Here’s a question worth asking yourself;
Are you using yoga to escape or enter into life?
Yoga is something that usually makes us feel good. It’s supposed to. It’s aim is to put the body and mind at ease.
What we do with that ease is up to us.
When I first discovered yoga, I would RUN to the studio at the end of a stressful day. I ‘escaped’ on the mat in graceful asana flows and breath work. The evening ended with me drifting home feeling amazing, reborn, and relaxed.
I like to call this the honeymoon period of my practice. When yoga and I first met, it was seductively enticing. Yoga made me feel like a new woman. It kept surprising me with unexpected, enjoyable things. It showed me a mind expanding world all while telling my body how beautiful and capable it was. Who needs a boyfriend!?
Over time, I realized something important; Just like anything that leaves us feeling good, yoga has an addictive quality. We can get stuck in the high it brings. Chasing it daily, hoping it will make all the scary stuff melt away.
It wasn’t until I discovered the philosophy behind the Asana that I started to consider using those ‘feel good feelings’ to restructure my life. Taking care of things that needed some tough love and attention.
Don’t get me wrong, the feel good, escape part is necessary. Jean Vanier, an amazing humanitarian who’s devoted his life to helping others find comfort puts it in succinct, beautiful words, “When the body becomes comfortable, then the spirit can rise up”
Yoga isn’t here to help you hide from your issues in a cloud of ‘nice’ feelings. It’s meant to place you in a better overall state. A state you can use to look at things in your life that need fixing, without freaking out or beating up on yourself, and then fix them.
Learn to use yoga to put the body and mind in a better place so you can deal with your shit. Trust me. We all have shit to deal with. Even the pretty Instagram yogis.
Keep doing things to put the body and mind at ease. You deserve it. But the juicy part? The hard part? The part that makes it even more worth while is using that goodness and ease to love yourself and others back to life.
Yoga isn’t an escape. It’s an entering into what already is. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Learning to see these things with a kinder perspective and choosing to change the things you have control over for the better.
So get on the mat, take a deep breath, and dive in….
