In order to understand yoga you must have a direct experience of yoga. Talking about yoga is an exercise in futility if it not accompanied with practice. My student Emily has been gracious enough to share a few words about her direct experience with Ashtanga Yoga and me.
From Emily:
I began practicing Ashtanga in attempt to heal and prevent the numerous injuries and problems with my body that had stopped me doing everything else: ultimate frisbee, Taekwondo, running, weightlifting…literally everything I tried had landed me with some sort of injury and resulted in long periods of “rest” while I waited for a sprain to heal, for inflammation to go away.
Doctors told me my bones were shaped wrong. Doctors told me that past doctors had failed to notice bones I’d broken, and that I’d healed strangely. Doctors told me they weren’t sure how to help me, and gave me laundry lists of things NOT to do. My periods of injury-induced rest effectively became a pattern of quitting.
I was tired of quitting.
I went to Land Yoga and signed up for a trial month, feeling skeptical and a little nervous. I was already anticipating my first Ashtanga-related injury and the day I would probably quit.
The injury came. I thought to myself, alright, here we go again. I waited for someone tell me: “Stay home and rest and come back when you’re better.”
I remember emailing Michael: “Should I come to practice?”
He said yes, come. He said we would make adjustments.
I blinked at the response and wondered if he really understood how frail I was.
So I went, and I made the adjustments. Halfway through my practice Michael came over and told me, “You have to stop dwelling on the injury.” He told me to move forward, to focus on what I could do, to stop making myself miserable.
I went back day after day. And then, even though I didn’t quite believe it would happen while I continued to use the rest of my body, the injury healed. In fact, I healed much faster than I expected. That was my first epiphany–that nobody would tell me to stop doing yoga, and that all I needed was patience and determination.
My biggest hesitation before starting my yoga practice was regarding the time I would have to devote to it. It was clear I’d need to carve out a significant chunk of my schedule for my Ashtanga practice to be effective, and I was reluctant to give up the hours. I’m a writer, which is hard enough to keep up outside of a full time job, and I had managed to balance my life just so in order to squeeze in three hours of writing a day.
But when I started going to the studio it became clear after just a few weeks that yoga was informing my writing. One of my journal entries from shortly after I began my Ashtanga practice says:
“The same way that I am building my strength and flexibility and peace bit by bit, day by day — that’s how I am building my writing. And obviously because I go to yoga practice so much, now I have less time to write. But in a way that is teaching me patience. I can’t abandon all else for the sake of my writing. Maintaining a healthy body and mind is just as—if not more—important. It’s easy for me to forget that.”
I stumbled across a quote once, that I now think about on a daily basis: “Whatever you do in life, yoga shows you how to do it better.”
Yoga has taught me discipline and patience. It’s taught me what it means to really focus. When I practice I’m forced me to stop everything else in my head and just listen to my breathing, pay attention to the needs of my body, remember what pose comes next. After, when I go back to my stories, I’m able to think with new clarity and sharpness, because yoga has helped me to clear my brain and empty out some of the mess.
