Great art, great yoga, and great life; Can fail

What started as this blog World Between Worlds, the most abstract subject I have ever written about, is spreading itself through the rest of my life.

The existential questions I have been asking myself with regard to art – How do I keep it pure? What comes if I do not DO anything? Where does it come from? How can I get closer? – are the same questions I should have been asking myself in every area of my life!

I am just learning what that means, and the vast extend to which my life will be different, if I unlearn all the habits of control and by the book, the habits of grasping and molding and WILLING it into existence;
And start applying the same principles in every area of my life instead. The principles as I have understood them with art.
Let go.
Sit with it.
Let it come through you, not by you.

Let God or the Universe work through you. The entity called “the Genius” or the Genie.
Or, alternatively, but probably simultaneously, let the conversations you have, the things you read, the world around you and its collective consciousness (the Scenius, as named by Brian Eno) work through you.
But do not DO the work.

I m currently on a really big project, which you can describe as the rediscovery of yoga. After 20 years of being on a professional path of learning yoga, teaching yoga, and also practicing yoga without that joie de vivre that it had prior to that; How can I go back to not knowing yoga and let it come to me?
Can I get that beginner’s enthusiasm back?
Can I unlearn?

And if I have found “that” yoga back, that I lost two decades ago, can I then develop it from there?
Can I share it with others, or even teach it?

And what do I teach from this newfound happy place of doing yoga?
Do I teach yoga, or do I teach the love for yoga?
Do I instruct or do I inspire?

It was in this project of excavating my love for yoga, that I realized the answers to these questions are similar to the ones I have been asking myself for this blog.
My goal is to let yoga flow through me, like my writing flows out of me.
I wish for the incentive to go to the yoga mat, to be as loud, demanding, and relentless as my urge to write.

But also, and this is what I have done in writing and not in yoga;
I wanted my yoga to be pure, straight from the heavens so to speak!
And not have yoga tied up and tied down to things that were proper yoga, and things that were not.

If you want to follow this “journey excavating yoga” (from the ashes of my 20 year career!) you can sign up to my new YouTube channel
No Yoga with Suzanne Beenackers
And!
And you’re gonna love this, or at least I did, I m unlocking my YouTube vaults, hundreds and hundreds of vlogs but also yoga videos. And I m reposting them on the following blog:
Suzanne Beenackers Curated
So follow it for my curated video content, including yoga videos.

Once I understood my yoga had turned sour because I had learned to “do it properly”, and after watching my own yoga videos where I was not just doing it properly but I was totally rocking it;
I knew I would find my love for yoga back.
Once I understood what had happened, it lost its power over me.

I no longer mourned what had felt like two lost decades of studying and teaching yoga. No longer felt like I wasted 20 years that I would gladly tear out of my life like pages from a book.
I was okay with it.
Wrong turn, wrong path, not for me.
Let’s start again.

And because with regard to writing I did have the positive experience of how natural and in flow it becomes if you only write what comes out of you;
I knew what to aim for.
I knew what it was.
And was excited by the idea of letting go of the reins and letting the horse, or even better, the stallion of yoga run free!

The videos where I teach yoga, rock. You can see this woman is not going to drop the ball and mess it up.
This is yoga capital Y on repeat, and you know it.

Which brings me to the title of this blog post, about great art, great yoga, great life, being fallible.
It comes from Marina Abramovic, and I think I remember her having it from one of her teachers;
Great art can fail.

And this illustrates what the difference is between what I want, and what we know as yoga; Yoga as we know it can’t fail.
The yoga teacher can’t fail because the class is build up with a certain formula that will always give a “B+”
And a practitioner on their mats can’t fail because just showing up is enough.

But if you let yoga be pure and let it flow out of you, just like this blog post flew out of me?
It can fail!
Maybe what “comes out of you” is not recognized as a yoga class. Or maybe if you practice yourself, you are distracted or not in tune with what you feel, and you hurt yourself.

A yoga teacher letting go of the reigns and teaching purely from soul can fail, because he or she will not know what comes out.
And a practitioner can fail because they may not even find the flow, it may stay clunky. Yoga can even give you a headache. I ve had countless times when I felt worse after yoga, or quit because I was just disgusted being on my yoga mat.
It wasn’t until now that I realize that meant I was taking it seriously!
If I had stuck with a known routine, I would not have gotten so frustrated.

Another way to illustrate the difference, and the importance of work that can fail, is compare it to a craft.
You can only get better at a craft.
If your work is something you will only get better at as you age, like teaching yoga, like working with your hands (like a craftsman); It is a craft.
But if you can fail even after 30 years?
If you can fail it is art!

Before this blog post I spent time on a different blog post for my Rock Star Writer blog.
When I started I knew it was something I had never tried before. Even if I succeeded, I probably would not be finished until midnight or even later.
But 75 minutes later?
I pulled the plug.
Deleted the draft, but this is called “move to trash bin”, so for good measure I went to the trash bin and deleted it there too.

At first I was bogged down that I had wasted 75 minutes.
How could I have done that? What a waste! I have been writing for 15 years, I know how to write a blog post, I know how to keep the time frame limited.
I know what topics to avoid not to ruffle feathers, and I know which feathers I will never get tired of ruffling.

But then I relaxed:
With my new mindset, my new values, my new goal of wanting to be in flow, and letting things come out naturally;
The fact that I had started a blog post without knowing how it would end, or if I would be able to pull it off, was from now on going to be labeled positive!
It was a good thing!

I really like that idea of unlearning the rules of your craft, and of going to the edge accepting risks, and excited to see what’s up next.
Yes, it can be failure!

But, as Master Yoda said in Star Wars;
“The greatest teacher failure is.”

And, in all likeliness, the greatest art.

Suzanne L. Beenackers