Great benefits from practicing Yoga
I’ve practiced yoga off & on for the past 25 years or so. For the first 20 I only practiced Ashtanga, one of the most physically strenuous forms of yoga. After having done my 500h yoga teacher training for Ashtanga & Hatha, which I started off with a month of 4,5 hours/day of intense asana practice in India, my body was broken. Let’s just say I had had too much of a good thing. So my advice to you if you are looking into doing a yoga teacher training course (yttc), do one at a time, let your body & mind rest, to get all the great benefits from practicing yoga.
When getting home from a year of traveling & doing my Ashtanga/Hatha yttc, I started noticing that something was wrong in my body. After a year of tests they found ulcers in my entire gastro/intestinal system, the start of my worst Crohn’s flare to date. Something that completely knocked me out. So doing anything that involved energy was out of the question. That was when I found Yin yoga. Half way into my 200h Yin yoga yttc, I also started a 100h Restorative & Mediyoga yttc. Basically I went from the most physically strenuous form of yoga to the most relaxing one.
Yes, I have a tendency to do a lot at once… Something I’ve worked hard on changing, & will probably have to continue working on for the rest of my life, since doing all the fun stuff I want, & doing them all at once, is what drives me. My body just doesn’t quite agree on how much I can do at once…
How has yoga helped me?
Getting in touch with my body
Getting in touch with my body. Having Crohn’s, Fibromyalgia & Ehler Danlos Syndrome means that I have periods that I’m in a lot of & sometimes constant pain, have very low or no energy & am extremely sensitive to stress & other stimuli. Yoga has helped me work in unison with my body. I start my days off with yoga. I let my body decide & try to give it what it needs that day. Some days that means no yoga, & some days it means 90 minutes of yoga (asana (postures), pranayama (breathing) & dhyana (meditation)) & maybe meditation multiple times during the day.
My morning routine helps me start off the day in a good way. It means that the feeling of being run over by a steamroller, that I often feel in the morning, the stiffness & pain in my joints & muscles become easier to deal with. Some days it even disappears entirely, or maybe it’s just that I just don’t notice it as much. I finish my day with a body scan in bed to really land & get into sleeping mode. So my body gets a slow wake-up call that makes it supple & a lot less achy, & then gets prepared for sleep.
Finding balance
When I’m stressed & life feels overwhelming it’s important for me to slow down & connect with myself. That way I’m in balance & can deal with whatever happens during the day. And let me tell you, having worked as a high school teacher for the past 14 years, a lot happens everyday that you need to deal with. Meditation & just slowing my breath has helped me a lot to achieve that balance.
When I was returning to work & trying to get back into the hectic life as a high school teacher I sometimes had to meditate for 3 hours per day to be able to somewhat function. All my energy was burned during the day & getting home I had already spent the next day’s energy reserve too. So starting my day off with yoga, taking breaks during the day to meditate, reconnecting with my breath, meditating to land when I got home & doing a body scan in bed became instrumental in me increasing my workload.
Recharging my batteries
Yoga helps me recharge my batteries & enables me to have energy over for other people. When your entire body is in turmoil there’s no energy to speak of. With the help of yoga I was able to calm my body down & little by little get to a point where I could actually watch TV, not just lay on my couch with my eyes closed, to today where I can live a good life where I do things I love doing alone, & with others. I just need to think about how much energy it costs & what I need to do to get that energy back. Maybe even prepare the day before I’m meeting a friend, by not doing anything too strenuous, & not make any plans for the following day either.
Learning to manage my energy has made a tremendous change in my life. Because everything takes energy, even if it’s something you love doing it takes energy from a reserve that runs on fumes. Simply put, yoga has given me my life back.
Dealing with pain
Yoga helps me deal, not only with physical pain, but with emotional & mental pain too. Being chronically ill, getting your first diagnosis when you are 31, & your 2 others when you are 44, after a lifetime of telling doctors that something is wrong & being brushed off, is anything but easy. All the anxiety & sometimes depression that follows when you, first of all aren’t listened too, second of all don’t understand all the things that are happening in your body, third of all have to come to terms with what’s happening in your body, something I didn’t fully do until I got my Fibromyalgia & EDS diagnoses, can consume you.
Yoga, & experience of going through emotions like anxiety before & knowing it won’t kill me, has helped me be with the emotions. I register that I’m feeling anxious or blue & that’s ok. I can connect to my breathing & just be in the moment. All emotions are good emotions, it’s how we react to them that makes them hard to deal with. I’m not saying I love anxiety when it strikes, but I’m ok with it being there & I know it too shall pass.
Connecting with the world around me
Yoga philosophy, something I had a hard time with in the beginning, has helped me feel even more connected to the world around me. It, together with all my own experiences dealing with illness & hardship, working with stress management & traveling the world & seeing all the beauty the world has to offer, has helped me have more compassion for other people & what they are going through. Yoga is so much more than just asana (positions), dhyana (meditation) & pranayama (breathing), it’s a way of life where you live in unison not only with yourself, but the world around you.
Being grateful
Yoga has helped me slow down when I eat & be more grateful for what I eat. When doing the 500h yttc in India we used to say a mantra, thanking the food, before we ate. It took a few years before it was something I practiced on my own. It wasn’t until I realized that being completely stressed out as I was, I started eating while I was walking from the kitchen & I finished on my way back. I didn’t take the time to sit & be in the moment.
So I started each meal by closing my eyes, taking a few deep breaths & said a little gratitude mantra that I came up with, “I’m grateful to the people who have planted, taken care of, transported & sold the food. I’m grateful for the nutrition it gives my body. I’m grateful to myself for cooking it & I’m grateful that I’m doing OK. Thank you, Thank you , Thank you.” This gave me the opportunity to land, be in the moment & slow down when I ate. Which not only helped my stress level, but also my digestion.
Reconnecting with myself
Most importantly, yoga helped me reconnect with myself. In trying to do all the things I wanted & achieving all my goals, constantly living in the future, never in the present, I had lost that connection. Yoga helped me find my way back to myself. Which helped me see more clearly what was important to me & what kind of life I wanted to live.
A time & place for everything
I don’t want to say that one style of yoga is better than the other, however, there is a time & place for everything. For me Ashtanga was what I felt I needed for many years, I loved the explosivity & high pace of it. It made me burn all the negative energy I had inside & get focused, in hindsight maybe not that good for my joints. Having more energy I’m adding a little bit of Hatha & vinyasa on the days that I feel like I can challenge my body. Yin yoga made me start connecting with myself & Restorative made me land fully.
Which form you choose is very much dependent on what you want out of your practice & how you want to go about getting it. In the end all types of yoga aim to do the same thing, unite the body, mind & spirit, they just do it in different ways. There are great benefits from practicing yoga no matter which style you choose, & the benefits are endless & life changing. So roll out your mat & start practicing yoga…
