Being of Power

“Don’t be fooled by me Don’t be fooled by the face I wear For I wear a mask, a thousand masks, Masks that I’m afraid to take off, And none of them is me.

“Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me, But don’t be fooled, For God’s sake don’t be fooled. I give you the impression that I’m secure, That all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well As without, That confidence is my name and coolness my game, That the water’s calm and I’m in command And that I need no one, But don’t believe me. …”

— CHARLES C. FINN

The lines above are from a poem called “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying.” It’s one of my favorites, because it cuts to the heart of the one thing so many of us do that blocks our power, which is to hide.

We hide behind our competency: our degrees, our knowledge, our advanced yoga poses, our successes, the things we’re good at … what makes us feel safe. We cover up our insecurities and fears because we’re afraid of showing anything other than the “everything is A-OK in here” façade to the world. That concern for looking good (and, conversely, not looking bad) drives so much of what we do. But it’s also what stands in the way of us being real.

Concealing at any level always comes at a cost: peace of mind, a sense of freedom, our health, or vitality in our physical body, to name a few. When we’re without authenticity, we’re not being ourselves—our energy is stuck. It gets contracted because so much is going toward covering up what we don’t want people to see; what we don’t want to deal with; or whatever judgments we have about not being good enough, smart enough, strong enough, or anything enough.

Imagine right now if you were to be open, undefended, and fully transparent in every part of your life. Can you picture how freeing it would be to give up all the pretending and just be out there, exactly as you are, without any masks? That might seem scary, but you’re here to transform, so game on!

The greatest source of natural power we have available to us is being ourselves. Our lives are transformed when we bring that organic way of self-expression to all of our relationships and experiences. Most of us already know that the word yoga means “union,” and to me the biggest union is the alignment between who we are at our core and how we show up in the world. When we drop the masks and live from our authenticity, we ignite our power and our whole life opens up.

I once saw a news story on Michael Jordan in which he talked about how he would review his performance after each basketball game. He would watch tapes of himself and only look for one thing, which was where he was failing or his technique was ineffective. He didn’t hold on to his mistakes as a sign that something was wrong with him. Instead, he saw them as an opportunity to up his game and grow in excellence. Seeing mistakes empowered him; owning failure was his pathway to greatness.

And even though we might not all be professional athletes, we live in the same “get the job done or fail” world as Jordan. Rather than deal with the possible embarrassment that comes with putting ourselves out there, we shrink away from being at risk and making mistakes. We instead give lots of justifications for why we should stay in our comfort zone.

For the most part, we have almost no training in how to deal with failure. Therefore, moving into the unknown is a threat to us. If we look up failure in the dictionary, it says, “The state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective.” How threatening does that sound? Not very, right? Well, that’s all it really is. But for us human beings, it’s way more emotionally charged than simply the lack of achieving a result. For us, failure isn’t about an unachieved task, a relationship that didn’t work out, or a poorly taught or practiced yoga class. It’s about what it means to us if we’re considered a failure and how others see us. There is only one thing worse than “I failed,” and that is, “I am a failure.” I am turns it into a declaration about our very existence as human beings, not a statement about how we showed up on the mat, on the court, or in the trenches of life.

All of that self-condemnation comes up, and we become afraid of taking risks or focusing on doing things right or not at all. But we have the ability to break free from that. We can embrace the possibility of failure. We can see it as a rich part of our learning process and trust that every breakdown leads to a breakthrough, to new pathways of action. Releasing that fear of inadequacy opens up a whole other level of freedom. And in freedom lies power.

I’m not saying this lightly, believe me. In my life today, I teach and speak in front of thousands of people. When I was younger and first started, though, presenting to groups was really hard for me. One of the biggest fears I used to have was of being perceived negatively. As soon as I walked into the room to begin a workshop or class, my hands would perspire, my heart would race, and I’d hear all kinds of self-critical commentary running through my head: You shouldn’t have said that. They don’t like you. You’re messing up.

