I am very curious to know your profiles with respect to yoga. This will help me to decide where and how I want to go about my own yoga journey.
I am interested to know specially the following:
This is all irrelevant my friend.
It is only the mental force, the rational, thinking, intellect that needs this to supply the ego.
How my practice emerged has nothing to do with the path of your yoga. Yoga is experiential and since each human being is completely unique so is the experience.
If you want to start, start. You will find out these things for yourself, for your life, for your purpose, for your living. Nothing else is germane.
[QUOTE=InnerAthlete;19204]This is all irrelevant my friend.
It is only the mental force, the rational, thinking, intellect that needs this to supply the ego.
How my practice emerged has nothing to do with the path of your yoga. Yoga is experiential and since each human being is completely unique so is the experience.
If you want to start, start. You will find out these things for yourself, for your life, for your purpose, for your living. Nothing else is germane.[/QUOTE]
I guess you are right on this to a certain degree from my perspective but I didn’t think it was irrelevant at all.
I thought the best way to learn something is to find out what most people did it, their mistakes, their experiences, their hurdles, their achievments. I believe this has worked for everybody I have known. I understand the unique experience part, but in the end we all are alike…I mean humans, so even though there is a “unique” experience part on eveything every individual goes through while learning yoga or anything else, I believe there is still so much “common” between all of us becase we all are alive, all are human.
I have already started for some time now. I guess since around 6 months just not regular and all this is just an effort to find out what will be best for me.
For me it was a matter of practicing with different teachers and styles until you find something that resonates with you. It is correct that everybodys journey is different and is continuously evolving. My best advise would be to listen to yourself first and foremost and you will never go wrong.Enjoy!
I thought the best way to learn something is to find out what most people did it, their mistakes, their experiences, their hurdles, their achievments.
This may be an efficacious learning method in the outer world, though I believe even that is debatable. However it is not efficacious in yoga. What most people do is more likely to be something avoided rather than emulated. That is, of course, a form of learning - what TO do and what NOT to do.
The point about commonalities is true. The point about differences, also true.
Nearly 13 years ago when my doctor wrote me a prescription to start doing yoga for my bad back.
I didn’t pursue it further, yoga pursued me further.
Initially I did it for my back issues, now the reasons are very different, more spiritual than physical. I don’t have specific goals, but I am sure yoga has some goals for me and they unfold as I continue to practice.
The few physical ones that persist, I overcome with accupuncture combined with yoga.
The spiritial ones, I overcome by remembering the good teachings and discipline of my own teacher and applying them.
Hope that sheds some light.
[quote=yalgaar;19202]1) How and when did you get introduced to yoga?
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I was learning how to work out at the gym, and picked up a book in a bookstore.
[quote=yalgaar;19202]2) How did you pursue it further?
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Pandara’s answer is the best - it pursued me. From the first practice sequence in the book, it just ‘clicked’. I live in a rural area and there were no teachers around at the time, so I ordered and bought hundreds of books, read constantly, and practiced the very simple sequences in that first book I bought. As teachers started popping up in my area, I surrounded myself with them, then started traveling and studying all over. A few years later I realized that no other career decision made sense in comparison to sharing this knowledge with others, and so decided to study to be a teacher. I switched my college studies to public health education, and then worked my rear off for over a year to raise enough money to fly to India to study vedanta and yoga philosophy, teaching methodology, and be over-inspired by everyone. I’m going back again in August to study for another few months and then when (or if!) I return, I’d like to study with a school in the states that is of the lineage I would like to learn until the next time I go back to India again.
Why do I do yoga? I just really can’t help it anymore.
My goals? To never, ever, ever, stop learning about yoga, and to share it with others to my greatest ability and their greatest understanding.
Laziness, back injury, disillusion, a sense of powerlessness, finances, lack of support from many people, the stresses of daily life, bad influences, ill health, cold weather… The list goes on. I am overcoming it one step at a time every day.
What REALLY helped the most was when I decided to go to India the first time. In order to make the money I needed to pay off some debt and buy tickets, I took a job where I had to live and work with my (former) best friend, 24 hours a day, in a city far from home. We had been unsuccessfully been dating on and off, and although we worked together professionally and were very good at our job, being in his presence all the time was one of the most challenging experiences in my life. I remember being overwhelmed with frustration, anger, sadness and having to lock myself in the bathroom and just repeat to myself over and over, ‘Remember why you are here. You are working here so that you can go and study and become a great teacher, so that you can teach other people that happiness is a state of mind and not dependent upon their environment. You can make it through this, remember why you are here.’ It worked every time - it took me out of the situation and helped me see that this was a obstacle that would soon be over, and that I needed to make it through this in order to later be able to focus my energies on doing something for the greater good. The person that was infecting my happiness those days didn’t even comprehend how much worth my goal had to me.
I still can’t believe how much I dealt with during those times, and how I managed to overcome it and be successful at work and happy in life and with friends in spite of being surrounded by depression and anger and fighting.
It wasn’t that long ago in a conversation with him that he commented on how impressive it was that despite how he deliberately was as horrible to me as he could be, I always managed to snap back out of it and not stay angry with him; and how the girl he dates now stays mad at him his lesser transgressions for months. I laughed at him. I put my faith and hope in the idea that it would be worth it, and it was. Not just the money, but going through it I learned the full spectrum of my emotions - that I could be angrier with someone than I ever thought possible (yeah! me! the peace loving, happy, compassionate yogi!). I said terrible things, responded to provocation in horrible ways, and made fast and bad decisions under pressure. Now I know who I am.
I wonder, had I not had this foundation of yogic studies under my belt, or that great goal - what would have happened? How would I have reacted to these situations?