THERE IS ENOUGH | Open your eyes, Open the world

I like to think that there's enough in this world for all of us.

This past year has challenged that a lot. In the past, and even still at times, I've played victim with a scarcity mindset thinking that there's a limit of what this world has to offer. In the pandemic we saw it manifest in toilet paper, thinking we won't have enough we bought out all the shelves at stores. In myself, I saw it manifest as I started my path to teach yoga full-time, I felt like there weren't enough classes to teach to make it happen.

We think if someone else has something, then there won't be enough for us, right?

Why do we automatically put ourselves in competition with one another? Are we bred from the beginning to think that this wide world will never be big enough for all of us to exist as we're meant to?

There's a healthy degree of competition that keeps us moving and fighting, but have we maxed out our competition where we now find ourselves at war with one another?

In marketing we see this played up over and over again: "Buy now!" "While supplies last!" "Only 2 remaining!". We're trained to see that everything around us is fleeting and in need of us clinging to our resources to make sure we're ok.

What if you knew you'd be ok regardless of what you had? How much would that fuck over their marketing techniques?

Probably a lot.

How do we rewire ourselves? Trust in abundance. Believing that this world is abundant can be hard considering what we're exposed to on the regular. What if we looked at our lives with the possibility that life has enough to offer each and every one of us? What does life look like, how do you feel?

For me, I see things becoming more accessible because we're no longer putting a ridiculous pay-wall in front of everything just because we need to get as much as possible to make sure we have enough in the first place.

When we believe we will have enough, the world starts to open up.

Yoga in a way has been taped off for those with "enough". Those who can pay for the right mat, the right look, and the right class are allowed in. I've seen it in practice in studios, and it never made sense to me. I first started practicing yoga at a gym and was hooked, I didn't know yoga studios were even a thing until I followed my favorite teacher, Jessie Davies, to an incredible space called "House of Yoga".

"Give what you can. Take what you need. There is always enough" still to this day sticks in my head. House of Yoga was built on that thought, the idea that the world and its people are already enough, so this space offering yoga was for them to take what they need without a set price tag. House of Yoga is a donation-based studio, which is kind of unheard of in the yoga-verse. Throughout my years of moving and finding new studios, I've seen more taped off studios that were concerned with getting everything they could from their community versus the studios like House of Yoga that are more concerned that their community is getting what they need and in turn give what they can to support that.

There's no guarantee when offering donation-based classes, there's just a willingness to believe that there's enough in this world for all of it to work. Without the tape of a price tag, yoga can be accessed by anyone needing it. And in turn, people who feel supported want to support what supports them. The world opens up.

When I decided I was going to run my own classes and eventually studio, it had to be with the belief that there is enough. So "pay what you can" really means just that. When we get obsessed with a price tag, with the thought that if I don't have it then someone else will, things begin to feel exclusive, and yoga is the least exclusive thing I can think of.

You want to show up and just lay there the whole time? DO IT.

You want to show up and do handstands and levitate? DO IT.

There's enough in this world for you to get what you need and for others to still have enough too. It starts with us believing and trusting in that first, and then allowing the world to open up from there.