“Yoga is the practice of tolerating the consequences of being yourself.”
In a yoga practice, there’s no escaping yourself. That sounds scary, but it’s actually really awesome. Yoga forces you to confront yourself and who you truly are. You’re left to your own thoughts, your own body and you just kind of have to surrender to it. Yoga isn’t about escaping your inflexibility and forcing yourself into a pose. It’s about understanding who you are, your strengths, your limits and working with them. It’s about clearing everything else out, other’s expectations, pressures and labels, and creating space for your authentic self.
During training we’ve been doing a lot of meditation and yesterday we went for a full 20 minutes. Meditation is something I’ve never really done but have always been intrigued by. For the last 10 minutes, my feet fell asleep and I was fighting the urge to fidget. It got to the point where it was almost painful and all I could think about was how much I wanted to stop. But before that it was pretty awesome haha.
It’s cool to see what comes into your head when you remove all the stimulus of your daily life and are just left with stillness. This time for me, I was struck by this strong feeling of contentment. And once I realized it was there my mind started racing.
CONTENT? Me?
One year ago all I wanted to feel was content.
And now here I am – “content” – and I hadn’t even taken a moment to recognize it?
I realized that somewhere in the past year the feeling of dread to wake up every morning became excitement for the future. My anxiety over ‘what’s next’ turned into being present minded. And my imbalances suddenly felt balanced.
It felt so great to acknowledge this in that moment. To recognize that, no, everything may not be perfect but that I’m okay with that. I’ve come so far in the past year (or two) that I can’t help but feel proud of myself. Proud for not letting myself get stuck. For not accepting my reality. For being proactive about my career, relationships and happiness.
It feels good.. and I decided then that I’d love to make meditation a daily thing (and maybe work up to 20 minutes slower haha).
So, weekend number two is in the books! I can’t believe I’m actually saying this.. but the weekends are flying by!
This weekend was a lot less eventful than last weekend (in a good way), we started to settle into a nice routine and everything just felt more comfortable. I started to really make connections with my other trainees and conversations flowed with ease. My 10-page reflection paper that has been hanging over my head for months was finally turned in. I spent every night (and lunch break) last week working on it and I’m actually really happy with how it turned out. It feels great to have that done with because it was the last thing on my massive to-do list that I made two weeks ago. I felt like this huge weight lifted off of me this weekend, in more ways than one.
If I haven’t said this already, I’m so glad I decided to do this teacher training. I can’t believe I actually had fears that I’d be the youngest trainee or the only one that couldn’t do some of the advanced poses. We have such a wide range of ages, personalities and abilities in the class- but everyone 100% completely belongs there.
Do you meditate? Or have you ever tried?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
So glad it’s going so well!
I love what you talked about in the beginning of this post about yoga. I was so proud of myself on Friday because I left work in a SUPER bad mood (of course not the kids, the adults making me mad) and I was like I need to just go to yoga, I can’t be mad on a weekend. Then I just set the intention of forgetting about everything I was mad about at class… of course I thought this would fail because I had an hour to basically just think and I thought i would go to being mad, but I actually didn’t. That’s what I love about hot power yoga, is that i end up thinking about being hot, and each pose so much that I can actually forget about everything else (sometimes). Yoga is great. So glad you decided to do training so I have my own personal yoga teacher AND photographer in my life… man, this is the first I’ve considered how much this benefits me haha.
I’m glad you’re loving yoga again. I can’t wait to teach you and Eric haha : )
I am so glad that you are having a great experience! I do love how the yoga instructors always encourage you to modify poses so they work for you and to recognize what your body is ready to do. It feels like a low pressure, non-judgmental space, which is one of the things I like most about yoga!
That is really great to say that you are really content with your life. I love those moments where you realize things like that. I have felt like that in the past, but am definitely not really feeling so content these days – but hopefully that will come with time…
You’ll get back there! If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past year it’s that life goes in waves and even when it feels like you’ll never get back to that place of contentment, you do!
I DO
every single morning—-no getting off track.
it’s my first appointment of the day.
That’s so awesome! Good for you!
I’ve done a few different meditation classes at my studio and always really enjoy them. I have terrible posture though so find that the sitting meditation really hurts my upper back. So bad! I actually LOVE the meditation or yin/meditation classes I’ve done at the studio but I do have a lot of trouble meditating on my own.
I’m so glad you’re loving training so much!
Did you try sitting on a block? That helps my back a lot! But yeah, I definitely can sympathize with that.. at training we are sitting on the floor all day long : /
This is just beautiful reading about your experience. “My anxiety over ‘what’s next’ turned into being present minded. And my imbalances suddenly felt balanced.” Oh, that is just gorgeous writing for my soul! I suffer from a lot of anxiety, but in the past year, I too have turned around a lot. The “what’s next” mindset is so harmful to your day. Being present is so much harder than it sounds. But when I can be present – I am content too.
That’s awesome that you’ve been able to turn it around – it’s so hard to do! Yoga and journaling have been helping me a lot : )
we used to meditate in a voice and speech class I took my senior year of theater school (weird right?) and we worked our way up to 15 minutes. What happens to your brain when it’s “silent” for that long is crazy stuff, right?
I found that finding a comfy position against the wall in class was really helpful so I didn’t start slumping over