Life Artist

One of the things that I absolutely love about my job is that I feel like an artist. I am a yoga teacher.  I don't paint, I don't compose music or write lyrics, I don't sculpt or woodwork.  I don't invent new yoga poses or words in Sanskrit.  I would say that I create sequences, but truthfully, it's all been done before.  What I do is I stand in a moment, with my feet on the floor and my heart wide open and I aim to create space.  A space for my students to breathe.  A space for them to feel, whatever it is that they feel in that moment.  I create an atmosphere of stillness and flow, from one breath to the next where living, complicated human beings can come and just be.  I create a space where if those same human beings want to step out of what they know and into new possibilities, they can do it, at any moment, in any breath.  The beautiful thing about this creation is that I am not the sole proprietor.  Every single other person that walks into the space, I am in Co-creation with.  It's actually why, I believe, that yoga, as we know it in the western world, thrives.  We long to be in the creation of our own lives when it can be really easy to let our circumstances take over.  We long to have a space and a community that is supportive and safe so that when we try something new and it doesn't work, we are held, and when it does work we have someone to celebrate with.  Human beings need other human beings in order to create anything.  The same way that an artist needs someone to see their art, a composer needs someone to hear, their music a writer needs someone to read their ideas, or a yoga teacher needs their students to take their class, we all need each other to see and be a part of our lives.  One of my favorite sayings from one of my teachers is "Be in the creation, rather than in the survival."   There are so many moments when we just survive to get to the next moment.  Where we do what we need to do in order to complete our days work.  What about our lifes work?  Each breath that we take is part of something bigger than just that one breath and so the more of them that we can take while being in the creation of our lives, our happiness, our truth, the more we weave together a life that is filled with happy, truthful, completely living in the moment breaths.  So what if we all took on the title of artist?  Whether our actual title is Mom, Dad, Teacher, Doctor, Lawyer, construction worker or yoga teacher? What if we looked at our life, our breath, as the canvas for possibility to be created through thought and action?  That all of our lives are to be seen by one another, not to be judged, but to be shared?  We could all look at each other's daily creation/life as a unique contribution that makes up the greater piece of art which is every single day in and day out.  Too Granola (as my hubs likes to say)?  Perhaps.  But hey, I'm just doing my part of the art :)

---