What if I told you that you are more courageous than you think? Would you believe me? Because it doesn't take a Captain Scully land-your-plane-on-the-Hudson brand of courage to be brave. For some, getting out of bed may be brave. For others, driving on the beltway at rush hour may be brave, or making a phone call to an old, distant friend. What’s certain is that any task can require bravery of someone, no matter how conventionally “easy” or "everyday" that same task may seem to someone else.
Each of us is a finely-tuned individual being, with a custom calibrated courage meter, which makes it pointless to judge the guts someone else needs for a task at hand. There’s also no point in judging ourselves, especially against an arbitrary set of standards that can set us up for feelings of disappointment or failure.
As Brené Brown reminds us in her work on vulnerability, the English word for courage derives from the French word, coeur, which means heart. In others words, maybe courage is simply resolving to face the present moment with an open heart.
Want to find your own brand of courage? A yoga and mindfulness practice has a bottomless well of bravery benefits, because it's in the realm of self-inquiry and compassionate attention that we can discover just how remarkably courageous we are to face these uncertain days with the whole of our tender hearts.
~ Annie Moyer