Random ramble I guess is what you can call this post, but I am a quiet person and it is often difficult for me to get out what I want to say in the right way, so if I offend or annoy anyone, I apologize, for it is not my intent at all.
When I first started doing yoga in high school, it was because a teacher in my Theater class made doing it a requirement to be in her class, and I remember cussing profusely the entire time. Thinking who would be insane enough to do this?! And he put his leg where?!
Many years later I became very ill, which has led me to where I am today. I had to change my life around to survive, I started seeing a naturopath, I was put on a restrictive diet, and I was told my heart could not handle extreme physical exercise. I was a person who loved junk food, who loved to work out hard, who had no individually, just was a follower and for years I fought these new restrictions and paid the consequences.
But once I started accepting that I couldn’t be like everyone else, that what I thought was a curse, was indeed a blessing it all changed. I learned all these ways of not only helping the world but helping myself. It is not just yourself you help when you commit to a naturalistic diet and lifestyle, but many other people and the environment and that filled me with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
The tough part then became finding a work out, like most women my body was a source of insecurity and I was being told I couldn’t do rigorous exercise, which was in truth was the way I punished and not helped my body anyway, but I was like well maybe I will try yoga and see, since people who do it are often thin. Just weeks into trying it, I saw that yoga is not about your outside body, but about your inside, it is about accepting who you are at whatever level and learning to truly listen to your body and to quiet your mind. Yoga became way more than anything a physical body could be, but a place for my mind to be free. I learned to literally read my body, I could tell if it was off balance in a pose, even if it meant moving a foot over, my body became a treasured book, instead of a stranger.
We live in a world where people don’t always help each other, where they are so separated from their bodies they need other people to tell them what to do, where fast food chains surround us, where disaster strikes and large corporations tell us what to think and buy and want, and sometimes those who are supposed to love us most, treat us the worst, often times people who are true Yogi’s are judged or made fun of.
But Yogi’s don’t have to retaliate, or wish ill or hate because they know in yoga, there is the ultimate peace, the ultimate happiness and contentedness and there is no need for being cruel.
I make time in my busy schedule for my practice every day no matter what because I may start out weak, and tired and beaten down, but from my first downward dog to when I close my eyes during the final relaxation and reopen them, I know I am going to feel renewed and strong, like I have found the self I lost once again. The peace of a river after a good rain. This is the feeling everyone should get to experience.
Yoga is so much more than words can describe.
It’s the budding of a new life, the finding of the inner beauty of being yourself.
