My yoga teacher apologized to our class yesterday before the session began. She was scheduled to teach this class last week, but didn’t make it back to the city in time to teach, due to travel complications. She was concerned for those who came to class, only to be stood up by her – the teacher who didn’t show. Her apology wasn’t one of those defensive, ‘it wasn’t my fault’ apologies, though it could have been. Instead it was straight, clear and open. If I had to summarize it, I would say it was ‘tender and vulnerable’. It set the tone for the rest of the session.
This was my second time back to my yoga studio in a couple of weeks. My work schedule was such that I couldn’t make it there for a while, but I made it to Thursday’s evening Ashtanga class and Friday’s Yin session. Though I practice at home – sometimes – I find regular participation at the studio a better fit. There’s something empowering when we practice yoga in community. There’s a collective energy that flows that solitary practice lacks. There’s accountability too, in the sense of collective support. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to help develop and shape one’s yoga practice.
Yoga is the only practice I’ve experienced that alleviates stress, calms my soul and spirit, opens my emotions, and strengthens my body, at the same time. Yoga causes deep, inner tension to arise in the form of negative thought, allowing me to observe and let them go. I can begin an Ashtanga or Yin session running lots of stress and negative emotion, only to rise from corpse pose at the end calm and at peace with myself and the world around me. And the same is true with the positive. I’ve walked away from many a session filled with appreciation or thanks for some person, place of thing in my life.
As a child, I experienced a lot of abuse in many forms, much of which had been suppressed and hidden away in a tight little compartment that only I had the key to. After I began yoga practice, I noticed how during some sessions I would suddenly have unexpected surges of emotion rise that I was unprepared for. I soon realized that through yoga I was alchemizing my abuses – facing them so as to release the trauma around them. I’ve now arrived at a place where I’m able to talk openly about my abuses for the first time, without fear.
I attribute this opening to yoga. It would never have happened without it. Yoga was once a practice I thought I would never attempt. Now, it’s a practice I will never abandon. It’s an essential part of my life. The yogic journey continues.
tao21st 