Fear can hold you back from so many good things.

When you live in the land of coulda, shoulda, woulda, you miss out on a lot of good things in life.

When you shed your fear and step into your true confident self that's when you really start living and loving life. (I believe your true confident self is already inside you).

When I first took yoga I was the one hiding in the back row and always did exactly what the teacher said to do, nothing more, nothing less. I followed blindly because I didn't know how to listen to my body.

I thought the teacher knew best, that their cues were the only way to do a pose.

I believed this external source had to know more than me because I felt confused, lost, and anxious inside my head.

I looked for external validation that I was doing each post right. Yet yoga is so much more than the shape of the pose.

The more yoga I took the more I began to feel and understand my body.

That meant I started asking questions. I asked my teachers after class to explain a pose or check my alignment to see if I was doing it right. One instructor after class helped me with my chaturanga. (If you don't know what that is, it's the yoga push-up-looking-thing). They're quite hard to do. The teacher tried to explain it to me. I kept rolling my shoulders forward and she kept stopping me, but there was something either in the way she was explaining it or the way I was disconnected from my body.

Chaturanga didn't click for me. That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t a good pose for me to do.

Fast forward to when I'm in yoga teacher training and we do a whole chaturanga breakdown. It still confused me. It still didn't feel great in my body. I learned it was okay to customize my yoga poses so that they worked in my body. For me that meant skipping chaturangas all together (if you’re curious what I do instead, I hold high plank and then push back to down dog).

I give myself permission to listen to my body.

I don’t have to do every pose the way the teacher told me to do it. I don’t even have to do every pose. That’s how I teach now, I offer permission to my students to listen to their bodies and customize for them.

When you connect with your inner knowing self, you unlock wisdom.

The more you move your body in a way that feels good to you, the more you release.

Meaning all the tension, trauma, and stress gets to leave your body when you move in time with your inner being.

You don’t have to do yoga, if that’s not your thing.

You can dance, run, jumprope, lift weights, or any other type of movement that leaves you feeling grounded, connected, and whole.

Those are the feelings to seek out in your movement practice, whatever it might be.

What ways do you love to move your body?

Want to experience one of my yoga classes? I teach online on the last Sunday of every month. Join me for CommuniTea Yoga where we yoga and journal together. The next one is Sunday July 31st at 9:30am-11am PST. Register Here for CommuniTea Yoga

Kerstin Phillips is a Life Coach & Yoga Instructor, E-RYT 200 living in Berkeley, California with her daughter, husband, and kitty, Pesto.

She loves to journal, read, do all things yoga, and hike in Tilden.

Kerstin guides women and non-binary folx out from the shadows so they can embrace their true selves, feel confident in their decisions, and define their purpose, because everyone is valuable and no one deserves to be overlooked.