Ahhhhhh. I just returned from taking an hour and a half yoga class with Murti of Healing in Yoga and then a nice lunch with a good friend.  I’m so grateful that Murti has devoted his life to giving yoga instruction to us. I’ve been taking yoga from him since November of 1996 and although I would not put myself out there as a yoga “officienado” by any means, I have learned to accept my limitations as well as my breakthroughs and to grab from yoga all that I can.When I began taking yoga so many years ago, I was very overweight. Probrably one of my main reasons for taking the class was because I was desperate to lose weight. What I discovered instead was how to connect with my body, mind and soul and drop the weight of the world from my mind.  I was always amazed by how a yoga class would make me feel because inevitably I’d walk into the class with a million worries on my mind about work, about home, about friends and usually about half way through the class I realized that my focus had moved from these worries to how the heck I was going to stay holding a painful pose and live to tell the story!

I learned to breathe through the discomfort and also to drop my competitiveness because there were people in the class who were much more flexible than me and many whom had been taking yoga for years. I learned to dive into the yoga and listen for what it would teach me about myself.  I don’t know how I hung in there for many years with lots of body fat making it very uncomfortable for me to move and hold poses, but I did.  Now that I am thin, it is much easier for me to move but I believe that I helped myself get to the place where I can “flow” more easily now by persistently experiencing yoga and making the effort for poses, even when I could barely get into them. As Murti says, “its all a pose, from the very beginning through to the advanced level”. It’s all about our intention.

Obviously I highly recommend exploring yoga classes for yourself.  Try different classes, experience different teachers. There are many kinds of yoga being taught.  I believe yoga not only helps us physically become more flexible and strong in our bodies, but also it helps us connect to that special part within us (I call it God, but you call it what you need too) and the spirit outside of us that connects us all.  I seem to always feel more loving to people around me after I’ve given myself the gift of yoga.

One of my classmates has a Ph.D. in technology and has well-respected job in that field, yet what seems to give him the most peace is to learn about himself, explore the great unknown and to practice yoga.  I have worked in the technical industry for lo these many years and have met some pretty amazing people and also people that were completely absorbed in their heads and not “connected” to the world around them at all.  It is always amazing to me when I meet someone in our yoga class who is grounded, and loving and peaceful and then find out that they have these huge responsible jobs that normally pile on the stress that we can only imagine, yet because they practice yoga, they are able to keep their work and their lives in perspective with balance.

I believe this kind of balancing of our work and ourselves is a great responsibility for the new leaders of our world.  We just don’t have to be crazy and over-worked and under-paid and stressed out to the max. That’s such an old-technology.  Instead, I believe we can accomplish more and greater things than before when we are balanced between our lives and our work.

So if you haven’t tried yoga yet, why not give it a go and see what you find out?  If you do practice yoga than keep on–keeping on.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful gift to give yourself. 

Namaste