When I started giving public lectures and teaching to large groups, I’d barely pull them off because my anxiety was so fierce. I’d lose my train of thought, rush my comments, or launch into performance mode because I was more worried about what people would think rather than being intentional and straightforward from the heart. I gave a good appearance of being competent and even authentic, but I really wasn’t because I was so consumed by my concern for doing it right. Generally, I was fearful during the entire experience, and this didn’t match the picture of how I wanted to be. I’d do my best, but that was very different than being myself.

What I didn’t understand at the time was how primal this concern for looking good was and how it was blocking my natural expression and ability to speak from the heart. Standing up and presenting to a group was threatening to my very survival—not because my body was in real danger, but because it carried the risk of embarrassment.

It took me many, many years to feel comfortable in my own skin, and it was ultimately the practice of learning to dissolve the fear when it came up that helped me get past this issue. I would practice identifying and locating the fear in my body, and then feeling and experiencing it fully until it loosened its grip on me. I was able to practice this whenever it came up and finally discovered the freedom to fully express myself from an authentic place. Little by little, I broke through my apprehension and found my rhythm. Eventually, I started loving the experience of connecting with people and sharing ideas and transformational practices with large groups. Today, I feel a genuine sense of ease and flow when I’m in front of a crowd, be they made up of 10 people or 10,000. It’s just me up there, expressing fully and sharing what inspires me without any sense of constraint.

Why on earth would you resist being of power? What’s to be feared that would make living in a comfort zone more appealing? Like me, you’re probably up to some extraordinary things and being bold in certain areas, possibly even empowering others to do the same. That’s not in question. The bottom-line question on the table is this: Why do you resist being fully in your power in all areas of your life?

The answer is actually very simple. You, me, and human beings in general resist the clarity and power that come from being, living, acting, speaking, and creating from our authentic truth so that we don’t have to deal with failure. Rather than risk looking bad, we will sacrifice what’s in our heart.

As a young yoga teacher, I cultivated my own way of sharing my practice in a form that inspired me. For the most part, no one in the traditional yoga world understood me: They tended to shake their heads at me and what I taught, telling me that it wasn’t yoga, spiritual, or deep enough to last—that Baptiste Power Yoga would be a passing trend. I took a lot of hits and had a lot of failures along the way, but I didn’t stop. I knew I wanted to create a system and a new kind of revolutionary work in the world of self-development and transformation. I wanted it to have commercial value so that it could reach a lot of people, especially those who typically would not have access. So I kept following my heart and what felt true to me.

My parents, Walt and Magaña Baptiste, were my primary mentors and models for how to stand in the face of scrutiny and criticism. As a kid, I watched them both go through the fire as pioneers in the world of holistic health, modern yoga, and spiritual transformation. Growing up around Dad’s work as a revolutionary personal-development guru seemed perfectly normal to me. But to the real world it was unusual and definitely before its time, and to most it bordered on the bizarre. It seemed to me like my parents were offering something of such great value to people, so it was difficult to understand all the resistance.

For me they modeled being a yes for what matters most in one’s heart and giving up the concern for what people think. They taught me to let people throw stones but keep my eyes on the prize of what’s possible. You will fail, but when you’re committed, you don’t quit. You find a way to make those failures strengthen you. You take the lessons and up your game.

Being who you truly are in your power without the masks means stepping outside the sea of the same old thing and risking having others judge you or even see you as less than perfect. It’s unavoidable that growth is messy; if you put yourself out there, you’ll absolutely have difficult moments. There’s no risk in hiding and playing it safe, and there’s also no power.

So what if you fail? Can you take risks and use failures and mistakes as opportunities for learning and upping your game? Can you create new pathways and possibilities for yourself, knowing that some will work out the way you imagined (or even beyond that) and some won’t, and make it your practice to allow for both outcomes to be enlightening stepping-stones to what’s next? Can you give up the concern for looking good, knowing that it’s what stands between you and your ability to evolve?

