How did my yoga adventure begin 15 years ago?
✦ 3 min
My Yoga
I remember being at my best friend's grandmother's flat, leafing through a typical women's magazine about everything and nothing. Under a blanket, because, as her grandmother used to say, there was always "mountain air" there, good for health and beauty. Back then I didn't know that many years later I would go just as crazy as she did about air, omega acids, magnesium, a balanced diet, bio, eco, organic, xylitol, natural medicine and spirulina and various other notions in which I would get lost along the way, too hard, too unhealthily.
Back under the blanket: a key word turned up in passing in the magazine. Exotic, magical, a little occult: the word MEDITATE. I say to my friend, "actually it would be nice to learn to meditate."
"Sign up for Yoga," she said...
So I did. I signed up for Yoga.
Over the years I have seen many people during their first Yoga session. Many of them I never met again in the company of a mat. I can also see my own first yoga session, at a school practising Iyengar yoga.
How all my beliefs collapsed: about where the heels go in downward dog, about yoga being "only" breathing in "pleasant" poses and basically one of the alternatives to fitness, the gym and the various crossfits.
When I recall that session and those people who "gave up" after the first class, for reasons that made sense to me even then, I don't understand why, when it came to buying a pass, I said "open pass" and day after day, at first a few days a week and later 7 days a week, I showed up to class with a mat under my arm.
Always with a mat without a cover, which I still don't have today, reeking of Marlboro, I went to sweat out kebabs and McDonald's, and although writing this today my vegan stomach is gently offended, I'm not ashamed of it, because it is part of my story, and Yoga helped me let go of shame.
And so, week by week, month by month, I experienced the magic that, as I know from other yogis, everyone who has stepped onto the path of Yoga experiences. A magic that slowly, before my eyes, transformed an inflated ego that competed with the neighbour on the next mat over "correctness" and endurance in a pose, proudly puffing out its chest whenever someone "less senior" came to class. An ego that for the first months answered the question "so how's that yoga going?" with "great, look at my thigh muscles."
Yoga calmly and smoothly pacified the ego, so that I could watch the show in silence: the show during which, in Savasana, I experienced the state of Samadhi for the first time; when I first used, unconsciously, the flexibility gained on the mat outside of it; when I first became Warrior II in life, engaged my bandhas and with a warrior's grace got through the situation I found myself in. The show during which, moved, I realised what Yoga means, and that the reason my decisions are becoming clearer and more and more ethical is precisely that I stepped onto its path.
For now, because frankly I don't know whether anything is more constant than change, Yoga for me is a path one can step onto consciously or subconsciously, or not.
I am very grateful to be on this path.
Just a few years ago, when I was pestering my husband, who complained of back pain, with asanas, and he would stand in downward dog and say it wasn't for him, I would have said it is cosmically hard to get someone hooked on Yoga and to help others bring it into their lives.
Back then I thought Yoga equals asana. Now that I know the range of concepts that make up the philosophy of Yoga, I notice it is much easier to introduce and present Yoga when we aptly choose the aspect of yoga we start from and present.
I'm confirmed in this theory by a friend who first liked my vegan recipes, which then became the impulse to explore the concept of Ahimsa and eventually the other Yamas. By my mother, whom I refused a raw apple following the Ayurvedic principles for Vata dosha, who started to take an interest in Ayurveda, and from there it was a short way to pranayama. And finally by my husband, for whom going to a yoga session is still not the greatest entertainment, but who fell head over heels for meditation and breathing techniques after all the courses we did together. Now every morning he starts with a sun salutation, because it helps him meditate "better".
I am very grateful for all of it.
