We are enough

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2022

“Meet yourself where you are at.”

This is a common cue in yoga asana practice, and yet I don’t think I truly understood what it meant until several years of hearing it.

Certainly, when I started practicing yoga, I had no clue. I felt driven to try to do things my body wasn’t ready for, and resentful of my teachers for “making me” do that. I remember leaving classes that felt too hard, mid-class, because I couldn’t touch my toes or wasn’t ready to try an inversion. I simply didn’t want to hear the offered modification. Anything short of the “perfect” pose was nothing at all.

Truth is, yoga goes against everything I ever thought I knew: about how to think, what to value, and why it matters. It isn’t linear, it values effort over output, and it demands that I take accountability for myself, first. This, of course, is why yoga is such a valuable tool for learning how to engage off the mat too. Because that is also just life.

And yet. In non-yoga spaces, we routinely stick to an unhelpful yardstick of linear perfection, valuing massive wins, and with very limited personal accountability as long as the output is right.

Never mind that this kind of mentality is what got us war, exclusion, and ecological degradation. Never mind that we are exhausted. Never mind that this mindset is what makes us forget to love.

And I think that is the crux of the matter: that it is so incredibly hard for us to love ourselves. It is so hard, that we refuse to even meet ourselves, lest we are forced to love the always-in-movement-imperfect-beings that we are.

I am sitting with the enormity of my grief for humanity this morning. We are so imperfect and so capable and I love us. We are enough.