Being yourself

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde

Who are you? A dancer, a teacher, a carpenter, a banker? Or is who you are something deeper, something harder to define, something that is unique to each individual?

Being yourself sounds easy, but try it! It is easy to wish you were someone else, someone who has more talent, more intelligence, more money, more wit or more beauty. We are programmed by our society to be competitive, to judge others and to define ourselves by what we do. Are you a human-being or a human-doing?

There is pressure in our society to conform and to be something we are expected to be by others. But trying to be someone we are not will feel like something is missing in our lives. For example, if you have strong creative talents and you try to be a banker, you would feel frustrated because your creativity would be held back. And if you loved numbers and working within a tight structure and tried to be an artist, you would feel lost.

We all need to eat, drink, play, sleep and but how we do each of these things is different for each of us. Just as every flower, every snowflake, every bird in nature is different, each of us is unique. That is the marvel of creation.

Being with your breath in yoga brings you to the stillness where you can feel the pose. Thinking is necessary to get us into the pose initially, but ultimately we can lose the thought and find the pose. The pose becomes a reflection of who you are.

Being yourself requires loving and accepting yourself. Let go of the notion of being defined by what you do. You are the perfection you seek. When your heart feels open, when your life feels in balance, then you have found the freedom of being yourself.