You guys, we made it all up…
"You guys....we made it all up. ALL of it. Everything. Money. Bills. Gender. Capitalism. Femininity. Masculinity. Body image. The 5-day workweek. Three meals a day. School. College. Fashion. Expectations. Institutions. Holidays. Traditions. Literally every single thing that we take for granted as "just the way it's done" is f*****g made up, and I just feel like it's really important that we remember that." (#mamaoffthegrid/Threads)
So why are we stressing ourselves out trying to do it perfectly?
We inherited a world full of invented rules. Instead of holding them lightly, many of us spend our lives white-knuckling our way through them, checking boxes someone else designed as though there's a cosmic scoreboard keeping track.
Yoga invites us to question this.
In yogic philosophy, the term Maya is often described as a veil that obscures the true nature of reality—shaping how we perceive the world and layering it with conditioning, assumptions, and inherited stories until the constructed feels permanent and the invented feels true.
Think of it like a filter on your phone camera.
One you didn't even know was there.
That filter is why a made-up rule can feel like a law of nature. Why "three meals a day" feels biological. Why "the five-day workweek" feels inevitable. We've been looking through the filter for so long that we've forgotten it's there.
Yoga doesn't necessarily remove the filter.
It teaches us to notice it.
The next time you feel that familiar clench of I'm doing this wrong—the meals, the schedule, the parenting, the practice, the career—pause and ask:
Who decided there was a right way?
Then take a breath.
Yoga creates a little space.
And in that space, we have a chance to hear something quieter than all the inherited rules: our own direct experience.
We will never become fully aware of all the ways we're influenced. The filter runs deep. But a consistent yoga practice has a way of revealing more of it over time, bringing us closer to our own truth, and helping us stay there.
