Since it's valentines and all...
My Yoga practice has been like any other relationship in my life...
I find these big national *cough* commercial *cough* holidays a good moment for reflection. Me and my life partner have a brief but important chat before Valentines:
Him: What you thinking for Valentine’s… card?
Me: Yeah, card and some nice food to enjoy.
Him: Cool, got it.
We check each other expectations, feel out the budget, keep an element of surprise but limited the damage that could be caused by wild disagreeances due to unmatched expectations on either side. Sometimes there are surprises but generally in the more positive leaning trajectory.
My relationship with yoga has been just as long as it has with my partner. With a fairly similar capacity to comfort, shock or sometimes surprise me as much as my partner does. The key thing here is that it’s my relationship to theses relationships that’s the important thing. The other half (yoga or partner) is just like a mirror, bouncing things back at me. Quite often big things, but more often that not the mundane, even boring, daily life stuff.
This mindset is really the gift that yoga gives. It’s not really the body we should focus in resilience training but the mindset. Recognising our own patterns of thoughts and the actions you take as a result. It’s not something we do once a week on a mat but a transformation of becoming that matures over time.
It hasn’t always been that way though. Sometimes I’ve been a little too into it, to vatta, practicing extreme shapes too many times a week or laid out a little long in savasana. An injury brought everything into sharp focus, the same shape as the pain. My heart was broken. I felt betrayed. The same feeling you get when a partner does something that doesn’t meet your expectations, like we discussed earlier.
I know now after expert guidance from one of my teachers that it wasn’t the yoga that betrayed me. It wasn’t the yoga at all. It was the Hallmark version of yoga. I forgot that it wasn’t just the practices that make up yoga. The twists, and the pranayama and the meditation. It’s a process that you get to enjoy. A set of practices as part of a process that I get to share with my students too.
Let us know how your practices in the yoga process have changed over the years.