Pursuing Your Passion
Possible for the faint of heart? Worth it? Will doing it cause you to burn out once it becomes a necessary financial means to an end? Or will give you the most fulfilling life you could ever dream of?
I guess you don’t know unless you try. Sometimes, with pursuing Yoga as my passion and trying to make a career out of it, it seems like a distant dream more than a reality. Sometimes it feels more like a lofty vision that I get scared of and question if it will make me burn out in the long run. Is that just fear or is it truth? I’m gunna go with fear and pursue this dream relentlessly, hopefully it won’t make me want to me peel away from my passion.
Like anything in life, there are ebbs and flows. With passions, we flow in and out of motivation, inspiration, and discipline. Taking moments of heat in stride with the moments of rest. And on this topic, I think
Rest from a passion is just as important as the intense, focused moments of pursuing it.
Rest gives you perspective. Rest gives you space to learn how to fall in love with your passion again. Rest gives you freedom to be re-inspired. When you’re in the intense moments of pursuing a passion, you’re already so absorbed in that love and obsession that it can cause you to question if you really love it this much. When it become something you have to do instead of something you get to do, this is when rest is needed.
Pursuing a passion is scary. I have a lot of different ideas on the daily about different offerings, business directions, and/or content I could be making. Sometimes, I get so overwhelmed, I end up doing nothing because I cause myself so much stress swimming in all of the potential ideas, knowing I have time for only a few. Right now, with Youtube and this newsletter, I have many more ideas for offerings I’d like to bring to you. For example, I’m working on hosting Yoga in the Park in Pittsburgh every Saturday for a live in-person offering, but it’s weird - there’s almost this dread… this fear… that maybe it’ll take too much of my time away from everything else. That maybe it’s not what I need to be doing with my energy, maybe no one will show up, maybe I shouldn’t even offer it…
Fear or Reality?
I’m gunna go with fear. Again. And push through. Let’s see what happens come end of summer after hosting a Yoga in the Park class every Saturday. Maybe there will be nobody and I’ll get an extra hour to practice for myself to shoot content (which wouldn’t be the worst)? Maybe I build a mini community of cool people that turn into my friends? Or maybe I realize I need to be offering this more or less often? When I think about it like this, it really seems like a no-brainer and that I should absolutely do it, because all of the outcomes seem to still fall in my favor.
Pursuing your passions looks like this ^. Should I do it, should I not? Is it worth it, is it not? Do I love this enough to try and turn it into a career or is this something I enjoy only as a hobby? Not always the easiest answers come to us in these moments of questioning, but if we’re questioning if we should pursue a passion or not, then, there’s already something there telling you, urging you, to give it a try… just the thought alone could be enough.
Meditation works like this. Once all thoughts clear and you reach the silent, calm lake, you make way for genuine inspiration that comes from without yourself. You learn how to separate yourself from the thought and come to realize that you’ve been given the thought because it was meant for you alone. You are supposed to see it, feel it, live it. You aren’t like everybody else. You have unique gifts and expressions to offer the world that no one else can.
You don’t have to be a special person to live a special life, but you do have to be willing to be crazy enough to push through all the bullsh*t, all the fear, and all the things in life that make everyone else average. Don’t NOT pursue your passion because you think no one else cares, or because your passion seems ‘basic’, or because whatever.
Do you know how many people have told me that the Yoga Industry is ‘oversaturated’? Or that “Anyone can become a yoga teacher these days”. They’re not wrong. But,
Who else teaches like me?
Who else has my voice?
Who else thinks the way I do?
Who else has lived my life?
Hmm? So I think I’ve made my point clear: nobody else has or does or ever will be you. Unless, of course, if we figure out how to clone ourselves, in which case, we’ll still probably be different somehow from our robot humanoid twins.
So are pursuing your passions worth it? Will it work out in the end? Are you strong and willing enough to walk the path? The best answer is that there’s no end, the journey is the destination. Learning to enjoy the ride and carry out living a life that is passionate, is a life worth living. You’ll never have regrets pursuing your passions and giving it your all, even if you have to file bankruptcy, because at least you gave it your all and challenged yourself to pursue your passion. Hell, maybe it even leads you to pursue another passion you never knew lived within you.
Right now, I’m working my 9-5 sales job, pursuing my passion on the side, slowly figuring it out one step at a time. It’s not a linear climb to the top. I’m prepared for the downspouts, for the moments when I have to descend and find a new route back up, but ultimately, it will still result in wisdom gained and for that, I’m rich with passion.
