Opening

 I have spent years now trying to find my purpose. To start living for real, choosing my direction, instead of reacting to what happens to me.

I have spent years getting out of the backseat of my life to grab hold of the wheel.

Now that I'm here, where am I going?

I'm not interested in steering myself towards material gain or popularity. Those are low goals. Motherhood appeals, but I can't escape the feeling I have something to do first. That right now, motherhood would be an escape.

The longer I stand with my hands on the wheel the stronger the signal is that I am not to drive at all.

That I am to suspend worldly (sensory) determination in order to allow what's within to come forward. The most important thing I can do, the greatest good I can accomplish in my life, will unfold by letting the divine live through me.

Easier said than done.

There is an impulse inside me that wants to share. An impulse that is backed by the feeling that through this my greatest potential will bloom.

An impulse that is constrained by my perfectionism and fear of judgment.

I am resistant to sharing.

I am afraid of being judged for what I say.

To be sure, it is not safe to speak, and it is certain I will face judgement. I cannot change this, and so I must accept it. The work is finding the courage to do it anyway.

Let them point out the ways in which I'm ignorant, bias, vain, arrogant, egoic or privileged.

Let me have enough restraint over my ego to consider whether they are right.

Let me let them fuel my growth, my Yoga practice.

Lately, I've been faced with my resistance to promoting myself. To opening up.

Writing is an outward pour, and the writing that makes me feel alive is when the content scares me to share.

So, to feel this aliveness I need to move past my blocks.

I need to get out the way of my flow.

To really get behind my work, to believe it in, I can't be doing it to achieve something. I can't be doing it with how it's going to be received, in mind. I can't be doing it for the fruits of my labor.

To write, I'm going to have to stop caring about the outcome. What it's going to be. What it's for. What it's purpose is. What people will think.

How do I do that?

I have to take my care, my attention, out of the future result, and invest it in what I'm doing now.

And so I practice taking my attention out of what will happen, and placing it in what is happening. Creating.

"Yoga attempts to create a state in which we are always present- really present- in every action, in every moment"

-T.K.V. Desikachar