Yoga brings immense benefits, physical and mental. Yoga can help you identify and focus on what is essential to your life. Some reflections on what my decade-long yoga journey has meant to me so far.
Yoga can transform your life.
I realised the other day that it’s been pretty much an entire decade since I first tried yoga. Back in March 2016, my wife encouraged me to give yoga a try. She had been enjoying videos from the Yoga With Adriene channel on YouTube for a few months, and thought they might work for me, too. At that time, I was experiencing physical discomfort if I tried to kneel down – and worse discomfort still if I then tried to stay on my knees for more than a few seconds. I was in my early-to-mid 40s then, and thought that this might just be an irreversible part of the ageing process. Bye bye knees.
I don’t know why I decided to give yoga a try. But I am endlessly thankful that I did. I am not a natural yogi. I will never be a good yogi. I am physically uncoordinated. I did terribly in PE classes at school. I am way too self-conscious to join a gym or to sign up for yoga classes. And that is perfectly OK.
Starting with the Yoga With Adriene Yoga for Beginners video, I was delighted to discover a form of exercise that works perfectly for me. I wish that when I was younger, YouTube yoga videos had a) existed and b) been as free and as easily accessible as they are today.
Stretching, strengthening, breathing
Yoga brings immense benefits, physical and mental. Stretching, strengthening, breathing. Movement and stillness. Through what has become over recent years a seven-days-a-week yoga practise, I can feel the immense benefits that yoga has brought to me each day. One small example: the knee discomfort that was ever-present for me a decade back (and which I thought I would have for the rest of my days) has long-since disappeared. It is hard for me even to remember having experienced it in the first place.
Yoga is accessible. I am a great believer in things that are open to all and for which the cost to entry is comparatively low. There is a wealth of free online yoga videos. Minimal investment is required. All you need is a mat. I have bought a handful of yoga mats over the past decade, replacing them only when they are worn out. My first yoga mat was a cheap and cheerful beginner’s mat. When that wore out, I switched to Yogi Bare mats. I recommend Yogi Bare yoga mats highly. A little more costly, but well worth the additional expenditure. Greatly improved grip and stability. The lack of additional padding makes yoga much easier on the joints.
Refine your focus
Yoga can help you identify and focus on what is essential to your life. You don’t need to hit a certain age and/or a certain crisis point in your life to recognise and focus on what is most important or essential in life.
You can refine your focus anew, each day in your life.
One way to do this is by putting a few moments’ thought into how you move and how you breathe. Yoga can hep immeasurably in this.
Without either meaning to or realising, through doing yoga on a daily basis all these years, I have found that I can now do intermediate yoga routines. I often “do” a great video on the Yoga with Kassandra channel, which speaks directly to how specific forms of yoga can help process and move past stresses or other things that do not serve you.
Tapas yoga is about moving through difficult, often uncomfortable poses as a way of achieving mental clarity. Kassandra says:
“Tapas is the niyama of austerity. Stoking the inner fire as a form of purification, as a way to clarify what is true, what is important and what is real to us. Dropping the excess. Letting go of the clutter.”
At the end, Kassandra describes how and why this challenging routine can help burn off that which is not of use to you:
“Really feel what this has shifted, the effects of this work, what came up for you throughout this practice. I find there’s so much we can learn about ourselves when we challenge ourselves in this way. Kind of lingering in discomfort. It’s not easy, but we can really grow from it in meaningful ways.”
Lingering in discomfort with deliberate focus and discipline can help you move through and past things that cause you discomfort in other areas of your life.
Yoga is a wonderful, endless journey. I have been astonished at the wide range of yoga poses that even someone as physically all-over-the-place as me can achieve. Perhaps it is a journey on which you find yourself. If not, perhaps it is a journey on which you might consider embarking?
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
IMAGE
- A man, facing left, wearing several layers of clothing, sitting with arms raised over his head, practicing yoga LCCN2009631963 via Wikimedia Commons.
MJCarty 
