What Yoga Is
Yoga is movement and yoga is stillness. Yoga is an old practice, a shared practice, with history and guidelines and beliefs, but also, yoga is a very private and current place inside myself, where I know that I can go to be free from the rest of the world. Yoga is a practice that manages to embody many juxtapositions, making it a hearty thing, with so much room for growth and exploration.
I turned to yoga when I was 19, just after the end of my gymnastics career. Gymnastics was a thing that had taken up so much space in my mind and heart, and nearly all of my time for as long as I could remember. When I got the idea to try yoga it was because I was full of energy that I didn’t know what to do with. I couldn’t find any activity that could challenge me physically but at the same time push my mental boundaries, like gymnastics had. And yoga, though it does not fill the same kind of space inside me that gymnastics did, was the first and remains the only practice that can allow me to find both a very physical and a very mental satisfaction.
My first experience with yoga was at a small studio in downtown Ithaca NY. I sat on my newly purchased mat with my eyes closed, having no idea what to expect. I can still remember what the teacher said in those first moments of class. She said that right there, in that room, we had everything that we needed. We had all the props, all the tools, all the ability that we needed in order to fully enjoy the very moment we were in. “Right here, right now,” she said, “You have everything you need.” It was something that no one had ever said to me before, and in that moment it felt so true. I forgot all the worries of the day, all of my goals, desires, doubts, and failures. I felt content, fulfilled, lucky. It was a lovely feeling.
I found, right away, many similarities between gymnastics and yoga. Both practices allow me to release everything else going on in the world around me, and in my own head, while I am practicing them. Both force me to let go of inhabitations, to put shame, fear, and pride aside. Both activities focus very intently on the inner experience of the body and mind in order to control, in a very subtle and complex way, the motions or outer experiences of the body. Because of it’s similarities to gymnastics, I found great enjoyment from yoga right away, but as I continued to practice, my connection to yoga grew in new directions that had nothing to do with where it began.
After college, when, what I had always considered the foundations in my life, began to break down, I remembered the sentiments of that first yoga class I had ever taken. I longed to have that feeling again of having everything I needed. I had just moved to yet another new area where I didn’t have a strong group of friends or family around me, and I decided that I would find a yoga studio and start taking classes on a more regular basis. I started practicing yoga at home as well. Soon enough, yoga got to be the thing that I turned to whenever I felt overwhelmed or unhappy, whenever I felt that I was too focused on the exterior and needed to go inside myself, whenever I had some free time, or wanted to take a moment for myself and do something fun. Now, every time I move, which in the past five years has been quite frequently, one of the first things I do in my new “home”, is to find a yoga studio. It makes me feel good to know there is a place that I can go, learn, and come together with others.
In the past few years, my relationship with the practice of yoga has continued to deepen and develop. I noticed recently that when other people approach me with the struggles in their lives – a hurt back, trouble with a boss at work, a fear of heights, a sense of being overwhelmed, a struggle to get in shape – I have begun to invite them to yoga classes along with me, to prescribe them a breathing exercise I just learned, to make them up a short yoga complex that they can try at home. Yoga began for me as a very personal need, and spread to an enjoyment of learning within a community, and I think now has broadened ever further. I want to share yoga with others that haven’t experienced it and to share it with those who know so much more about it then I will ever know. I look forward to my feelings towards the practice of yoga, and my relationship to it, continuing to change as I continue to. The best things in life, I find, are full of movement and growth, ever expanding.
