I’m not sure when we all decided we were supposed to be so good at being human.
Think about it: we’re supposed to say the right thing, make the right choice. We’re supposed to have the difficult conversation with no anxiety whatsoever. Know when to stay and when to leave. Take care of ourselves but not be selfish. Be productive but also know how to rest.
Be present.
Be grateful.
Drink enough water.
Remember everyone’s birthday.
Get enough sleep.
The list goes on and on, and apparently, we should be doing all of this while becoming the best version of ourselves.
Um.. sure, no pressure there.
One of our teachers, Lara, described STAY HUMAN this way: “For me, staying human is like a dare to yourself.”
I love that word. DARE. Not a goal. Not another thing to get right. A dare to let ourselves be exactly what we already are. Human. Which means we are going to get some things wrong. We’ll say something and wish we had said it differently, change our minds. Lose our patience. Forget something important. Take things personally that weren’t personal. Make a choice that seemed right at the time and discover later that it wasn’t. We’re going to have really good intentions and occasionally execute them terribly.
That last one might just be me, and yes, I’m owning it.
Lara went on to say, “When we remember that we’re human, we all make mistakes. We are here to live life fully.” I keep coming back to the connection between those two things. Making mistakes and living fully. Because somewhere along the way, we’ve gotten very good at presenting the parts of our lives we’ve already figured out. We can edit the photo. Rewrite the caption. Delete the text before we send it. Think about our answer before we give it. We can polish so much of ourselves before anyone else gets to see it. And honestly, some editing is probably a good thing. But what happens when we start editing ourselves too? When we become so worried about saying the wrong thing that we stop saying what we mean. When we wait until we’re sure we’ll be good at something before we try it. When we confuse being self-aware with constantly monitoring ourselves. When every mistake becomes evidence that we should have known better. When we start looking at every part of ourselves and wondering whether it could be improved.
That sounds exhausting.
And yet, there’s an entire world ready to help us do exactly that. We can optimize our sleep, our mornings, our workouts, our diets, our productivity, our relationships, our homes, our skin, our bodies, our time. There is always another habit to build, something to track, something to improve, some slightly better version of ourselves waiting just on the other side of whatever we decide to work on next. Some of that can be useful. Of course it can. There are things we want to learn. Habits we want to change. Parts of our lives we want to understand better.
But what if we’re not a project?
What if every part of us doesn’t need to be worked on?
We’ve spent the past few weeks talking about evolving. Wanting something different. Discovering strength we didn’t know we had. Turning down the noise long enough to hear our own voice again. And there’s a temptation, even in all of that, to imagine we’re slowly working our way toward some better, wiser, more evolved version of ourselves. As though one day we’ll finally get there. We’ll say the right things. Make the right choices. Have the boundaries figured out. Know exactly what we want. Our morning routine will be flawless, our inbox will be empty, and apparently, we’ll FINALLY be drinking enough water.
I’m not holding my breath.
I don’t think there is a magical endpoint; I think STAY HUMAN gives us permission to leave room for those unpolished parts.
We see plenty of those on the mat. We wobble. We fall. We forget which side we’re on. We turn left while everyone else turns right. Sometimes we hear the cue, and our body does something completely different. Sometimes the teacher does too. And we laugh. At least I hope we do.
Because yoga can become another place where we decide we should be getting somewhere. A deeper pose. A stronger practice. Better balance. More flexibility. We can start measuring ourselves against the person we were last year, the person on the mat beside us, or the version of ourselves we think we should be by now.
Or we can just practice.
We can show up with the body we have today and see what happens. Lose our balance and come back. Take the modification. Try something and discover it isn’t happening today. Laugh when we go the wrong direction. Rest without making rest mean anything about us. The point was never to become the person who gets everything right, and evolving doesn’t have to mean polishing away all the messy parts either. We become more ourselves, not less. We get things wrong and learn something. We change our minds when we know more. We apologize when we need to. We laugh at ourselves. Try again, and we let other people do the same.
I keep going back to the fact that authenticity might have less to do with knowing exactly who we are and more to do with being willing to show up as we are right now. Still learning. Still changing. Still occasionally walking into a room and forgetting why we went in there.
Human. Full stop.
I really think Lara is on to something. STAY HUMAN really IS a dare. A dare to participate in your life before you’ve figured everything out. To try something you might not be good at. To say what you mean. To let yourself change your mind. To make the mistake, own it, learn from it, and keep going. To laugh when the moment calls for it, even if the moment wasn’t supposed to be funny. To live fully without requiring yourself to do it perfectly.
So, here’s something to notice this week.
Where are you so busy trying to get it right that you might be missing the chance to simply be in it?