In order to create new pathways in any area of your life, you must get real wherever you haven’t been. Acknowledging what’s stuck and telling the truth about where you’ve been wearing a mask opens up new energy to flow in the present.

The problem is that most of us refuse to admit that we are not being ourselves in the areas of our life that matter most. Automatic denial keeps us from seeing any inauthenticity that’s the source of resistance and causes stuckness, and this is where we need to dig deeper and find the courage to risk getting real with ourselves.

Regardless of how you feel about it, any area of your life where the energy is stuck or contracted or you feel disempowered has some inauthenticity present. Perhaps you can’t see it, but it’s there! If you can locate and tell the truth about it, you access great energetic freedom. It opens up the future like blank pages in a book, available to be filled by new ways of being.

Being inauthentic is not bad or wrong—it’s just not real. Without blame or embarrassment, your practice here is to confront, layer by layer, one after the other, each area of your life that lacks genuineness and start coming clean about it. The breakthrough occurs by getting into action and restoring transparency and truth. If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t like looking at the areas where you have been insincere and how this has impacted your life in unwanted ways. But I know that not looking at them won’t make them go away. I’ve learned that looking at the ugly stuff and taking responsibility for it is an essential practice for living an extraordinary life.

Consider just for a moment that every bone in your body is inauthentic. I’m not saying that it is, but just consider it for a moment. Start from the idea that you’re not being yourself in every area of your life. Go through your whole being, bone by bone, each one representing an area or a relationship, and ask yourself, “Am I hiding here? Am I pretending things are one way, but really they’re another? Am I being real, or am I acting?”

The point of this exercise isn’t to make all sorts of judgments or condemn yourself, but to set yourself free. So just put the chastisement aside, and get really clear about where you’re hiding and pretending and where you’re being real. Go through your entire existence: your relationships, your work, your family, your health, your financial life, how you show up in groups of people and the world at large—all of it. A big clue that you’re caught up in the concern for looking good is if you’re burned out, stuck, deadened, resistant, or experiencing a loss of purpose or inner peace. That’s a signal that somewhere in there the real you is missing. When you feel that way, your energy flow is blocked in some way, and that leaves you drained.

I’m not saying that it’s easy to call ourselves out like this. Believe me, I get it; we’ve put a lot of energy into covering up our insecurities or whatever other flaws we don’t want people to see. One of my students recently said, “I feel embarrassed being straight with people. I don’t want to admit that I don’t have it all together the way they think I do.” It’s like that for many of us, and that’s why we keep wearing masks. We want others to admire us. So why would we own up to things that would get us anything other than admiration?

In turn, we just start pretending, and before long we forget we’re doing so. It’s similar to wearing glasses: You’re aware that you’re using them when you first put them on, but when you do all the time, you forget about them. You see through the lenses, and although they’re altering your vision, you somehow don’t remember that they’re there. You forget that you’re pretending, and in your mind this perspective becomes who you are.

These filters control and limit us, because we don’t even know what we don’t know. When we bring one into view and say, “Hey, yeah, I’m not telling the truth” or I’m pretending here,” suddenly now it doesn’t have us in its grip—we have it. We hold it differently because we’re aware; we’re awake to ourselves not being real.

It’s way more powerful to be conscious of yourself as a fraud, if you are, rather than hiding the fact that you’re not. Pretending is toxic, and it’s the energy of disease. Do you want to create inner peace, freedom, and an empowered life that’s full of true joy and happiness? Then make it a practice to be real, shoot straight, and tell yourself the truth from a context of empowerment.

When I got to a point where I started to really see how I’d been treating my family and the people around me, it was as if a light switched on. I got it. Similar to that moment when the meaning of a joke dawns on you and you laugh, I had this “aha!” moment and suddenly saw where I’d been out of alignment. I realized that up to that point I’d been living in a world of blame, fault, and resentment, and now I was able to clearly see the cost and impact that all of this had on my life.

