When I first came to this practice I was following an inner calling that said donât hold back, follow your heart. But my parents were worried. In the early â80s yoga classes were held in church basements and only aging hippies shopped at the local food co-op. Most of the friends I had known since grade school were going off to law school or taking jobs at Schwab or Merrill Lynch. But something stirred in me that I couldnât ignore. I didnât have any language to describe this calling. These were days before inspirational verse from the likes of Mary Oliver and David Whyte who advocated for transformational growth. However, in my late teens, I couldnât help but to follow a silent prompt that directed me to pursue the language of the soul. I felt then, as I do now, that I was willing to do whatever was required to discover this calling and to live by it. Before I found yoga I spent time hitchhiking through the West, wandering the back country of Yellowstone National Park and reading Carlos Castaneda.
Any quest toward a reckoning of the true self involves a lot of trial and error. You have to be willing to get lost or stranded and possibly labor at tasks that donât serve you. On the long pilgrimage toward embodying your most authentic self, you have to follow an inner trust, an unnamed conviction. Along the way, the path requires more unlearning than learning, casting off  beliefs and expectations that never served you in the first place. So cultivate fidelity within your own seeking. Be willing to forge into places inside yourself that may have been concealed, neglected or forgotten. And as W. E. B. Du Bois once said, âThe most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might becomeâ.
Photo: Atlas Green / Unsplash
