Real Yogi...

​I heard the phrase "she's a real yogi" this morning and I felt myself cringe inside. I can remember a time when I used to aspire to be a "real yogi". A time when I felt I had to rise above my emotions because spiritual people don't get involved in such earthly experiences as feeling pleasure and pain. When I was constantly feeling shame for not being spiritual enough, not kind enough, not open enough, that I didn't dedicate enough time to my practice, that I wasn't perfect in every aspect of my life, that I wasn't enough. Nowadays I'm much more interested in being a real human with all my humanness and messiness. Being a real yogi often doesn't give freedom for mistakes, for messy emotions, for being the realist version of yourself as you're often too busy with your veil of spirituality wrapped over you, an aura of superiority over mere mortals that don't have a spiritual practice, that don't drink green juice and talk chakras, energy and crystals. I've been around enough teachers and "spiritual" people to realise that once you're elevated up on that pedestal it's a long way to fall down...and they do, every.single.time. Give me being a real human where I can experience the full experience of a human life of irritation, anger, jealousy, joy, sadness, elation, anxiety and happiness without it being frowned upon because you're "spiritual" and you should "rise above it" (whatever that means). Give me a real, juicy, messy human experience, totally grounded in reality, with no pretences and no airs, where I can acknowledge the whispers of my emotions as the important messengers that they are. Where I can mess up sometime because I'm human not some highly enlightened spiritual master. That I can have an off day and not be the most kindest version of myself possible and it's not the end of the world because it is all a part of the human experience, where we fail and we experiment and we learn and we grow and we fail again and experiment some more and hopefully learn and grow some more.