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Over the years I’ve developed a deep love and appreciation for yoga. Sometimes I joke and say that it’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had.
In the beginning I did yoga to help me lose weight after a pregnancy and to keep fit. I discovered I was good at doing the asanas so that gave me an ego boost and led me to do yoga teacher training. Teaching led to starting up yoga centres, to travelling, writing about yoga, and to training yoga teachers.
Eventually, because of health problems, I used yoga to manage my well-being, to recover and rehabilitate.
Along the way, asana practice became a little less compelling and other facets of yoga drew me: relaxation, yoga nidra, pranayama, meditation, philosophy study, the ethics of yoga.
One day it dawned on me, that it was important to think in terms of what I brought to yoga, rather than what it could do for me. I’m a slow learner.
I like how writer Lyn A. Anderson, Ph.D. describes yoga as a sort of GPS for discovering your soul:
Karma yoga teaches us that if the lessons we need to learn have been truly learned, change has been made, a space opens and we then have a greater opportunity to manifest free will and with free will, we become the master of our own destiny. The soul has found its GPS, a system that provides time and location information under any condition here on earth, with an unobstructed view.
Visesadarsina atmabhavabhavananivrttih
A person of extraordinary clarity is one who is free from the desire to know the nature of the Perceiver.
*Patanjali’s Yogasutras, translation and commentary by T.K.V. Desikachar.
