Flaunt yourself free

Using the principles of burlesque, author Lora Cheadle’s new book FLAUNT! Drop Your Cover and Reveal Your Smart, Sexy & Spiritual Self helps women strip away everything nonessential that’s covering their raw, beautiful souls in order to reveal the sparkling goddess lurking inside. All too often, women have been taught to hide their true selves with costumes, characters, and masks, creating a persona to show the world that pleases others and acts as the ‘good girl’, doing what is expected. These layers may originally seem imperative, but all too often they begin to chafe and restrict, suppressing the true beautiful and unique spirit that every woman has.

Yoga: The Four Stages of Competence

FIRST STAGE: Unconscious Incompetence – Discovering Yoga

People come to yoga for many different reasons including fitness, mindfulness and stress relief. Regardless of the reason, yoga – like a true master – meets us where we’re at and takes us where we long to be.

For me, a long-time fitness aficionado, I came to yoga for continuing education credits. As an over-burdened corporate attorney and mother of two, when my gym offered me a free spot in a yoga teacher training immersion that would fulfill my credits all at once, I jumped at the chance.

I thought that learning yoga would be a great addition to my repertoire, but what I discovered instead was how to accept myself as I was, without ever achieving mastery.

SECOND STAGE: Conscious Incompetence – Studying Yoga

Walking into teacher training (which also happened to be my first official yoga class) I thought learning yoga meant learning the asanas. I did not know we would study the Yoga Sutras, go in depth on the Eight Limbs of Yoga, and spend a month journaling about the application of yogic concepts in our own lives.

As a lawyer, studying was in my nature. I loved researching, reading, and writing about whatever I was grappling with. And yoga was no exception! I dived in headfirst, learning about every tradition, series, flow, practice, theory or style I could. But the more I learned, the more I realised I did not know.

THIRD STAGE: Conscious Competence – The Arrogance of Yoga

As I improved, I began proving my competence, becoming judgemental in the process. My curiosity about the many forms of yoga was replaced by irritation. How dare they strip away the spiritual pieces, focus solely on the physical, and still call it yoga? Why were Americanised names used instead of the original, Sanskrit ones?

Who did these people think they were, and why wouldn’t my gym friends find a real yoga studio instead of going to the weekly, half-baked practices they were doing at the gym?

FOURTH STAGE: Unconscious Competence – Honouring Yoga

And then it hit me. My so-called competence and the way I tried too hard to master yoga was the problem — not other people’s practices or philosophies. Yoga is the master, and like a good master, it meets students where they need to be met.

In fact, a discipline as powerful as yoga can never be fully mastered and like it or not, I will be a perpetual student! Ironically, this shift allowed me to let go of judgement, embrace where I am (not where I want to be), and move into unconscious competence to deepen my practice.