When I was setting up various tools for generating traffic to my website, I recently searched for the most used keywords surrounding the theme of my teaching message.

One of them was “be graceful with yourself”, which I instantly fell in love with. How much tenderness, self-knowledge and self-love lie in this short sentence?

Be graceful with yourself…

What does that mean? What does that include? How am I graceful with myself?

What always helps me identify more of the meaning behind the words is looking at the language itself - looking for synonyms like:

Agile, nimble, light-footed, fluid, smooth, elegant, limber, flowing, aesthetic, artistic, charming, easy, effortless, elegant, polite, neat, tasteful, to name a few.

Isn’t that precisely what you want to learn and find inspiration for yourself here?

• to move light-footed, fluid and elegant on your yoga mat

• to flow aesthetically and easily

• with smooth, effortless transitions from one posture to another

• to practise elegant and tasteful yoga classes

But “be graceful with yourself” doesn’t end after your practice when you step off your yoga mat. It touches your whole being, your whole life.

Transfer into your daily life

So how can you transfer what you practise on the mat to your life off the mat?
Can you integrate your whole existence into “being graceful with yourself”?
Let’s take one of the synonyms and look at “being charming” with yourself – what does this mean?

• Being polite and neat toward the Higher Self rather often treated as though it was the lower?

• Living your life effortlessly and with ease and not forcing things.

• To loosen the grip and flow.

Do you recognise a relationship between how good you are in flowing gracefully on your mat and living your life with grace? What is hindering you on your mat? Where are your blockages? Do they have something in common with the limitations in your life?
In other words, can you learn how to be graceful with yourself on the mat to establish the same inner attitude towards yourself off the mat?

gaining self-knowledge through movement

I always believed that we humans could get to know ourselves more profoundly through and in our movements – and in physical efforts in general. Moving my body and observing it in motion has always been one of my best innate teachers.

Taking a step aside and looking for similarities has been an intellectual game for me throughout my life.

How do I meet my limitations? How do I talk to myself when things get challenging? How do I cheer at myself to motivate me to push beyond my edges? How do I accept the state I am in my never-ending process of learning and evolving? How quickly do I give up? How close can I get to perfection -knowing that this doesn’t exist – but anyway?

I must admit that I am much better at being graceful with myself in my practice than in my life. My body teaches me through sensation and feelings what is right and wrong. I can rely on my intuition entirely in the context of my body and the way it wants to move. I feel its urges very clearly. And then, I work on the gaps to close them so that I can do the movements my body longs for.

But in my daily life, there is still so much to learn. Although I know that I can fully trust my intuition and gut feeling, I don’t always follow. I am still resisting the easeful flow of life in some ways. I don’t am aware of where and how. But I can recognise a clear difference of how graceful I am with myself on the mat versus off the mat. I am less patient…

Call to action

Be graceful with yourself. That is a call to action of glad acceptance and love for yourself. It is an act of reparenting yourself wholeheartedly. Of forgiving yourself, your past and all the things, you may depict as mistake or fault. And it is also a call to action for how you meet yourself in the future.

Be charming, neat and polite with yourself to flow with elegance and ease in artistic aestheticism. In other words, be graceful with yourself.

What does that mean for you?

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