Yoga Has Aged Me Well!

Yoga Has Aged Me Well!!

Just like a fine wine ages well if it sits long enough, yoga has aged me well!  After almost three years of practicing yoga, I have seen spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits that I never in my wildest dreams thought was possible at the age of 37!!

I started the three years with a lot of grit and determination.  I practiced and practiced beginners yoga, and built up my practice, until eventually I could go to a class that I consider extremely hard even for those who are in excellent shape and don't practice yoga often.  My point here, is that it takes patience, and determination before you see benefits of practicing yoga.  There are of course, immediate benefits, such as feeling more relaxed, feeling like your muscles have been stretched and revitalized, increasing the range of motion in your joints, increasing your metabolism, increasing your mood, increasing your sense of self esteem.  

After I could master the asana's physically, I found myself able to focus on my inner self.  If, for example, I was in child pose (Balasana), and I felt suffocated or emotional, I realized that the pose was opening up something in my past between my mother and myself that I did not release.  When ever we go through experiences that are traumatic, we store that experience in certain parts of the body.  Yoga helps to open up those parts of the body, and thus those emotions are released.  So it's not uncommon for people to cry or feel sad during certain poses.  Some poses teach us how to "let go" such as the Pigeon Pose.  Some poses teach us how to look at life from a different angle, such as The Camel, or the Headstand.

My point in this blog, is to show you that yoga has benefits that are not just physical.  That yoga is an art that can be utilized as a healing tool for past emotional trauma that you stuffed down and therefore placed into your body.  In a future blog, I will talk about how my crippling anxiety was virtually cured due to yoga.  

Namaste

A Bit About Myself.....

A Bit About Myself

 A little bit about myself and my history with yoga.  I'm 37 years old.  When I was a young child I used to do gymnastics and Karate, and not to brag, I was really good at those sports.  I also, would enjoy stretching my body, and often my parents would find me on my back balancing a chair on my feet!  I enjoyed the concentration and the fact that it took my mind off my worries (I worried a lot as a child, and had a lot of anxiety, my first panic attack being at the age of five!!).
  I did not hear of yoga until I was in college, and one of my friends gave a speech about yoga and showed us a few moves.  From that day I was hooked.  So I bought books and flashcards on yoga asana's (yoga positions), and went to a few yoga courses.
Life took over, and yoga was put on hold, I started practicing again in my early thirties, not seriously, but once a week or so.  
  Two years ago I started to get into yoga seriously.  I watched youtube videos of people practicing yoga and watched their technique.  I also bought a plethora of Wai Lana DVD's and started to practice with her as my instructor.  Once I felt my strength building and my technique improving, I started to take yoga classes.  I was so scared during my first yoga class, as I felt I wasn't "good enough", but I made it through, my instructor was kind, and I now go to her as often as I can.
  On Facebook,  I am a "liker" of several yoga pages, and at times I'm frustrated by those pages.  They show people in very difficult asana's (poses, or yoga positions), and I wonder to myself "how many people look at these photos and think there is no way in hell I can contort myself into that position, or I have no strength to do that!".  I believe that those photos really do put a lot of people on the defensive about yoga, which is a huge shame.
  It has taken me 3  years to get into a moderately advance practice of yoga.  I'm finally learning to do headstands, which is something I never imagined in my wildest dreams I could accomplish.  Three years of faithful practice, by faithful, I'm talking about practicing about 6-8 hours of yoga a week.  I'm fortunate in that I can practice that many hours, as I know many in this crazy and complicated world cannot.
  I am also a big girl, and that is something else I will be talking about in my blogs.  
  This is my first blog ever, and am going to talk about how I built up to being mid advanced, how I realized that getting to the point where I am at took a lot of effort and time, and that how yoga has benefited and healed me in many aspects of my life, and many more things about yoga that you may find interesting.
  My message in this blog is this: If you want to practice yoga, please don't be intimidated.  If you are painfully shy or have no access to a yoga class, then I suggest buying DVD's, and the best ones I can recommend are Wai Lana DVD's the Beginner's Set.  You can buy them through her website (google her), or on Amazon, it's a three DVD set, each DVD about half an hour long.  Practice as many times as you can until you have mastered those moves, then go onto her next DVD set.  If you're fortunate to be able to attend yoga classes, choose an instructor that you are not intimidated by (trust me most beginner yoga teachers are far from intimidating), and go from there.  You'll make so many good friends, and you'll realize thatpeople who practice yoga are very accepting and kind and encouraging.

Thankyou for reading this blog and I hope you will continue to read more of my future blogs :)
Namaste