You Are Radically Loved: A Healing Journey to Self-Love - Hardcover

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Rosie Acosta has studied yoga and mindfulness for more than 20 years and taught for over a decade. She hosts a weekly conversational wellness podcast called, Radically Loved. Rosie has traveled all over the world leading workshops, retreats and yoga teacher trainings. She works with a wide range of students, from those in her East Los Angeles community to Olympic athletes, NFL champions, NBA All-Stars and veterans of war. A first-gen Mexican-American, Rosie’s mission is to help others overcome adversity and experience radical love. She’s been featured in Yoga Journal, Well + Good, Forbes, The New York Post. She currently lives in the greater Los Angeles region known as The Valley. 
 

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Chapter 1

You Are Radically Supported

Radical Truth: Life makes no sense, but you can still find meaning if you try.

A shark in a fish tank grows up to eight inches, but in the ocean, it will grow to eight feet or more. The shark will never outgrow its environment, and the same is true about you. Our environment has a direct impact on how we grow and develop. What we believe, what we achieve, and how we go about achieving it are all dependent on what we've been exposed to. I always knew I would be a product of my environment. I just never imagined I would do anything about it. So, what's radical love got to do with it?

Radical love requires a courage unlike any other. It calls for us to believe in and become devoted to something that keeps us in this world. Devotion to our own self-worth creates a level of self-trust so that we can make better choices and live more fully.

Among the many reasons we practice yoga, mindfulness, and meditation is to cultivate more discernment and to understand ourselves, our choices, and others on a deeper level. We practice so we'll know what to do when we are not on the safe space of our mat or cushion. Feeling safe is the key, and at times our history can keep us from feeling that safety. When we understand how our history has influenced our mind and shaped our reality, we can begin to understand why we are where we are. If able and willing, we can reframe our thinking, change our internal dialogue and take the necessary action to change our lives. We can reframe our thinking and create a different environment even if, for now, it's only internal. We can change our perception and have a clearer understanding of what is best for ourselves, so that we feel more secure and supported in our actions.

What we think, what we say, and what we do matter. If you want to change, it's your responsibility to make that happen.

For me, changing my environment started when I got arrested. I knew that whatever decision I made after that point would set the tone for the rest of my life.

I was fifteen, standing with my public defender in the Eastlake Juvenile courthouse in Los Angeles. My mom sat behind me in the gallery, and I could feel her eyes burning into the back of my neck.

It was 1999. I was a sophomore in high school and awaiting my sentence for trying to steal a cop car. With a simple stroke of a pen, the judge would decide my fate. He was short and stern and flipped endlessly through case folders. He seemed indifferent, like the job was run-of-the-mill that day. He'd judged boys all day long and seemed confused by what I was doing there. I was a girl, all cleaned up, dressed in my mom's nice clothes, and looked nothing like the teenage gangbangers crowding the benches, two of whom I recognized from our neighborhood. He began listing my failures with the enthusiasm of reading a grocery list-the truancy, my previous arrest, my bad grades. I knew he had the power to decide whether I would be another statistic, because up until that point, that's what I was. This moment would determine whether I would live my life in the system or get a chance at creating a better one.

I realized that I didn't want to be sentenced to a life like the ones I had seen so many of my family members, neighbors, and friends live. A product of my socioeconomic inheritance. Growing up in East LA in the 1990s showed me plenty of examples of heartbreak, hopelessness, and despair. Every family on our street and all of my mom's friends had kids in trouble with the law. Every. Single. One.

Standing in that courtroom at fifteen years old, I knew this moment would define who I would be for the rest of my life. I also knew that if I was actually going to do better, I would have to swim upstream or I'd become another fixture in juvenile hall. I would have to be radical.

We were instructed that we would break for lunch and that I would get my sentence at the end of the recess. I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I thought about the worst-case scenarios, which all resulted in the same restricted life. I would go back to my friends and hear the celebratory "Welcome to the club, homie." As much as this scenario matched my environment and even felt normal, I knew in my heart that it wasn't where I wanted to be. Doing what was normal, what was routine wasn't resulting in anything that benefited me. If anything, it had only resulted in problems. We each see the world we are taught to see. Maybe if I could see the world differently, I would be able to see myself differently too.

Cracks in the Foundation

Learning about where you come from is your first foundational step toward creating the framework for your path. Our roots tell us a story about which lessons we are here to learn and how we can use these lessons to create a deeper connection to who we are. Whether our upbringing was pleasant or not can be irrelevant to the way we decide to live our lives, because we do get to choose how we live.

Somewhere along the way, you make a decision that takes you off course. In order to make a change, you need to get to the root of the dysfunction. Most often, you must go all the way to the beginning. To learn why your decision-making is out of order, you must go back to the environment where you first developed and what shaped your perception of the world. If you grew up in a fish tank, you don't know any better. You know what you know.

For me, the view of the outside world came in the form of movies, TV shows, and the posters in our garage, which doubled as my uncle's room-a small, dilapidated space where the floors were lined with food crates of Thrasher magazines, empty tequila bottles, and oldies records. A collage of images covered one single wall-Guns N' Roses, N.W.A, Kid Frost, The Doors movie poster, and a flag for the Los Angeles Raiders. Magazine tear-outs with images of sunsets and bikini-clad women and stickers with sayings like "Live Life Radically, Surf" and "Stay Rad" were what I might later refer to as an unconscious effort to build a vision board.

Radical comes from the Latin adjective radix, which means "root." In Southern California, rad or radical is slang for "excellent" or "impressive" or "something that is true." Telling the truth wasn't something that came easy, especially when one of my first memories as a child was lying to a police officer. This was contrasted by my family, who were devoutly Catholic and often talked about the importance of honesty, integrity, and hard work.

My entire life was a contradiction. It was no wonder that studying a practice like yoga made sense later. Yoga is the study of paradoxes. Contradicting ideas designed to understand different aspects of the same truth. They are aspects of a greater whole.

Childhood is complex. On the one hand, you can see that perhaps lying to an officer is a bad thing. Lying to an officer at the behest of your parents can seem worse. However, if I told you the reason for the lie was to help save someone's life, would that make it better? Does it justify teaching a child that omitting the truth is okay? A child doesn't have the tools for discernment of this magnitude because they lack experience. Lying made me feel like I was all alone, disconnected from everyone and everything. I knew lying was wrong, but I was told to do it anyway. This isn't a call for listing all your parents' mistakes; it isn't about judgment either. We all falter in some way, but that's part of our learning process. This is about identifying the foundational cracks in your own experience that have kept you from feeling deeply rooted and...