Yoga for Assholes

This is "Queenie" - She is the mascot for my yoga business, Queen of Hearts Yoga. The night before we found her, sitting peacefully by herself at the front steps near my local coffee shop (great manifesting btw) I had been brainstorming with my housemates about what to call my yoga business. There was certainly no shortage of ideas being thrown around, and Queen of Hearts Yoga was an apt title, but given my inherent streak of rascality, the gang jokingly concluded, that if I were to open an authentic studio, then I would have to call it 'Yoga for Assholes'

You see, I am an asshole.

Now I may not be parking in handycapped spaces, as Dennis Leary so comically sang at some point in the early 90's, but without a doubt, I am one hundred percent, an asshole.

The problem with a lot of yoga these days is that everybody is trying really really really hard to be perfect. We want perfect minds, perfect bodies and perfect spirits, without actually really knowing who we are and why we want these things. We see young girls back flipping their way to enlightenment, without even knowing how to meditate. We see Master Gurus making millions of dollars, only to find out they are pathological narcissists who can't sleep and who psychologically abuse students for profit. This insidious style of teaching and business is of course, not just in the land of the 8 Limbs and spirituality, it is in every aspect of life and business.

So what makes me an asshole?

Well I finally decided not to fake it. I decided not to fake it as a student or a teacher. You see, I don't find myself frolicking on beaches and cartwheeling to sunsets and so I don't take pictures of them. I haven't organically found mantras that I relate to and that make any sense to me, so I don't teach them. I don't wear patchouli. I listen to Metallica. I swear in real life, and so I swear in my classes.

There is an absolute totality in all of us. We all have a yin to our yang, a no to our yes, a sad to our happy. For the sake of our sanity we must be able to be lazy and rest, we must be able to honestly dislike things and opinions, we must be able to sometimes just tell people to go jump. This does not make us bad people, or less 'spiritual' - It just makes us honest.

We have all been or seen the ultra 'nice to your face' lady, who gets pushed to the limit and then rams into your car in the parking lot. We have all bottled up feelings of resentment and anger to the point of explosion. Its normal.

What is not normal is repressing it and letting your anger fester into depression. What is not normal is letting people walk all over you for the sake of people pleasing. What is not normal is being so numb and painfully positive that you become dangerously naive.

What is normal, is being a bit of an asshole.

It is a misconception that yoga is here to fix something in you or make you super -happy - positive and likeable. In fact its a misconception that there was anything wrong with you in the first place. If you break yoga down into three sections, you begin to understand its premise. Supporting the body. Supporting the mind. Creating awareness.

Move lightly, stretch properly, breathe. Learn to meditate, understand your inner world, be self aware. That's it.

Feel good. Think properly. Observe.

No where in there does it say you need to be perfect or backflippy or vegan, or better than anyone else. No where in there did it say you have to change who you are at all.

The truest things I have discovered in 20 years of teaching and practice, is that there are no shortcuts, and that there is no escaping me. Oh I have tried, believe me. I've ultra-spiritualised myself, I've quoted Eckart Tolle at dinner parties, I've judged.

And yet ultimately my veil of delusion would always slip. Ultimately I would have to accept, acknowledge, forgive and surrender into all of my imperfections, my family trauma, my obsessive traits, or my recklessness. There was no escaping them. And the problem with super fast happy yoga, that is in a rush to get you nowhere, and is not built for a LIFETIME platform of practice and self awareness, is that the more I practiced 'being' perfect, the less perfect I became.

Ultimately I had to be ok with being an asshole, sometimes.

So my only advice as a teacher, is be you. Just be you. Look after your body, just because it's worth it, because it's better than being sick and tired and sore all the time. But not too much, you don't need to do too much.

And learn to meditate. Just enough, You don't need to go astral travelling to the twelfth dimension. Just enough to calm your mind, breathe some stress out of your nervous system, and get some rest. That's it. Simple

Who knows, with a little bit of practice, one day you might even find yourself enlightened.

But ... not without first accepting, that you're an asshole x