what is yogic artistry?
I like to call myself a Yogic artist. I’ve never heard anyone else use this term before. It’s pretty clear that I just made it up. But why? Well I’ll tell you.
As an artist (which you probably are too) I’ve always struggled with my sense of identity, especially when it comes to my work. Am I just a painter? Just a writer? A performer, or more than that? Does calling myself by any of these titles mean I can’t also be considered a business professional? How do I describe what I do?
So, when I started studying Ayurveda, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it is I wanted to be known for.
Ultimately, after a long stint of meditations on the subject, I started asking myself: who do I want to be? What kind of person do I aspire to embody? And this line of questioning helped me a lot to formulate the term “yogic artist” that I use today.
Here’s what I came up with:
I want to feel calm, grounded, and relaxed at all times.
I want to be free to act upon my creative impulses.
I want to prioritize the movement of my body and the stillness of my mind.
I want to be perceived by others as being elegant, poised, articulate, and intelligent.
I want to live outside the norms of regular society.
I want to find myself surrounded by other artists, academics, entrepreneurs and yogis.
I want to create art from a place of love, expansion, and higher vision.
…and from this list, I took a step back, and thought to myself: this is half crazy, half noble, and completely unique and authentic to me. This energy I deliberately put out into the world deserves a worthy reflection that I can put into words. And, of course, as a professional I need something that can simply and succinctly describe who I am and what I do.
Working as an artist means I work in sales. There’s no way to get around this fact so I’ve pretty much accepted it. I have to put myself out there and not wait for anyone else to discover me. And a big rule in sales, is to make sure that you, your pitch, and your offers are simple and easy to remember. Well… I have a weird name, and I do so many different things, and my job description does not fit into any category you’d find in a drop-down list of careers on a demographics survey. What’s a girl to do???
Once, when I was feeling really confident about my business, I had a finance bro at a coffee shop tell me when I was 19 that I wasn’t even allowed to call myself an entrepreneur, because I wasn’t in tech or finance, and I wasn’t building a company that I could sell in a few years to make a few million dollars… so, yeah, I remained confused, and my career identity crisis continued on for a number of years after that! (Thanks a lot jackass).
Finally, after years and years of searching for myself, I landed on “yogic artist”. In hindsight, it’s pretty silly that it took me so long, because this whole time I’ve been doing the exact same stuff, just in varying degrees of effort. Just because I might take a season off from one aspect of my business, doesn’t mean I have to completely rebrand. But the solution was, for me, to find the words that could act as an umbrella to encapsulate all that I do. And YAY! I found it!!!
So if you’re new here, or a curious listener of the RNLE podcast, I’m glad I could lay it all out for you with context. Names are arbitrary and meaningless at the end of the day… but what you choose to call yourself has a direct consequence of how the rest of the world sees you in this moment.
My only advice is: to keep it weird. Keep it fresh. Do the impossible. Speak the unthinkable. And shock every last one of ‘em with what you know you are capable of doing. (Keep it to the good stuff, though! Karma is real).
Thanks for reading. I hope you can find the courage to create your very own unique and beautiful business and call it whatever the fuck you want.
Much love,
