Yoga

"My vision started to be clear, I watched the sunlight coming near." Lucious Jackson, Naked Eye

When you think of yoga, do you think of bending yourself into some contorted pretzel shape only to be left wondering how you'll ever escape your newfound predicament? If you think that this is what yoga's all about, your are certainly not alone but are most definitely mistaken.

I may be a neophyte but I'm a big fan of yoga. I encourage (read: push!) my friends at every opportunity to try it, hoping against all hope that they'll see the 'inner light' and get to a class pronto. Personally, I would enjoy practicing yoga for two hours a day if I could get away with it. I recently learned something about myself that astonished me: I don't need therapy to calm my spirit, I need more yoga! I have never felt so refreshed, so centered, so calm as I do when I finish practicing yoga. The pretzel thing? Granted, there are many, many yoga poses that look rather... interesting. But no matter the pose (or asana), there's something special about each and every one of them.

Appearances can be deceiving. Take, for example, Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). This is a very basic yoga pose, one that I have been doing for a couple of years. Imagine my surprise when I learned a couple of months ago that I've been doing it wrong for all that time. And it was much harder than I had ever thought it could be. Eagle pose (Garudasana) was perhaps my first real 'twisty pose, but I was pretty happy when I was able to get into it without falling over. My favorite pose that I can do well continues to be Tree pose (Vrksasana). I feel very powerful and balanced in this pose. But the ultimate frosting on the top of the proverbial cake has to be Corpse pose (Savasana). I find myself in this pose at the end of my practice, centering my mind with the help of my breath. I never realized that there were different ways to breath until I started to practice yoga. Cleansing breath, indeed.

The stretching and breathing involved can help a myriad of things within the body. Feel free to to explore Yogajournal.com to find a pose that may help a particular ache or condition you have: Lower back pain? Check. Need something for headache? Here you go. And I found that there was an unintended benefit to yoga that I never expected: my new limber self could perform better while weightlifting. Calmer mind? Better lifting? That is something that I can definitely live with.

Namaste