Be the star you are!

London is dark. It’s raining. So how come I feel like a seed reverberating underground, ready to shoot forth new green shoots?

Part of me thinks it’s best not to ask. However, the yogi in me can’t help it.

Here’s my theory: last year I spent a lot of time going inside, asking questions of myself. Why yoga? Why teaching? Why this, let’s own it, craziness?

I got answers, I got more questions, I got a frown and a smile. What I mainly got was a deeper awareness of myself, what does motivate me and why I do come back to the mat day after day.

The reason is pretty simple. I got to be the person I always thought I was inside but never quite knew how to be. It’s not like yoga changed me, more like it unveiled me. In a good way, not an emperor’s new clothes way. I’m not there yet, no way. Where I am though is at a point of no return, again... in a good way. This is the point at which my mind quiets and I move from a place of deep inner knowledge. Definitely not every moment, I do travel on London Underground daily and I am human. Although I do now have knowledge and a memory of feeling this amazing, like that seed ready to burst forth my heart yearns to know itself and connect with every other heart. Yoga gave me the ability to be the person I always thought I was but never knew how to be. It’s that simple, that complex and always evolving.

However, that’s a bit of a mouthful though and I spent a number of weeks rolling it around in my mind, trying to put make it clear, universal. One day, I was on the train, flicking through my ipod and My Way by Ian Brown came up. I love that album, I love Ian Brown. He can’t sing and he can’t dance and yet... oh yet, he’s like a magnet to me. I can listen over and over and over to those tunes.

My favourite song on that album is called Stellify. It’s a crazy song with a beat and the accompanying video is basically him and a brass brand marching around Manchester. I guess harking back to F.E.A.R. when he rode a bike backwards around Soho. Something about it sucks me in and makes me play it again and again. Brown says it's the first love song he's ever consciously written.

It struck me that morning when I played that song. That’s it. That’s why I do yoga, why I keep doing yoga and why every time I teach I wish to transmit that feeling. Stellify means to become starlike, to be a star. The paradox that we are stars, each and every being, we just get to shine even brighter and connect like a constellation around the earth. Like so much else, what it boils down to is love.

That's it, be the star you are!