Am I Fulfilling My Full Potential?

It’s so easy to slip and slide into believing that to be of the greatest service, I should be devouring and memorizing every ancient text I can get my hungry little hands on, that I should be learning Sanskrit as a second language, with perfect pronunciation, or finally upping the anty and getting serious about flying into handstand with full lotus, with my eyes closed and my cat balancing on my pinky finger, so I can start being of real service.

I trip over the nagging cut-throat wire of insecurity and end up contemplating if I’m fulfilling my full potential to be of deep service when five people instead of 55 show up at my class, or if four come on retreat instead of 40, or 100 instead of 10,000 read my blog.

I’ve caught myself, all trapped up in the numbers, all bound-up and bullied by my fear, by the stinging burn that somehow, I may just not be enough to offer what it is I’m trying to offer.

Bullshit! Buuuuuuuuuuuullshit! (Sometimes you just gotta’ call your own bluff.)

Self-doubt is a sabotagingly seductive trap, where you end up convincing yourself that the gems and diamonds you’ve packed into your heart, scavenged and saved from your life-journey so far, aren’t shiney or precious, or valuable enough to be of real service to anyone else out there.

You tell yourself that you should really be able to drop back into full wheel, flip over into handstand and land in kundinyasana before you become a yoga teacher, or write 1,568 more blogs before you call yourself a writer, or that you should have patience and peace down pat before you even utter a word that could potentially be of service to someone else, but that’s where the mind fails us, because it doesn’t take perfection to change someone’s day.

You convince yourself that your journey isn’t enough, your struggles, your surrender, your triumphs and your tribulations—not enough to inspire or comfort or give solace to someone else.

You forget, and you begin blindly believing that you need to look somewhere else other than within yourself for something worthwhile to offer, for something of real value to give.

But, there is nothing more valuable, nothing more precious, more rare, or more transformational that you could offer, other than you.

You, as you are, with your scars and your story, your pains, your tumbles and your glories, have the potential to share yourself and shift someone else’s life right now as you are.

Your greatest gifts aren’t hiding somewhere in scorpion pose, or in the trails of India (although they may); they’re not threaded through the mask of pretending that since choosing to be happy, everything is perfect and flawless and lovely and splendid in your life. They’re not hiding in more education, or more life experience, or in more of anything other than what it is you already have.

Your most valuable gifts, your most precious offerings, the best tools you have to help transform someone else’s life, are already right there, folded within you.

There is no one else who has been where you have been.
There is no one else like you who has what it is you have to offer.
There’s just you, only one you, so be you!

Just because you didn’t get five million hits on your last YouTube video, or because you haven’t written a best seller yet, or because only two people read your last blog, doesn’t mean you aren’t making a difference. It doesn’t mean you haven’t shifted someone’s life, or soothed someone’s heart, or brightened someone’s day.

Don’t waste anymore time waiting to be ‘more’ to start moving towards your dreams; don’t let any more opportunities for rawness and realness slide by, because really, you never know who you could help by sharing the gems of your journey…right now!

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Ed: Brianna Bemel