As products of our highly competitive and specialized society, with all its ladders and ceilings, neat compartments, titles, and categories, to remain in an expanded state can feel like swimming upstream.

Follow your nature. The practice is really about uncovering your own pose; we have great respect for our teachers, but unless we can uncover our own pose in the moment, it's not practice - it's mimicry. Rest deeply in Savasana every day. Always enter that pratyahara (withdrawn state) every day. And just enjoy yourself. For many years I mistook discipline as ambition. Now I believe it to be more about consistency. Do get on the mat. Practice and life are not that different.

You can't make yourself be compassionate, you can only keep stepping back and becoming a larger container in which compassion wants to live. The practice should open us up, and crack open our hearts again and again.

I believe we are capable of great things.

I don't think we find compassion. I think we become the space that compassion wants to live in.

The time to recognize the power of community is here again. Not as some romanticized renaissance from times past, but as a necessarily new and innovative response to "life as it is offering itself to us."

I believe myself capable of great things.