(or how I made my way through yoga)
I was never good at sports. I was always the last one to be picked by the team captains. I was the one my classmates made fun of while playing any sport.
I just wasn’t good at sports; I didn’t like them, and no one ever taught me how to like them or how to enjoy them.
That’s why I grew up avoiding sports, and thinking that they were never going to be ‘my thing’.
12 years ago I tried yoga for the first time.
I don’t know why, but I had the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I HAD to try it. So I just found a place, made the time between rehearsals while I was studying drama, and went to it twice a week, every week. It was my ‘me’ time in very stressful times, it was my ‘peace & breathe time’ while getting over a very hard breakup, and it was the way I discovered that I am capable of doing much more than I thought I could while growing up.
That started me on a journey.
I’ve been doing yoga intermittently all these years – sometimes more intensely than others, and always exploring different kinds of yoga to find what’s right for me each specific time.
I’ve done Hatha, Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Power, Flow and every interesting mix I’ve found on the way. They’ve all been great to me, and taught me different things.
About 5-6 years ago I got into Vinyasa, and got very into it. I went 5-6 times a week every week.
I am a very intense person, so when I love something, I put all my heart into it… sometimes even maybe too much.
Vinyasa wasn’t only the time when I got to take a break from everything and just breathe, but it was also the space where I slowly discovered those things I thought I was never going to be able to do. At some point my body just bent and allowed me do them. My body discovered a strength I didn’t know I had, and a conviction that I never expected from myself.
With yoga I decided that nothing was going to stop me: I was going to improve, I was going to re-discover myself, and this time no one was going to label me.
I learned a lot from yoga, and I learned a lot of myself.
I learned to confront my fears: my fear to fail, my fear to fall. I learned to put my ego aside, and every time I fell (which was very often, especially in the beginning), I stood up and tried again. And I fell, and I stood up, fell again and stood up again every time until I understood where the balance and strength that hold the pose are.
It took me a long time to feel ‘safe’ and in control, but I made my way through the poses that challenged me the most, and sometimes through the most difficult task: breath.
I discovered that too often I forget such basic instinct, and the beauty of yoga is that it reminds you of how important it is to breathe.
For Vinyasa I had a very strong teacher, one who seemed to be more interested in having students doing ‘pirouettes’ than yoga. He pushed us to our limits and beyond, while developing my strength in a ‘circus’ look alike class. To be honest, that’s what I needed at that time: to see myself capable of doing amazing things; capable of doing the unexpected from this girl who was never good at any sport, the girl no one believed in, starting from myself.
As they say: “If you want something you’ve never had before, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done”. And I did it.
It was great at the moment. I achieved a lot and it made me a different person. It also helped me breathe my problems away and find different perspectives in my life because as I often heard, “being upside down helps your brain see things from the other side”.
At some point I took it too far and tried to do more than what my body allowed me. I got injured and was forced to stop.
In the beginning it was chaos in my head: “I HAVE to go!”, “I will lose what I’ve learned”, “I cannot stop moving”… that’s all I could think of.
I had to do physiotherapy and when I tried to come back, I discovered it wasn’t the kind of yoga (or teacher) that made sense to me anymore. This stop made me realise that I changed again (and it never stops), so it was time to move on and discover other things: I had to bend so I wouldn’t break.
Since then I’ve been doing more relaxed yogas intermittently, and that is what I need right now.
I discovered that I still can do most of the things I learned, and that they will stay there, both in my body and my head. It changed me, and my self confidence changed with it.
Yoga is part of my life, and despite what most people can say, how often I practice doesn’t define it.
For me, the way I ‘live’ yoga in my daily life is what matters the most: the incorporation of some movements every day, the breathing it taught me, and the will to practice often. Regardless of what kind of yoga or how intense my practice is, yoga is part of who I am now.
I have so much to thank yoga for, and it will always be a part of how I live my life. In different ways and different moments, because I think that I also learned to listen to my body and understand that what is good for you now, doesn’t have to always be.
Here are a few links to read more about the fantastic yoga and the different kinds:
