You can’t expect apples from a mango seed.
A mango seed will never grow into an apple tree.
Everything the mango tree will ever become already exists within the seed — its nature, its form, its fruit. In the same way, everything required for you to become you already lives within you.
So much of our suffering comes from trying to become who we are not. From seeking apples where mangoes are meant to grow. From forcing ourselves into borrowed lives, borrowed rhythms, or borrowed ideas of who we should be.
Yoga, when understood as a lived path, is not about self-improvement in the modern sense. It is not about fixing what is broken or striving to be “better.” It is about remembering. About removing obstacles. About providing the right conditions for what is already true to unfold.
This teaching is articulated clearly in the Bhagavad Gītā, where Krishna reminds Arjuna that each of us has our own path — our own dharma — and that straying from it, even in pursuit of something admired or idealised, leads us away from ourselves.
Bhagavad Gītā 3.35
śreyān sva-dharmo viguṇaḥ
para-dharmāt sv-anuṣṭhitāt
sva-dharme nidhanaṁ śreyaḥ
para-dharmo bhayāvahaḥ
It is better to live one’s own dharma, even imperfectly,
than to live another’s dharma perfectly.
Better to meet one’s own destiny in following one’s true nature,
for the path of another is fraught with danger.
A mango seed does not need to be convinced to become a mango tree. It does not need to compare itself to the apple orchard. It needs the right soil. Water. Sun. Time. Care.
In the same way, the work of yoga is not to remake ourselves into something else, but to tend the inner and outer conditions that allow our truest nature — our highest expression — to emerge organically.
Through practice, reflection, rhythm, and conscious living, yoga supports this process of becoming. Not by adding something new, but by clearing what obscures. Not by force, but by alignment.
This is the heart of Become YOU.
To trust the seed you carry. And to commit — patiently and faithfully — to the conditions that allow you to grow into who you already are.
—
Avril Bastiansz
Being • Becoming • Belonging
Become YOU