A morning yoga practice doesn’t do what you think it does.

It’s not about getting fit, losing weight or getting focused so you can achieve more during your day.

It’s actually about letting go of what you have.

Let me explain.

The world offers us endless remedies to our suffering – most of them require obtaining more than we currently have.

We often find ourselves lost in a forest of acquisition.

Just as you cannot fill an infinite void with finite things, you cannot uproot desire by feeding it more.

Desire is not undone by accumulation.

No amount of grasping can quiet the hunger born of forgetting the essential truth about one’s value.

Through meditation and spiritual inquiry, we endeavor to understand that truth.

We acknowledge the suffering of not having. We sit with it. And inquire, “What am I really longing for beneath this craving?”

Often, it’s not the object we desire, but a state of being: safety, connection, peace, belonging.

In the realization of our deeper longing, we realize how we’ve become attached to certain circumstances or people that we feel can help us fulfill these needs.

The question of the spiritual seeker is, “Why did I ever think someone outside of me would determine my value?”

You are suffering because you hinge your happiness upon the actions of another.

Your mind forgets there are other ways of meeting these needs, and you rely on one source for your supply.

In reality, there is an infinite supply of love, and it is ubiquitously available.

Morning sadhana is the process of cutting the cords that tie one’s contentment to things outside oneself.

We lay down our desires and responsibilities one by one until we are as naked as the day we were born… and in that space, we realize the truth:

There is nothing we ever needed to do to be “enough.”

The practice of non-attachment doesn’t mean we should shirk our responsibilities and stop caring about our loved ones – it means that we should take a few moments to let go of the external standards we measure ourselves against in order to be lovable.

We begin the day with a chance to be born again – to see the opportunity to love and see past the bounds of our own beliefs.

As the Tibetan Buddhist Tenzin Palmo once said, “We do our practice not to become something, but to let go of everything that is not true.”