I love yoga.
It seemed only fitting that I write about how much. I also thought it would be great to share some ah-has that I’ve had about Life while practicing.
1. Keep Going.
Yoga challenges every physical and mental aspect of your mind, body and soul. The longer you do it the better you get at the poses yet, the stronger you get the more challenging your practice becomes. You are able to do the postures more completely, thus your practice becomes harder. I am a baby, baby yogi. I have only been practicing for 10 months…..not even a year. I am barely able to transition from push up to up dog to down dog with out collapsing. Maybe in a one hour practice I do one or two near flawless flows with these poses. It’s not always about doing the postures or nailing the poses or moving smoothly through the transitions. It’s about the journey getting there. It’s about the subtle adjustments you will make or the intuitive alignments your mind, body and soul will automatically make over time. Yoga has made my body bend and twist and turn and fold and creak and crack
and stretch and externally rotate and glide and oops! Fall on my face (damn you, crane!) many, many times. Does this not sound like Life? It sounds like mineJ But, you get up, you keep going, you inhale….and exhale. You keep coming to the mat everyday. You ground the four corners of your feet in mountain pose and you give yourself in service. Like in everyday Life, we fall down, we get up, we keep going. We get feedback we make improvements and adjustments and we feel good.
2. Balance in all things.
Yoga is the ultimate exercise in balance. Besides the obvious examples like being able to stay on your two feet while hopping and bending and stepping one foot at a time from down dog to a deep lunge and back again. It’s about the perfect harmony in twisting from one side to the next. Inhaling and exhaling. Do this on the right, then do it on the left. But my favorite, the expansions of your chest, which contracts your back, then the opposite, balancing expansion of your back which contracts your chest. Think cat and cow. On all 4’s, inhale, look up, arch your back, expand your chest, exhale, contract your chest, hollow your belly while expanding the muscles in your back. One good turn deserves another. What is expansion to one is contraction to the other. All things working together to create the perfect ebb and flow of Life. Not always what we judge ‘good’, not always what we judge ‘bad’, but rather an harmonious alignment of some sort of combination of the two. When we look back in hind sight, somehow it all makes sense. And if we are aware, and easy on ourselves we can say we loved every minute of it. Just like Life.
3. Let it be and breathe.
Like I said before it takes time and practice to be able to a lot of the postures in yoga. Like I also said, it’s not about doing them, it’s about getting there. It’s not going to happen over night, either. You gotta let it be. Love what it is. Congratulate yourself on the small and big victories. Revel in the isness. It’s your journey. It’s your lesson. Love it.
Breathe. There are many reasons why we do this. Mostly to stay alive, but in yoga it also serves a purpose. It energizes our bodies, oxygenating our blood and muscles allowing us to keep going, to use our bodies to make a connection with our souls. It goes with the flow of the postures. In the classic sun salutation you inhale when you are expanding or opening and exhale when you are bending or contracting. Starting in mountain pose, you inhale arms up, over your head, expanding your spine and waist, all the way from your toes to the tips of your fingers, filling your body with breath and Life, then you exhale as you swan dive, bending at the hips into forward bend, releasing the muscles in your back and your neck, let your head be heavy and hang. Inhale as you expand your chest and flatten or arch your back, look forward, exhale, release your head and your neck in forward bend, exhale, jump into push up (this is hard…you may also step back into plank as you exhale down into push-up or chateranga) I have maybe done this successfully 3 times this year. Again, the journey, not the destination. I also have had maybe 3 successful relationships in my Life as well….we fall down, we get up, we keep breathing. The breathing gets you through it. The exhale and release of your muscles allows you to let go of tension, negative energy and toxins. Yoga breathing can get you through anything. Focus on your breath, inhale when it's easy and exhale when it’s hard. Let it be and keep breathing.
4. Yogic connections to emotions.
I really enjoy the connection between any back bend posture, like wheel, bridge and camel, to trust, vulnerability and being open. When we vigorously open our chest we expand and make open the heart chakra, actually and metaphorically. I had an experience with this recently. The better part of the 10 months I’ve been doing yoga I have avoided the deep backbend postures. I saw them as too hard and scary. I also look at trust the same way. It’s too hard to be vulnerable. I am not strong enough to be open and exposed. If I expose myself emotionally they will know I’m human. If I cry, I will know I’m human. After much yoga and emotionally exposing experiences this summer, I decided one day to try a backbend, wheel specifically. To my amazement, I was able to awkwardly push myself up into full wheel. I am choosing my words carefully, they are meaningful. For someone who wears a mask of strength everyday, any attempt at being vulnerable is awkward. Since that first attempt I do at least one chest expanding pose everyday. One time, I pushed myself up to full wheel and really gave in and stretched and expanded. When I released down to the ground, I burst into tears. What a release! My sobs soon turned into laughter when I realized what was happening… I was open, I was vulnerable and I was ok. I had spent so much time being afraid and avoiding the inevitability that Life is sometimes scary. It’s when we expose ourselves we can accept our own humanity and move passed trials and scary things, and be better than we were. Now, I can barely get through any day without bursting into tears. Not really, but close to it.
I encourage everyone to do yoga. I love it. It has changed my life more than any one thing ever has before. I am excited for the challenge it continues to present me everyday. I feel accomplished and strong when I can do things today I couldn’t do yesterday. In Life and in Yoga. It's bascially the same thing.
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