What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “yoga?”
For me, until three weeks ago, my first response would have been “tight pants.”
It may surprise you to learn that there’s more to it than that. It certainly shocked me!
Yoga, as it turns out, is an ancient, multifaceted technique for opening up to seeing the world as it is, without experiencing unnecessary suffering. And the tight pants? They’re just the beginning.
Up until my arrival at Kindred Spirits, my entire exposure to Yoga had been at my climbing gym, years before. I’d taken a series of Vinyasa flow classes that helped me open my hips, enabling me to really reeeeeeach for those far-off footholds.
I was in for a humble awakening.
Surfing had built a lot of strength in my back and shoulders, but I hadn’t been stretching. Ever since high school, I’ve been TERRIBLE about stretching before or after exercise. Stretching was always a boring chore, done with little attention to detail before group sporting events. As Jason Nemer (co-founder of Acroyoga) says:
“If you build strength without building flexibility, you’re just building a time bomb.”
I didn’t know how fun and awesome stretching could be. I didn’t know that stretching could be used as a way to move energy through the body, bringing it into proper alignment. But the sense of fun would come later because, in the first week, stretching was neither fun nor awesome. It hurt. I was carrying stress in my hips, my lack of stretching in my hamstrings, and my idiocy in my shoulders. The first sessions were a struggle, and as I worked through the poses, I felt sweaty, frustrated and full of strange feelings that I couldn’t control.
My instructor assured me that this was normal because, in the western world, we don’t see the body as a unit. We see it as a composite set of parts. So when we start treating the body as a unit after a lifetime of believing it’s nothing but parts, we actually start releasing emotion trapped in tight parts of our bodies.
I’d have thought that was hokey and woo-woo if someone had told that to me a month ago, but damned if it didn’t start happening to me in the first week before my body got used to it. I’d deepen into a hamstring stretch and feel angry. I’d go into a hip opening stretch and feel sad. The feeling was unexpected and unusual, and often unpleasant.
But hey, that’s why I’m out here trying all these movements, right? To feel their healing power! So knowing that this was part of the process, I pressed on.
After the first two days, my body started to adjust. My hamstrings let go of their death grip on my repressed anger, releasing what I wasn’t letting myself feel. Once I felt it, I could release it into the wind! My hips opened again, and I was able to breathe into their pain and replace it with self-love (at my teacher’s direction).
There really could be something to this whole yoga thing… I began to think. If you can bring up old feelings and process them just by moving? It’s worth exploring.
That was just the tip of the iceburg on a three-week rollercoaster that took me more than 5000 years back in time! But that, my friends is a story for week 2.
Thanks for reading :)
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