Should I try Yoga?

You may have heard that yoga is really relaxing, or that because you are stiff that you should try Yoga, maybe that it will help your health issue, or enhance your training programme. 

Iyengar yoga classes are full of details and techniques that may be completely strange to you at first. You may think or feel overwhelmed by instructions that you don’t seem to understand.  Then while looking around at others,  they seem to “getting it” and not struggling with that intense pain the back to there legs! The teacher may try to help you, giving you a correction when you thought your alignment was perfect.  During the class you do your best to keep up, and maybe even just trying to survive until the end of the class. 

Then comes the Savasana or the final relaxation at the end of the class. You maybe someone that can completely melt into the mat and has a lovely floaty experience  or you maybe finding that your mind can still not turn off. Either way, you feel you don’t get it and it’s not for you. 

The next day you feel your body all over, maybe feeling like you have been run over by a truck. 

What do you do? Do you persevere and try to make sense of what everyone else seems to get out of Yoga or do you just give up? 

Yoga can trigger so may parts of ourselves. Our minds are rigid and set in there way, and our ego is very protective of maintaining its own safe place of power. Each of our lives has been made up of many experiences that go into moulding our minds and ego. Some of these experiences will have been traumatic, others  just making suggestions of what is right and wrong, making us believe in certain structures, should’ve and should nots. These beliefs have created a gate or boundary around the possibilities of life. 

In today’s world, yoga can offer us a safe place to look at our selves through the experience of a yoga practice. For many the confrontation s will come in small doses that you can manage but for others it will seem like a mountain to climb. I know of people who, even when they lay on there mat the tears started flowing, while others seem to be able to just easily unwind in there practice. 

Yoga is not just a chance to stretch the body, but is an opportunity to stretch the mind. While for most people this is an interesting experience for some it is very confronting. The experience maybe a simple observation of how the busy the mind is or noticing how exhausted you feel, it might be an observation of how poor your balance is, or how of how uncomfortable you feel in that upside down pose. 

Whatever that difficulty is, it can be confronting.  The question is  how are you going to deal with that confrontation?

If you do decide to preserve, I suggest that you let your teacher know what is going on with you. Either by email, or catching them in a quiet moment so you can let them know your experience, and what you are trying to work with. It might be that you are sensitive to touch, that you have a medical condition or that you are dealing with an emotional challenge. 

I would like to finish this blog with a big thanks to all my students at Yoga on the Square who have been brave enough to persevere! I know that at times you will have wanted to give up, but that in making that choice to preserve you are now reaping the benefits of all that Yoga can give.