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