A post shared by Kino MacGregor (@kinoyoga) on Jun 4, 2017 at 1:58pm PDT

I remember when I first started doing yoga.

I would look at people who could do all the poses that I couldn’t with a kind of envious wonder. Whatever they had, I wanted but I didn’t know how to get it.

It’s easy to think there is a limited amount of success to go around and that when someone else succeeds it means you will fail. But it’s not like that. We are each designed to live extraordinary lives, destined for happiness and love.

Circumstances may seem to hold you back and get you frustrated. You might look longingly at others that seem to live in ease and be filled with envy.

When I first started teaching yoga, I saw other people effortlessly getting jobs teaching classes while no one wanted me. When I wanted to make yoga videos, people told me I wasn’t experienced enough, pretty enough, or tall enough (I hated that one!).

But I kept going. I kept believing in myself just enough not to quit.

And I did something really important to change my own thinking: I started to make friends with the people that I was jealous of. When I reached out and met the real people that I envied I saw something—they were just like me, they had their own struggles, their world wasn’t really better than mine.

Maybe someone could lift up and jump back but their life was otherwise in shambles. Maybe someone was a best selling author but they suffered from severe physical ailments.

Maybe you look at me and think I’ve got it all now. Whatever it looks like from the outside, I’m far from perfect. I practice every day, but I have a tweak in my shoulder and my hips feel tighter than ever.

My dad is in the hospital again with very little sign of a possible recovery. My heart breaks for this every day. My new business is off the ground, but we have so much more left to do and so much further to go. While the response has been overall good, there are also some haters who have called us names, discouraged us, and said all sorts of other nasty things about us just for daring to build our dream.

So yeah, I’m human and the struggle is real. I’m still learning to love and accept myself.

I don’t feel particularly good at any of it, but I have just enough faith not to never give up.

Author: Kino MacGregor
Image: @kinoyoga Instagram
Editor: Sara Kärpänen