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Why Yoga And Your Thirties Are Awesome

Yoga | Yoga for Beginners

“You do not understand your features. Your features are not your beautiful nose, your beautiful cheeks, beautiful lips, and so on. These are not your features. Your features are your beautiful behavior, your beautiful character, your beautiful health, your beautiful spirit, your beautiful advice, your beautiful wisdom, your beautiful inspiration.”
~ Yogi Bhajan

I didn’t understand. I look back on my twenties, and I just didn’t understand this. I was always comparing, and doubting my abilities. My inner voice was unkind and critical. I never imagined that voice would ever get her shit together. Everyone was more beautiful, more intelligent…

Everyone was… more.

As I approach the latter part of my thirties, I can honestly and without hesitation say that these years have been transformative in the best possible way. I can now REALLY see myself. I see beyond myself, and I have a greater understanding of the vast beauty that each being possesses (including me). My thirties have offered a greater wisdom in mind-body connection, self-awareness, and the true journey within has begun.

Many readers will agree that age is nothing to be feared. If embraced with acceptance rather than resistance, age can bring us into the awareness of our true beauty and endless courage.

The Irony in Confidence

There is irony to confidence, and only in my thirties have I learned this. In order to feel confident, I have found that it is important to release the NEED to be seen as confident. Recognizing your soft spots and accepting them is not as easy as it sounds.

We want to feel loved. We don’t want to be judged for our flaws. Some of us go to great lengths to hide our true selves, and cannot allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Our thirties provide us the courage to be vulnerable. Most of us have already found our tribe, our career, and our path in life. We are more fearless in our vulnerability. Releasing the need to be seen in a certain way begins to slowly loosen its grip on our mind. This grip has immense power, but slowly, sometimes at a glacial pace, the negative voices in our head begin to quiet down.

We begin to step into awareness that it’s okay not to have all the answers. It’s okay to really own our uncertainties and soft spots. The more we acknowledge our uncertainties, rather than judging and resisting them, the more capacity we have to manage these less confident moments.

Life Has Happened To Us

There is such beauty in life experience. Difficulties and struggles are a gift. We only recognize this after we have felt that the pain has brought with it a powerhouse of resolve. If many of us think about the most trying times in our lives, we can honestly say that true strength and wisdom have emerged from our greatest struggles. Very often, we spend our youth conditioned to follow a certain prescription to happiness. These conditions often dilute our happiness because they do not resonate with our true desires. Often, major life decisions are made because we feel that our lives should take on a certain form.

With age, we free ourselves from these chains of how it “should” be and we begin making choices from our own life perspective rather than the perspective of others. As we experience our own perspective, we may find ourselves moving away from the archetypes that we once aspired to.

You’ve Found Your Tribe

As I write this, I realize that I am writing to my tribe; like-minded people who set similar intentions, seek the same awareness, and have committed to the same path. Finding your tribe can be difficult in our youth. Our tribe may change as we do through the years, or we may grow with our tribe as we empower each other on our own individual journeys.

In my thirties, I have found that there is a distinct difference between having a social circle and being “tribal.” If our relationships lack intimacy, and we feel that we cannot be our authentic selves in freedom and honesty — we are still seeking our tribe. Often, as we age and grow more comfortable in our own skin. We shed certain relationships from our lives that feel stagnant, and may weigh us down. Our focus begins to shift, and the people that we once gravitated toward may no longer be a vibrational match to our energy.

With age, comes confidence to be a bit more choosy, and not from a place of superiority, but from one of recognition and self-focus; we want support, shared interests, and freedom to be our authentic selves. As I grow older, I find myself walking through life among the beautiful people that I have found. I find myself fearlessly being a more honest version of myself, and becoming brave. I feel truly accepted and loved.

Yoga And Other Awesome Discoveries

The transformative effects of yoga to our physical, mental, and spiritual selves may not be uncovered until we are a bit older. From my own perspective, any physical activity that I focused on in my twenties was strictly to enhance my own physical beauty.

With age, we may begin to become more spiritually focused, our minds and bodies are in sync, and we are freed into a higher awareness. We feel more deeply connected to all that is around us and our awareness to the divine nature of our being expands. We begin to learn to love and accept who we truly are. We grow in freedom and become who we are meant to be.With growth comes the ability to affect all that surrounds us.

Yoga is a conduit through which this transformation is possible.

Every stage of life brings us to new perspectives. I loved my youth for exactly what it was, and cherish all of my experiences. As my thirties reach their last few years, they have revealed more wholeness, honesty, and courage. Age brings deeper mindfulness, increasing our capacity for acceptance.

Go ahead and celebrate your age! Have fun! Be fearless. You are only getting better. Believe it!

Featured in New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The Washington Post
Featured in the Huffington Post, USA Today, and VOGUE

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