Waking Up

Waking Up

Many people say that yoga is just something they cannot do. They claim that their body is not made for it or just incompatible with what the practice of yoga entails. One thing that most of those people have is four working limbs. Matt, however, does not have this luxury. After being in a severe car wreck that killed his father and sister, he was left paralyzed and in extreme pain. Medical efforts were given to alleviate some of the pain in addition to spiritual efforts to rely on God. After his condition became increasingly worse, he said that he "trusts no one" (63). This was before yoga changed his life.

One thing right out of the gates that makes me relate to Matt is his inability to trust people. I trusted my parents and told them about my eating disorders, depression, suicide attempts, and self-harm after I had hid all of this from them for six or seven years, it did not go that well. I was told to just decide to be happy and get better. I went to see a psychologist to fix all of my problems, but I suffered a severe relapse and was trying to tell him about it. While I was divulging information about how my self-hard and eating disorders flared back up, he was literally nodding off. A professional that was trained in this field essentially betrayed any trust I had left in me. If someone in this field could not help me, then who could? Because of this, I relate with Matt’s issues to trust other people.

Going into this book, I was very intrigued as to how someone who suffers from paralysis could do yoga, and Matt amazed me throughout it. One of the most amazing things is that he notes that through yoga, “I grew in dimension as my entire body began whispering to me once again…Progress is what you make of it” (168). I also related to this. When I first started to seriously practice yoga, I thought that my body was a prison that I had a life sentence in. I hated it and everything in it. I thought that through yoga, I could begin to love my body, and I was right. I grew and continue to grow internally in my body as I accept it more and more—from the fold my stomach gets when I sit down to the stretch marks on my lower back.

These things that I am overcoming are minor things when compared to everything that Matt overcame, but I suffered from a different kind of paralysis, an emotional paralysis. Through yoga I too began to feel. However, it was not my body that I was feeling, like Matt, but my emotions that I had bottled up inside of it. One quote at the end of the book really resonated and has continued to echo in my mind after reading it “If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention” (222). I only have one body and one mind, and, with the help of Matt’s memoire, I can one day wake up loving it. 

Yoga(t) Some Sutras

Yoga(t) Some Sutras

            The yoga sutras were one of my favourite readings that we covered in class. The only thing that might beat it is How Yoga Works just because I absolutely loved the storyline. I really miss going through the sutras in class together and getting to understand them at a deeper level. So, because I loved the sutras so much, I am just going to go through and explore my favourite verses and sections of them.

            My first favourite verse is the very first sutra, “With prayers for divine blessings, now begins an exposition of the sacred art of yoga” (1.01) (particularly the Iyengar translation). The reason I love this one so much is not only because I love to do yoga, and this marks the beginning of a yoga session. Rather, I love the deeper implications of this verse. This translation includes an emphasis on the reliance on the divine, which, for me, is God. This shows that yoga is to be practiced, at its most basic, with the desire to get closer to God and receive blessings from Him. This, in my opinion, demonstrates that yoga and Christianity are not mutually exclusive. For me, yoga is a way that I can glorify God through the things my body is able to do and focus my mind on dwelling in the peace He gives me.

            Additionally, there is another verse that confirms my belief that yoga can be also done under the scope of a Christian religion. “Īśvara was also the teacher of the ancients, because he is not limited by Time” (1.26) Through this verse, I see a direct connection to the Christian God. God is omnipresent, which is echoed by this verse when it says that  Īśvara is not limited by time. Also, when it says that He was the teacher of the ancients, I immediately think of the Bible, more specifically the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the earliest foundation of Christian religion, which was inspired by God. Therefore, this verse supports the Christian notion that God is transcendent of time and the divine inspiration of the beginnings of our faith.

            Finally, on a slightly different note, one of my favourite things about the sutras is that they say that it is okay to fail to still the oscillations of the mind. “At other times, the seer identifies with the fluctuating consciousness” (1.04). I frequently find myself getting upset if my mind is going, and I cannot stop it. As an instructor, I hold myself to a standard that I should be able to do almost anything in yoga so that I may demonstrate it to others. When I just cannot stop thinking during savasana, I almost feel like my entire practice was fruitless. The one thing that never changes in a yoga class or session is that there will always be a savasana. However, this sutra reminds me that yoga is not an all or nothing practice. Each and everything you do in yoga is planting seeds for future practice.

With that being said,

Until next time, my fellow yogis and yoginis,

Namasté,

Upward-facing Bear

Bhagavad Gita I atiG davagahB

Bhagavad Gita I atiG davagahB

(Get it? It's a reflection!)

Reading the Bhagavad Gita has been a very interesting and eye-opening experience. Whenever I saw that we had to read the Bhagavad Gita for the class, I was somewhat dreading it. I knew that, especially as a yoga instructor, I needed to read this text and have knowledge of it. However, I expected that I was going to have to struggle through very dense and confusing text. Philosophy has never been my strong point, especially with studying classic texts like Plato, so I figured that this was going to be the same thing. I was very pleasantly surprised. The text was not hard to read, and the concepts were not that hard to understand.

