Aren't we all in jail?

Everybody just wants to feel good about themselves. Consciously or unconsciously every living thing moves through their life searching for something to complete them. From the tinest germ's struggle for survival to the wisest beings search for enlightenment, life is a matter of each of us doing our time according to how we want to live it. I see these kids everyday struggle to just survive, whether it is a robber hoping to steal some contentment, a murderer trying to destroy his own unbearable pain of separateness. Bob Dylan puts it best--Steal a little and they put you in jail--steal a lot and they make you king. Today we are all faced with a world of insecurity. Through Yoga, these kids are finding some form of their real Truth. Which really is a study of who they really are and when doing yoga, they are faced with the reality of who they want to be. What is a paradox to me is that when I look at these kids, I see everyone, everyone of us are all really doing time until we find the freedom inside ourselves. These kids have the rare opportunity to study themselves through the looking glass of Yoga, and they are finding that they are strong, beautiful, wise, and worthy. A person's self worth is their greatest asset, and when it's lost we are a spinning vortex. A vortex searching for an answer to why we feel lost in our own skin.

These kids have a choice, everyday of how to live their lives, they are sharp enough to find the secret of making every choice a good one--along the way, they have found that their self worth is gone and therefore they don't care if their choices are good or not. This lack of self worth is self destructive and becomes a shell around the intrinsic goodness that is living inside them. Yoga is beginning to crack their shell and when the light from inside them shines though it is blinding.

The most important lesson that I have learned from these kids is that we are all seekers on a sacred, ancient path carved out by our trail guides-Budda, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses and the many great yogis, gurus, chiefs, shamans and countless men and women of every race, color and creed. We are all searchers of our inner Truth. It is our inner Truth that will inevitably set us free.