My Journey to OM

I’ve been doing yoga for about 9 years or so but have really been practicing consistently during the last 3 years. Last year I started looking into getting certified as an instructor but the timing never really worked out. Earlier this year I finally decided that now was the time to do it. For some reason it felt like a now or never kind of thing even though that really wasn’t true. It turned out to be the perfect time to do it and it was exactly what I needed in my life at that moment. If it were ever true that something was “meant to be” this was one of those times for me. I think after you go through a rough time in life you look for something to help pull you out of it. At least I do. At first I grabbed onto my husband with all I had.  He carried me through the worst of it. But I knew that this was partly a journey I had to take on my own.  I bring this up because for me yoga was one of the ways I began to put the pieces of my life back together.  When a hope, a dream, is taken from you so suddenly you have to find a way to accept it. People talk about this concept of acceptance. We need to accept what life gives us. We need to find acceptance when bad things happen to us. Except that when something awful really does happen to you the last thing you want to do is accept it. If fact you want to deny it and probably spend a lot of time and energy doing just that.
I went into this yoga training hoping it would help me find this “acceptance” or at the very least give me something else to focus on since it would be taking up so much of my free time. Well it did all that and a whole lot more than I ever expected. For 6 weeks I spent my nights and weekends in a small studio on 29^th St in NYC with an amazing group of yogis that were some of the most inspiring, compassionate and loving people I’ve ever met. We were put through grueling practices, long meditations and had thousands of years of yogic history and practice summarized and taught to us by brilliant teachers for 30 hours a week. It was magnificent.  The connection that you make with people when going through an experience like this together is hard to put into words.  You are bonded together in your shared passion and trepidation.  

It is said in The Bhagavad Gita that yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self. This didn’t have much meaning to me until I took this training. In your practice you are forced to get to know yourself. Whether you are running through a few rounds of sun salutations, doing a morning meditation or holding downward dog for 12 minutes (yes, we actually did that), you are forced to come face to face with who you are. It is only you on that mat, alone with yourself.  You take a breath, you are mindful. You quiet the stirring of the mind. You are your true self.

There are moments now where I will catch myself going to a dark place, a place of non-acceptance, without awareness of self. It is so easy to let your mind carry you away to these places. Yoga has taught me how to come back. Breathe. Let it go. I am in the here and now and I am at peace.