On Yoga
As the years go by, we get prosperous and our waist line starts to increase. We get accustomed to sitting on the couch with our chips and salsa and binge watching our favorite show or sports event. We start using our joints and our muscles less and less. Mowing the lawn and weeding the bushes starts to take a toll. Sounds familiar, this phenomenon otherwise called ageing is a certainty. Our aches and pains start to grow and we long for the days when all we worried about was where to go for a holiday or what else we did not need that we have to buy.
Life doesn’t have to be like that. We don’t have to feel tired all the time, or be afraid to overstretch, and have to take pain killers afterwards. Yoga offers a life changing experience to one and all. The earlier you start the better for you. All you need is discipline and patience. The best way to explain what yoga can do for you is to illustrate with a simple example.
Just humor me a little bit. You can try this this on your own, at home. Go open up a new bag of rubber bands. Take one of them in your hand and stretch it. It probably offers a lot of resistance. Now keep repeating that say fifty times you will see the band begins to be more supple. Our muscles and tendons work the same way. Without much use they become very tight, reducing our flexibility. Yoga offers a means, to exercise all our muscles gently, over a period of time, to increase our flexibility. Unless you have some injury, yoga is sure to offer you a way to improve your flexibility.
On a recent trip I read a book on my Kindle by Jessamyn Stanley called Every body Yoga. What attracted me to this book was that the author wasn’t a model, but an overweight person, and had pictures of herself in the various yoga poses. This book helped eliminate my fear of being able to do yoga. Weight and flexibility aren’t directly correlated. You could develop flexibility even if you are overweight.
My yoga journey began a year after some gentle nudges from a friend. My first weeks of yoga weren’t great as our teacher pushed us to flex. The day after was often quite miserable 😩. Although the visions of standing upside down in a yogic pose, and doing somersaults like the gymnasts kept twirling in my head, I realized it was far from reality. Seeing my teacher a elderly lady sit with knees on the ground doing a butterfly pose whilst I sat with my legs bowed at a 30 degree angle wasn’t quite what I had expected. I guess the less you used your muscles the tighter they got. After several months at it, I must admit I am still far from reaching my goal. It’s been almost a year since I started yoga, but it’s only the past month or so that I have started to practice regularly. Our bodies and muscles are much tighter than a rubber band and you need a lot of discipline to loosen them.
You don’t have to stop your exercising or playing sport when you take up yoga. But my view is that they both have a purpose in our lives. Yoga will not help you lose weight or trim your waistline. That will come through a combination of exercise and dieting. But yoga surely will help oxygenate your body and make you feel good about yourself. I remember coming back from work every day, tired and achy 😖, just waiting to jump on the couch and retire for the day. On days I practice yoga I feel different, I don’t feel physically tired as before, after a long day of work and two plus hours cramped in my car. The stretches I did, when I practice yoga in the morning, have made it easier for me during the day. My day at work isn’t the most active — sitting crouched in front of my lap top, reaching or sometimes overreaching for something on my desk, sitting endlessnessy in sometimes meaningless meetings. But yoga and the morning stretches have made it easier on my body to feel relaaaaaxed at the end of the day.
The most important thing to do, if you are willing to try your hand at yoga, is first stop thinking that it’s going to be simple and easy. Yoga only helps you realize how unfit you are on the very first day you try it. It requires your commitment and hard work 😓. If you are like me and lazy, it might take you a year to even develop that. Find the right cohort for your classes, folks that will push you to keep going when you are ready to give up. It also helps to have people with the same levels of motivation and similar levels of flexibility. Interestingly, we all use our muscles differently, so you might be surprised 😲 when you find that you are better than some in leaning over and touching your toes, but can’t even get close to holding you toes behind your back.
Most important of-course is to find the right teacher. Unfortunately those are hard to find, and you need to persevere to find one of your liking. Don’t rush to pay up for the steamy Bikram yoga in your neighborhood or go try out a fancy yoga class at Lifetime Fitness with a bunch of twenty-something’s. All this will accomplish is get you a nice sauna, and keep you amazed at the flexibility of others. You need to get real and find a teacher that is proficient and patient, who can deal with your lack of fitness, and understand that you are not going to get there for a while. I was fortunate to have gotten introduced to one such lady — Dakshaji who has helped me start to work wonders with my body. Kudos to her efforts and patience and attempts to motivate us every week. I am still not as supple as an elastic band, and head stands and somersaults are still only fictions of my imagination. But my confidence, that I could get there eventually someday if I try, is higher today than a year before. So come join me in the journey of yoga, and give yourself s chance to make your life even better.