One of the things that stuck out to me while reading the Bhagavad Gita was something that reflected what is, in my opinion, one of the most central ideas in Christian theology. "Being devoted to loving God in loving worship leads to the performance of one's sacred duty" (9.30-31). This immediately made me think of my own Catholic faith and The Bible. This is very close to the verse of Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” In both of these it shows that we are called to love and serve our God, and that is our ultimate purpose. In my own walk with God, I have fallen in and out of an intimate relationship with Him. However, each time that I come back, I feel a sense of belonging and that this is my ultimate job. I feel that we, as Christians, are called to serve God and exonerate Him in everything we do, whether it is bagging someone’s groceries at the local Walmart or practicing as a clinical psychologist. Between these two quotes, it really became apparent how similar the roots of Hinduism and Christianity are.

While finishing the Bhagavad Gita, there was one thing that I cannot stop thinking about that made me doubt this newfound similarity between Hinduism and Christianity. One of the final warnings that Krishna gives Arjuna is about telling others about the knowledge that he has of God. Krishna says, “ “Do not share this wisdom with anyone who lacks in devotion or self-control, lacks the desire to learn, or scoffs at me” (18. 67-68).  Whenever I first read this, it was almost a knee-jerk reaction. This is basically the opposite of what we are taught as Christians. In Mark 16:15, we see God’s ultimate plan for us, “And He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.'” From here, we see that we need to spread the Good News to every person we come in contact to because the only way to Salvation is through God’s never-ending love for us and knowledge of the Scripture to guide our lives. Without knowing this, we cannot live to the full potential that God has in store for us. When following Krishna’s demand, we are possibly denying other people the knowledge of God. It might be that through being first introduced to The Bible, someone cleans up their act and reforms to follow Christ’s example. This is something that I do not fully understand in the Bhagavad Gita. 

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this text because it was an essential piece of yoga philosophy that I needed to understand both as a yogi and as a Christian. 

Until next time, my fellow yogis and yoginis,

Namasté,

Upward-facing Bear

For Halloween, I'm going to be....

For Halloween, I'm Going to be a Yogi

Actually, I was an old lady (my female friend was an old man), but that is beside the point. This week in class was a lot of fun. I absolutely loved working on handstands. To be honest, I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of working on them because it was something I did not know I was already good at, such as headstands and forearm stands. To my surprise, however, I was a lot better at them than I remembered. I had had a lot of experience with them before from my experience as a cheerleader, but it has been many months and a surgery since the last time I was able to fully tumble. I knew that getting up in the handstand would be no problem, but it was the holding it without the wall that had me worried. It was a wonderful surprise to see that I could actually hold it off of the wall for a decent amount of time. This is something that I thought I was a long way away from. I guess that I had closed off my mind from the possibility of me being able to do it. This has made me even more excited to get back to working on those as well. I see that on the syllabus, it says that we are going to have quite a few Thursdays off, which is bitter sweet because the yogi in me wants to practice, but the student in me is grateful for any cancelled class, even if it is one of my favourites.

Outside of class, I have had a decent amount of practice. I actually had my first ballet class last Monday. I never realized how much yoga would help. Obviously, the flexibility that I earned doing yoga was a huge benefit. After the class, I talked with my ballet instructor, and she was in awe that I had never taken a ballet class before. She had said that I caught on very quickly, had a lot of natural flexibility, good posture, and natural turnout. Now, not all of those are from yoga or beneficial to yoga. The largest problem is my natural turn out. It makes many yoga poses harder because I have to focus on correcting my turnout in many of the  yoga poses that call for straight hips. Other than this, I had a wonderful class that I taught on Tuesday. Everyone seemed happy to be there and excited to practice yoga. That was one of the best classes that I have taught in a while. We had a very intense class where we worked on abs for several different poses and then had both an inversion session and a challenge pose arm balance. People were very enthusiastic to try poses that were outside of their normal comfort zones. Everyone was just excited to get one last good session of yoga in before the long weekend!

The Bhagavad Gita continues to surprise me as I am reading it. Much like several others, I keep drawing comparisons to my own faith as a Catholic. While reading, I thought of the Just War theory in Catholicism that acknowledges that sometimes war is necessary to combat evil or corruption in the world. This is seen in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna is advising Arjuna to fight and fulfill his job as a warrior. Another part that I believe there is much similarity between Christianity and the Bhagavad Gita is the level of devotion that it requires to be united with the ultimate being, or God. Both in the Gita and in Christianity, we are called to live out our faith in the most extreme manner we can. When this happens, we become closer to God, or Vishnu. While the Gita does speak about being detached from all things in live, there is a difference between being detached and being on autopilot. While being detached from the world, I believe that a person can still be wildly and immensely emerged in everything it has to offer. It only becomes a threat to detachment when you are unwilling to let go of what you have. In this, I believe it is very similar to our call, as Christians, to drop everything we have and follow Christ when called to do so. The similarities between the Gita and The Bible give me chills because it raises much deeper questions as to why our religions are so similar, and, all the religions of the world. 

Until next time, my fellow yogis and yoginis,

Namasté,

Upward-facing Bear