A deep sadness ran through me … really deep. And also a kind of gladness, too, because I thought, Whoa, it’s a relief to see this now. I saw it as good news. The truth really did give me a new sense of freedom. Waking up to it allowed me to finally begin shifting out of my false self. In my heart I knew I had a lot of talent and gifts to share with the world, but the constraint of all the self-imposed drama and conflict I carried from my past had greatly limited my power and self-expression. I simply hadn’t stepped it up to the degree that I’d wanted to. Out of the discovery that I wasn’t being real, I was free to be myself and fully commit to new practices and clear new pathways. I started to show up for myself as more powerful, connected, and aware of the potential for flow in my life. Much the same as when I was a young child, I started to believe again that anything is possible.

It’s empowering to be in a place where you can be real with everyone in your life. Otherwise, you’re betraying yourself, which is a big hit to your vitality.

The lighter side of this practice of examining every energetic bone in your body is that you’ll simultaneously realize all your genuine qualities. You get to look at some and say, “Oh, this one’s authentic, actually. This one … okay, I like that, it works. I like how I’m being in my [work, relationships, connections with people, and so on]. But this one over here … no, that’s not powerful and doesn’t serve me. That’s a place where I’m hiding and want to uncover my freedom and power.” Go through and see yourself clearly, and then, from that vantage point of clarity, you can see what’s fulfilling you and also the work you need to do.

Where are you hiding? Where do you pretend? What are you covering up? And, most important, at what cost?

“I was always worried about people finding out that I wasn’t good enough,” shared Susan, a 45-year-old mother and workshop participant. “I was worried about having to cover everything up, and by doing that, I was keeping myself from having true connections with others. Here I was surrounded by people I loved, and who I knew loved me, but I felt so lonely all the time because I wasn’t really being myself when I was with them.”

I’ve heard countless students talk about an endless array of “flaws” that they’re afraid of exposing. They’re afraid of just being themselves, because they think others will judge or reject them. You may not think that your friends see or feel it when you’re hiding something, but at some level they do. People can sense everything, and whether consciously or not, on some level they know when they’re not getting the real you.

If someone gets too close, we panic that they’ll see what’s underneath the mask, so we go right into survival mode. We defend ourselves, create distance, resist, avoid, even wave the phony “peace, love, and compassion flag.” We keep others out by making sure we look good in their eyes. If our strategies fail, we default into making them wrong. We think we’re protecting ourselves by putting up walls, but in reality we’re the ones creating our own prisons.

In some of my leadership and teacher-training programs, we do an exercise where we have participants stand up in the front of the classroom to face the group and teach. Suddenly, I’ll call out, “Pause.” Then the trainee will simply stand there not saying or doing anything, but just looking at the individuals right in front of him or her in the classroom. Almost immediately, those who are “on display” start fidgeting, giggling, and averting their eyes—anything to not have to look at the people in front of them, and in turn because they’re being seen so simply, intimately, and without pretense.

But they stay. (Well, they stay because they have to … it’s part of the training. I’m guessing about 95 percent of them would run if I gave them the option.) Then they hold a gaze with the other participants without talking. The intention is to really see each other.

What starts to happen as students do this exercise is that the masks drop and the protective walls they’ve built up over the years start to dissolve. They stand as a mirror for each other as all the pent-up, stuffed-down energy comes up and out, until they find themselves standing there with their pure humanity exposed. If it sounds scary, that’s because it is. There are plenty of tears, laughter, and sometimes even raw, wracking sobs; being seen in this kind of way causes all kinds of breakdowns and breakthroughs. But always there is a shining release of energy and a palpable sense of lightness at the end.

