The Yogi in Me

In my quest to find an inner calm, I have found it in yoga. Many people ask how yoga does this for you? From my experience, yoga helps me stay in the present moment by focusing on my own breath together with movement. You cannot have one without the other. The past is forgotten and I certainly do not think of what will happen later. All I could do for an hour and a half is to be in the “now.” That is where my body is and is focused on–my breath, my movement, my gaze because they all take place in one time.  During that moment in practice, betwixt all the purification process the body and mind go through from the asanas or postures, drishti or gaze and bandhas or internal lock, the body and mind experience such an inner awareness that it makes you think how we have taken a lot of things for granted. Like our breath for instance how we are unconsciously aware that how we breathe has as an effect on ones senses. It is our breath that moves the body. Yoga keeps you in the present. And because all postures cannot be performed right away due to inflexibility or injury or frustration because we want to identify right away with the perfect form. Yoga is a good practice of patience and a total surrender of the ego.

After such a vigorous practice we settle in what is called the corpse pose. We lie on the floor with arms and legs spread out. This is where we find our stillness. In this pose we surrender our whole being, and our wordly attachments. We forget about everything for a moment and just focus on the breath. We breathe into every part of our body where we feel tension and we lay still for a moment. Everyday our mind has a constant stream of thoughts. Yoga helps us find the gap in those thoughts and next thing you know, a fresher perspective arises. 

In a way, yoga gets you started to be more aware starting with your self first and then later on you branch out and spread this awareness to your surroundings. For some reason I cannot explain, I begin applying my internal experiences on the mat onto the outside world. It’s amazing that I have started to want things only to better myself and lead a healthier lifestyle. But as my yoga practice got deeper it made me think of how I wanted to do much more than just feeling good about myself. I have had that unexplainable feeling of wanting to help make the things around me better as well. I want to live in an environment that is clean and green.  I want to be able to give back to Mother Earth and what she has provided us. In a way, Yoga has inspired me to make a conscious effort to do things to help and protect the environment we live in by leading in example in her preservation. Yoga in itself is an education that starts with the betterment of the self and has a ripple effect towards the improvement and betterment of our surroundings. Yoga is a good feeling to spread unto others. For some reason, Yoga makes you a good person. I started out with the objective of looking good and feeling good and finding my own inner calm. 

Image via Wikipedia

But as I delved deeper into it and studied it through a teacher training recently, I have discovered other good things that don’t only pertain to my selfish self. I have discovered many good things that I want to do and one of them is to help others in my own little way by creating a good space and  extending a positive and good light unto others. I want to share this consciousness which I am going through right now and stay hopeful that when others find the time to discover yoga, may they go through what I am going through on and off the mat–and that is to find the their own ”yogi” from within.