"Authenticity" or "The Retraction Post" or "Part 2: Goal Setting & Re-Assessing & Wide Open Spaces"

(This is a part two to a blog I wrote several weeks ago.  Visit it here if you haven't read it already.)


I came *this* close to signing up for Yoga Teacher Training….



And I did.



Here’s what happened:



I had focused too much on the teaching aspect.  That is, the stand in front of the room and present my truth so everyone can get to their truth and ultimately the Truth.  This isn’t necessarily bad, but my hard-wired fear-based loop-feed refused to quit and it spun me into circles of not being bendy enough, not knowing enough, not devouring enough, and worse yet…not being authentic enough.



My fear of not being authentic has driven much of my action since I was a small child.  It is the reason that I avoided calling myself a Poet until more recent years. ( I claim that title with honor and great privilege now.)



If you ask a person what it is (s)he does, (s)he will often reply with what (s)he does as a job/career.  I do not make a sustainable income as a Poet, Editor, Freelance Writer, nor a would-be Yogi (see how I still trip up over the language here?).  Because my job history averages 8-9 hour days administrating it in one form or another, I had long-held the similar habit of answering, “I’m a Legal Administrator" or  "I’m an Administrative Assistant.”   Never have I once answered, “I’m a multi-passionate human being simply be-ing.”



What would happen if I said that?  Would it make her/him uncomfortable? Wouldn’t their response be, “Well yes but what do you do for a living?”  Isn’t simply be-ing what we do for a living?  No one ever asks a cat what it does; it is simply a cat.



Money drives our culture and society; easily arguable, the world over.  There is no escaping the need for it as we’ve collectively agreed to impress on it a value that moves  and drives each of us in specific ways, good or bad.  But why should my be-ing root from my method of currency?

THAT feels inauthentic to me.



And having finally recognized where I feel most inauthentic, where I struggle feeling ok with my be-ing as equivocal to my income, is where I can finally interrupt that fear-based loop-feed with honesty and even brand new reason to fear, and say,” Fuck fear.”  Fuck it, because it won’t go away until you’ve seen it through to its end.  Fuck it (literally), because once you’ve intimately and sexually known someone isn’t it more relaxing and fun the next time around?  And Fuck it, because there will always be something uncomfortable and scary.



Again, my authenticity is in my be-ing, not in my do-ing because so long as I am be-ing with intention and conscientiousness, then I cannot help but do.



And that is why I signed up for Yoga Teacher Training through Big Bear Yoga.  And I am still in pursuit of working under Sri Siri Dharma Galliano, my Kundalini teacher.  And, if you remember from my last post, I can already feel the wide open spaces of the universe stretching themselves for me as I am stretching myself for Universe.  See, I am already be-ing, thus I am already do-ing.  I'll leave it to you to figure out what that “really” means.  If you want.