Jessica, a 21-year-old participant, described her experience this way: “I’ve always compared myself to other people. I judge myself and make myself inferior … I’m not smart enough, not thin enough, and not educated enough. All these things constantly go through my head. Connecting with others in this exercise was really hard for me at first, but when I started seeing them beyond just their surface appearance, I realized that we can get and give incredible power from each other when we stop hiding. It didn’t matter anymore what I looked like, what I drove, or where I went to school. I can be myself, and I don’t need to hide. All that judgment feels as if it’s gone now … like I can exhale and suddenly see my whole world through new eyes.”

Now that is a breakthrough! A breakthrough is when you step through some energetic veil to where what was limiting you is now behind you and you’re standing in a completely new space. Creating fearless connection with others in your life transports you out from behind your self-created walls. You discover the ability to relate to people more deeply and from your purest, fullest, most unfettered way of being.

Now, I get that you’re not going to walk around looking deeply into everyone’s eyes. I mean, that would be weird. The way we break down the barriers is through an even simpler practice: being transparent and telling the truth from the heart. Always. Everywhere. With everyone. Try that on for a minute. Imagine how freeing it would be to not have to keep pretending that everything is okay, that you’ve got it all together and figured out. To some, that might seem like a weakness, but this kind of transparency is actually a huge source of strength, because all your aliveness is no longer bound up in creating smoke screens. Great reservoirs of energy become available to you as you stand front and center in your power and are straight in your communication.

This is the practice I offer you to take on. Begin to tell the truth to yourself about where the energy is stuck and where you are hiding, pretending, and lying in your life, intimate relationships, work environment, and family or home life. It’s important that you do this without embarrassment and without invalidating yourself or anyone else.

From this position of bravery and clarity, move into action to get the energy unstuck in those areas by restoring your genuine self with people. Have heart-to-heart, face-to-face conversations, and acknowledge where you’ve been withholding how things really are for you. When and where it’s needed, apologize, ask for forgiveness, appreciate the good things someone has done for you, and hold out a new promise for your relationships and what you are now committed to bringing in that’s new (as in, “I am now committed to being

with/for/to you”). Open up the communication with the individuals you need to clean things up with, and create new pathways of relating that empower.

What you want to get here is that this is a practice—a new way of being that you will embody with more and more mastery over time. If you have something to say, say it. If you feel tempted to lie or cover something up in the name of looking good or hiding, quickly remind yourself that inauthenticity never works. Never. It’s also helpful to ask yourself in those moments, “Do I really want to make a mess of my life again in this way?” and “What am I so afraid of, and what is it costing me?” Chances are that it’s costing you your power, peace of mind, and what you really want for yourself. By the way, something to consider is that other people are far less concerned with you than you might think. They’re all too focused on worrying about how they look in your eyes to worry about you.

It can seem scary at first to do this with individuals whom you haven’t had open, transparent communication with up until now. But I’ll tell you something that I’ve learned: You can actually create how other people in your life will show up around you. When you speak from the heart, you speak into the hearts of others. You relate to everyone else as if they have an open heart, even if theirs has been closed or bound up. The truth always stands up to anything, and we have to trust that. Transformed people are those who can be completely themselves, and they in turn create a transformed environment where truth and transparency can be shared and expressed freely.

One of the practices in the world of Baptiste Yoga is that we relate to people as if they are already in their power, whether they’re already there or not. We don’t focus on their stuckness or lack, but instead support them in realizing what they really care about and the results they want to achieve, in the process leaving them empowered with new practices. My point here is that if you approach everyone from a generous place—from your own open, truthful heart and with the intention of giving them power—then you create space for everyone around you to also show up in that way. They’ll hear you and, in their own way, start coming out of hiding and relate to you in a new way; before you know it, you’ll start thinking what a coincidence it is that you’re surrounded by all these like-minded people. But they may not have started out that way. Consider that your courageous heart opened theirs—that they mirrored you. Yes, you really are that powerful.

