I took up yoga wholeheartedly about six months back after a few abortive attempts. A friend had recommended a youtube channel, and since I am not a fan of classes, or people in general ,I was up for trying it. I have been stiff for as long as I can remember, so my main motivation was to become more flexible. Becoming beefy was, for some reason, of little interest to me at the time.
I took to yoga like a fish to water. After doing a 30-day series without missing more than a day, I started on another 30-day series. Since then I have been doing various singles.
Yoga isn't a great bodybuilding workout and as my health has improved, I have started supplementing it with body-weight routines. Yoga is more for my mind than my body. There hasn't been a single day that I have felt worse after a session than before and yoga has lifted my mood on a number of occasions. Yoga makes you acutely conscious of your breath and your body, what yoga instructors call "coming into your body". This necessitates suspending judgement of the past and expectations and trepidation about the future. For those 30 minutes in the morning, I am fully in the present. Since forcing yourself to relax or be present is next to impossible, the only way of coming into your body is to surrender yourself to the practice and your instructor. A number of lines of my instructor, which perhaps would have sounded banal in another context, are seared into my memory and sources of comfort during testing times. Lines such as "Surrender yourself to that which you cannot control", "The mind is strong, but so is the breath," "If the mind is strong today, you are not alone'. And, just the physical experience of being conscious of all the body parts you never give a second thought is refreshing.
I took to yoga like a fish to water. After doing a 30-day series without missing more than a day, I started on another 30-day series. Since then I have been doing various singles.
Yoga isn't a great bodybuilding workout and as my health has improved, I have started supplementing it with body-weight routines. Yoga is more for my mind than my body. There hasn't been a single day that I have felt worse after a session than before and yoga has lifted my mood on a number of occasions. Yoga makes you acutely conscious of your breath and your body, what yoga instructors call "coming into your body". This necessitates suspending judgement of the past and expectations and trepidation about the future. For those 30 minutes in the morning, I am fully in the present. Since forcing yourself to relax or be present is next to impossible, the only way of coming into your body is to surrender yourself to the practice and your instructor. A number of lines of my instructor, which perhaps would have sounded banal in another context, are seared into my memory and sources of comfort during testing times. Lines such as "Surrender yourself to that which you cannot control", "The mind is strong, but so is the breath," "If the mind is strong today, you are not alone'. And, just the physical experience of being conscious of all the body parts you never give a second thought is refreshing.
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