Tag Archives: Yoga

On My Mind

New Body Yoga

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No bending over, no engaging the abs, no twisting.

No inversions, no backbends, no planks.

Welcome to prenatal yoga, where it’s all about space, lengthening, and breath.

In some twist of fate, the yoga teacher who comes to my school once a week is also certified in prenatal yoga, and she has been kind enough to modify our usual class for me. As this is a teacher who knows me and how my body is used to moving, I feel very safe in her hands.

I love yoga for many reasons and have been practicing regularly for over fifteen years. I love the way it has helped me get to know my body, what it has shown my body to do, and the way my breathing has changed as a result. That’s what yoga is, really; breathing, and letting the breath move the body.

As I’ve learned more about yoga as a practice and as I’ve become stronger and more experienced, I’ve recognized different purposes in yoga, and they have applied to different points of my life. I’ve done yoga for the purpose of getting stronger, for learning to breathe, for slowing down, for healing, and for learning to work with discomfort.

And now, I’m doing yoga to encourage the changes taking place in my body, to help it lengthen, open, and create space. As my belly grows, the pace of yoga postures slows down, the breathing practice deepens, and concentration shifts from breath to body and back to breath. Working on the breath is no longer a means to find the deepest core of myself, but also to welcome the being that is becoming.

“I know it’s boring,” my teacher said at the beginning. “But you’ll get bigger and you’ll see.”

Used to feeling my body move and stretch and knowing how to use the breath as a way to move the body, it was boring. And then I stopped focusing on what I couldn’t do any more and started focusing on the purpose: lengthen, open, create space, breathe.

Yoga was no longer boring.

Used to coming home feeling stretched and strong, a rubber band played with, twisted, pulled, I began coming home feeling relaxed, calmer, my hips and lower back able to move more fluidly. I’ve been tired at the end of the day in a way that I’ve never been tired before, and it was yoga that reminded me why.

Yoga is like meditation in the sense that we practice. It is a continuous doing without a done, without a stopping point, without a natural break. Yoga is a flow. It is about welcoming what is, where it is, how it is. And now, it is about welcoming what will be.

Lengthen. Open. Create space.

Breathe.

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia – February 2016
On My Mind

Take a Moment

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I woke this morning early, heart beating hard and mind picking right back up from either a dream or the events left over from the night before – it was hard to say. When changing positions in bed and a sip of water brought nothing, it was time to get up, despite the early hour I made out through the glow of my old running watch, fumbling for the correct button.

I took myself to the sunniest spot in our small apartment and did yoga as the sky changed. I made a glaze for the date and nut bars that had cooled overnight, poured my coffee, and took my book outside onto the balcony. Our balcony is the last to be kissed by the morning sun and while the neighbours’ laundry had surely dried, I bundled into a jacket and let the sun gently bring me into the day.

It was hard, actually.

I was antsy, uncertain, energetic, and had far too much on my mind to sit there as calmly and quietly as it may have seemed. Even while doing yoga, I had thought of lists to do, weighed scenarios in my mind, and pushed myself time and again back to my intention – be here now. On the balcony, I let my book focus my attention, let the feeling of the chair pressing into the backs of my legs keep me anchored to where I was.

As is often the case, the uneasiness dissipated as the sun moved higher in the sky. Along with it, I felt better as dawn became day. The concerns I’d had were logical, systematic, manageable. The beating of my heart slowed down, the anxiety I’d felt crushing my chest upon waking drifted off and settled somewhere out of reach.

When such feelings flickered again later, as feelings often do, I looked for the breath I was supposed to find during yoga. I looked for the breath that had been elusive in the moment, and waited as years of practice called it back when I took a step back and closed my eyes. I smiled instead of settling into the negative emotion and felt the emotion loosen its grip. That’s not always the right response, but that was what this moment required. There would be an opportunity to revisit later on.

Be here, now.

Germany

Yoga auf Deutsch

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I’ve been living in Germany for slightly over a year and it seems like my language skills are slowly improving. A friend asked recently how long I’ve been learning German (about a year and a half) and complemented my fluidity when speaking, which I think was a generous remark. It certainly doesn’t feel fluid and I often only catch the grammar mistakes after I’ve made them, assuming I catch them at all. But I am starting to get a sense for the language and I can make more meaning out of what I read and hear without knowing all of the words, which suggests a gradual improvement.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is hear as much German as possible, for example, on the radio, in films or TV shows, and eavesdropping closely when the opportunity arises. It is for this reason that I started following a German yoga instructor on YouTube. I’ve done YouTube yoga for well over ten years and it seemed like a natural progression in language learning. The idea is immersion, after all.

It helps that I am intimately familiar with yoga after years of practice and it helps that Sanskrit is used for many postures. It helps that yoga sequences are deliberately repetitive and that all yoga teachers talk (slowly and calmly) about breath, stillness, movement, and stretching. They use imperative language, which is not always obvious in daily life, and speak as explicitly as possible without simplifying, which is otherwise hard to find. I hadn’t realized all of this when I first began looking for yoga videos in German and perhaps it wouldn’t have taken me so long if I had.

Brand new when I began practicing yoga auf Deutsch were some anatomy words and the German translations for names of postures that I’m used to hearing in English. These are the things one doesn’t typically learn out of textbooks, but also the things that make the difference between living in German (when I try to do that) and learning German. And if experience is the best teacher and language learning requires repetition, yoga is a beautiful way to practice.

A benefit I did not expect is that doing yoga in German requires me to focus in a way that a yoga class in English does not. I’ve done plenty of yoga sequences with my mind accidentally elsewhere the whole time, breathing automatically rather than intentionally following the breath. After such a practice, the body feels better but the mind remains in a whirl. But when the instruction is in German, my whole attention is on listening because I cannot passively absorb language the way I do in English. As a result, I am more engaged when practicing and recognize immediately when my mind has wandered because I lose track of the sequence and literally cannot continue. At the conclusion of practice, my body and mind are very much aligned.

Naturally, there are things that I miss in these videos, perhaps elements of philosophy that go beyond my current vocabulary. But the benefits, both for language learning and for yoga practice itself, are far greater than that, and far greater than I anticipated. The biggest reminder here, I think, is that it is always worth trying something new because you really never know what you’re going to find.

You live a new life for every language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once. – Czech proverb