Once you begin shifting and come from truth when breakdowns, frustrations, or judgments arise, you immediately recognize that you don’t want to be participating in that negativity. You can stop the dynamic right there in its tracks and say, “I’m sorry. Let’s pause here. Let’s re-create this.” You lead the change.

But none of this—not one single piece—is possible if you’re hiding and not relating to others from your full truth. Where can you strip away the walls and stand face-to-face with those in your life, sharing what you’re committed to openly? Where can you inspire them and yourself to be up to something bigger, even in small and simple ways?

Perhaps you can get some clues by observing other people’s acts. Take the businessperson who declared years ago that she would be president of a big company one day. That requires a suit and briefcase, reading the business section of the paper each morning, and fighting like hell to climb the corporate ladder. To others like her, that “looks good.”

Or take the antiestablishment act—the young guy who decides that the conventional route isn’t for him and puts on the act of growing a beard, driving an old VW bus, and wearing beat-up jeans. He purposely has no money and goes against the cultural grain whenever he can. To others with the same or similar act, he “looks good.”

Then there’s the soccer-mom act—someone who is in the social whirl of carpooling kids from one sporting event to the next—or the street-gang act, the yoga-devotee act, or the yoga-teacher act. All of them have accompanying scripts to operate from—ways of communicating both verbally and nonverbally. It’s simply a matter of saying, wearing, believing, and doing the right things to keep the performance going.

It’s helpful to really take a deep look and get a clear insight into the mask you may be putting on every day. Where are you playing a role and using a predetermined script? And then, consider asking yourself: is this really even you?

A lot of us think that if we’re really good, organized, educated, and so on, then we’ll be in control of how we look. Deep down, we may carry the usual human insecurities of feeling unworthy, unimportant, and unwanted, so we create all kinds of “fix-its” to cover them up. They can include the amassing of degrees, knowledge, wealth, or status to show the outside world that we’re worthy. Yes, a lot of those things get us far in life, but underneath them the concern for looking good still has us in its grip. Accomplishment, achievement, and admiration show up as an empty package, because they’re coming from a reaction. We’re reacting to something on the inside: that little voice of doubt in our head that says we aren’t enough of something and that we need the right solution to change it.

Although we’re typically unconscious to it, the question How am I going to get approval? runs our lives. People even do it in yoga—aiming to do it well, correctly, and intelligently. Take, for example, 32-year-old Amy, who would throw herself full force into mastering anything she took on as a way of compensating for feeling deep down that she wasn’t good enough. So of course, she did that on her yoga mat. She practiced daily for years, and when she got to a point where she’d mastered the advanced poses, she actually had a flash of So what that I’ve gotten all these poses down? What does it matter? It was a letdown, since underneath, still, was the feeling that something was wrong and not up to par.

What she discovered was an essential truth of transformation, which is that creating fix-its to cover up our feelings of inadequacy doesn’t work. If you’re not operating from being and trusting yourself, you’ll just keep seeking more solutions, knowledge, skills, stuff, and beliefs that will fix the dilemma—which, in reality, is made up and doesn’t exist outside of the mind.

Pretty yoga practices aside, one of the areas where I see my students hide the most is in their speaking. A lot of them will show up to teacher trainings looking for me to give them a script. They want the ABC’s of technical knowledge that they can then take home and regurgitate to their own students. They may not realize it, but what they’ll get is a script to hide behind so they don’t have to be completely out there, exposed in the moment, and teaching from their creative force. To be creative in front of others is to be at risk, and the possibility of failure and looking foolish looms.

One student actually joked, “I’m frustrated, because I know you have ‘it,’ and I want you to give ‘it’ to me!” And yeah, she’s right, I do have “it,” but I have my “it”—my own sense of being myself; trusting my inner knowing; and being connected, alive, and creative in the present moment with a roomful of people. It takes a couple of days for students to realize that they’re not going to get a cookie-cutter script from me, and this forces them to inquire about what it really means to flow from their own power and sense of self.

