This is why we dedicate our practice to our breath instead of our schedules, we drop into the wise reflections our body reveals in the face of our insecurities.  It is important that we have a way to return home to ourselves even if it is only 20 minutes and recommit to that state of heart held forward so that our lives are not the product of automatic, or of parroted opinions or of regretful reasons.

Because what often happens when we prioritize the external more than the internal, the schedule versus the natural rhythm, we are inconvenienced again in the poop wont drop or the orgasm won’t climax or the hair wont grow faster.  we are unsatisfied, unfulfilled and under the thumb of another dirty kitchen or longer than expected meeting or ache in our knee for years that has now become our inability to enjoy a walk.

And I get it because I still get pulled deep into one of my bullshit narratives as dogma, and I let my practice take the back seat while I sit in traffic ruminating in my misplaced mantras and alienating affirmations, a result of a culture ill advised believing the sparkle to a great life comes from what it looks like rather than what it feels like.  And I have compassion for myself most of the time when I fall in line and forget what really matters standing over my definite one day death bed, in which this practice is truly the greatest gift of liberation devoted to my fullest life possible.  And when I find my way through the hustle and bustle of there is no time and neon lights of codependence, I arrive again, sometimes a little battered and more often a little bruised, in this space I created in the middle of the desert or in the corner of the airport terminal, to heal, to renew and emerge again my whole self fully reclaimed as radiant.

Even if I have to trick my ego with spur of the moment, or skip that season finale I thought I was looking forward to, or ditch that Facebook account I believed validated myself, I pledge allegiance to 20 minutes fully embodied.  And the key to my success is dropping it needing to look a certain way or be a certain length of time or demand a certain amount of sweat or effort.  When I just simply show up 100% for myself and let it be expressed in that moment by where I am in my cycle, by how I feel after a long day at work, by what the weather is doing and by the size of room available to move, I am free to just do me being my whole self experienced.

And its here, unplanned, unscheduled, undetermined by the direction of somebody else’s perspective, that I am home and I can pray to whomever God I connect with and I can remember my aliveness in the movement unprepared and the breaths unexploited and the heart unfiltered.

This space is my love and light uninhibited.  And this place is my whole self, meeting moment to moment unfixed.  And its now where creation is born untamed and limited dies unbred.  Its this practice that is my own where I am my greatest version of love yet and the best part is I took a satisfying poop, a reached mind altering orgasm and I am just grateful for the hair I have.