Speaking from theory or repeating memorized facts is devoid of energy. There’s a huge difference between teaching as a technician versus an artist. One is by rote, the other by strategic intuition and inner direction. When we lack confidence as teachers (and we’re all teachers, no matter our walk in life), we tend to use our tool kit of knowledge as a shield: we rely on concepts, facts, learned knowledge, rehearsed speeches, and borrowed quotes. The problem with going on autopilot is that there’s no sense of heart. The zing of realness is missing … and is that really fulfilling you? To me, life has fun and spark to it when we’re inspired and operating from something deep within. The irony here is that the script that feels so safe as a way to sound brilliant is actually what’s keeping us from shining with true brilliance.

Perhaps you don’t teach yoga, but consider that you too have scripts you rely on. Most of us are wired up like a jukebox, except in this case it’s the world and people around us who put in the quarter and press the button. We automatically react and play the appropriate script to avoid failure in each particular situation. For example, when teaching a yoga class, we might play our “wise and knowledgeable” track; with our boss we may do a number that looks like “Mr. Dependable”; and with members of the opposite sex we choose our “charming and smart” selection.

You want to start listening for those scripts, as they may sound great and make you look good in the eyes of others but aren’t powerful because they aren’t creative; they’re reactive. You might use really nice, smart language, but where are you? If someone’s talking and everything they’re saying is really clever, witty, flowery—too perfect—then there’s something missing. They’re not sharing of themselves, really, and that’s stingy. When you give from your heart with generosity, that kind of expansiveness of being inspires others to align with something bigger within themselves.

One of the ways we awaken our power and participate in creating our reality is through what I call essential speaking. Essential speaking is about being intentional and communicating straight from the heart. It’s the practice of speaking from our own experience and self-discovery rather than from concepts and vague generalities.

Essential language gives voice to our personal experience: speaking from “I” rather than “we,” “all of us,” or just giving a theoretical overview of a situation. It’s far more powerful to speak from “I,” because it gives people a sense of you.

By their very nature, concepts and descriptions are dry and canned. They’re of the head, not the heart. There are two distinct ways to use language, and relaying concepts and theories is much different than sharing directly from your essence. A very spiritual communication between two people is when I have a total experience of you. I can hear your personal reality and what matters to you, not your opinions and descriptions of reality or simply your beliefs. I’m not interested in what you believe; tell me your inner experience. For instance, someone telling me about his or her belief in God isn’t very interesting, but an experience of God … now that holds something for me.

Essential language is transformative and sparks clarity, which generates a new conversation. It moves us from a state of vagueness and detachment (or even helplessness) into taking responsibility for how we’re showing up in an actual situation. For example, if people tell you, “My job is a nightmare and stressful,” they’re describing a scenario in their lives but not really putting themselves inside the experience. If they were to rephrase this using essential language, they might instead say something like, “I am frustrated by my relationship with my boss and don’t feel as if I’m being heard.” Now we’re getting somewhere! Just by making that small shift, you gain access to what’s really happening in concrete terms. You then generate an energetic flow and create new possibilities in ways to relate, communicate, and empower yourself now and into a new future. Instead of feeling helpless under the past-based, conceptual, story-land version you’ve been telling (“It’s a nightmare and stressful”), you’ve taken ownership of the experience and are freed to steer conversations and perceptions in new, energetic directions.

It’s the same for listening. Being of power requires that when in a conversation we focus on the experience of each other’s essence—the gold—versus the script. Most of us can’t really communicate powerfully because we don’t typically pay attention to and really get the speaker’s experience. Instead, we hear the little know-it-all voice in our head that evaluates the rightness or wrongness of the other person’s reality compared with our own. Distinguishing how you listen is the key to evolving the way you communicate. The power of essential speaking is born out of listening from a quiet space in your being.

I’ll share a story with you to show you what I mean. One evening in 2003, I was teaching a filled-to-capacity class at my institute in Boston. A few journalists from the local media were doing a story on the popularity of Baptiste Yoga, but they didn’t want to participate. They just wanted to observe me teach the class and take notes, so I set up some chairs for them in the back of the room. They were quietly talking amongst themselves as I was simultaneously leading the class, but clearly the conversations were vastly different.

From their seats in the back of the room, the reporters were taking notes about the yoga practice and what people were experiencing on the mat. They were assessing, judging, and making assumptions about what it felt like and describing what certain poses looked like, but they weren’t personally engaged in the practice or embodying the experience in a way that gave any access to the benefits of it.

The question this story brings up is this: what type of conversations are you having in your life? Are you on the mat, directing and elevating the energy, expressing from the epicenter of your own experience in ways that inspire creativity, flow, and power? Or are you just observing from the sidelines and talking about what’s happening around you, not making any real difference?

You know who has the hardest time with essential communication? It’s usually those individuals who are highly educated. When you know a lot, you’re naturally wired to speak from that base of conceptual knowledge. This was the case with Cynthia, a 22-year-old graduate student who participated in an exercise we do in teacher trainings around “What the training is about.” In it, participants write out how they would describe to someone at home what the weeklong transformational training is all about, as if they were talking to someone who had never given personal growth a single thought—a neighbor, for instance. The challenge is to say it in a way that not only makes sense to him, but also to have him walk away feeling as if the transformational results you experienced might be possible for him, too. This doesn’t involve convincing anyone or selling it; it’s about speaking plainly, concretely, and deeply from the heart without all the window dressing.

Cynthia carefully constructed her piece the way she would a term paper for school and then shared her letter with the group. Here’s what she said: “The teacher training program is based on the Baptiste syllabus, which consists of three elements: Baptiste Yoga practice, meditation, and inquiry. As the students move through the seven days, breakthroughs occur as they discover themselves and awaken their inner sense of power.”

You could tell that she thought she’d nailed it … until the feedback she got from another student was, “That was an A+ paper … awesome! You were very thorough in your explanation of what we learned here. But I don’t feel you, and I definitely don’t know anything about your personal experience, what inspired you, your breakthroughs, or if you had a personal transformation and how that impacted yous.”

Cynthia realized that she was so wired to present arguments in careful language that she glossed right over what was real and authentic. There was no passion or sense of personal triumph in her words. After a few tries, she whittled her entire essay down to one essential sentence: “Through getting on the mat, meditation, and engaging in a process of self-discovery, I was presented with powerful tools to immediately reestablish vitality and freedom in my body, leaving me with a new inspiration; awareness; and the attitude that I am surrounded with support and can live, breathe, and act from a place of all things being possible in my life.”

Bull’s-eye! It just clicked with people; you could see it on their faces. This woman had dropped the canned script and spoke from the heart. Essential language can give you that “aha!” It has the kind of dynamic, from-the-heart energy that can make you laugh or cry—it hits a nerve. Sharing from your heart affirms something in you and everyone around you. It affirms something real about humanity and what your life is ultimately for. It takes you over as soon as you express it, and it takes other people over, too. They can see themselves in what you’ve shared, even if their experience isn’t the same as yours.

You want to be someone who reaches through to people, and that doesn’t just come automatically. That’s the irony here: you actually have to practice being essential, because the world puts so many layers of “should” onto you. That clarity of inspired naturalness is under there, and you just need to uncover it and come out from behind the safety of your protective tool kit and the flowery, vague, story-land language. This kind of articulation starts to roll out a new pathway, and a fresh energy of presence opens up. When you drop your script, you can be intentional, dance with what’s right in front of you, and author from your authentic power.

This applies to every area of expression in your life. When you show up and are willing to speak from your heart, come what may, that authenticity communicates directly with other people’s hearts. Doing so creates an energy that inspires you and those around you into action. You can transform your entire life with this one simple practice of essential speaking.