Learning to practice yoga
Yoga was always in my life - albeit at the margins of it. I remember my uncle and aunt showing me how to do the Tree Pose, under an old apple tree in my grandma's garden. It felt good to become a tree. Years later, the pull towards yoga intensified - this time, it was a social pull. I was living in London at the time, and I found a community of people who felt familiar and fascinating. They hosted a yoga night and invited me. I didn't want to be clueless when attending, so I found a yoga mat - a deep salmon colour - aiming to start practicing on my own. Peer pressure, without pressure. Peer elevation, if you will. Then the pandemic hit, so my practice got squeezed in between of the foot of my bed and the doors of my wardrobe. But it fit.
During the lockdown, yoga became a disciplined, even enforced, practice. I had to do it. I dragged myself to the mat - in the evening, if my willpower didn't hold in the morning. Because at that time it was a willpower thing. A rigid approach. Unnecessarily so, I soon learned, because it was so much easier to come back to my practice when I was creating convenient conditions for it - rather than forcing myself into it. Of course, getting stronger is helpful. But you cannot get stronger without, well, getting stronger. So you have to go through the awkward phases of it, until it becomes more about cultivating mental states, rather than physical ones.
There were material changes as well. When I started working remotely, hopping from Florence to Trento to Cadiz to Gouda, at first I was carrying my yoga mat in my single suitcase. I soon realised how unnecessary it was - I tried yoga on a towel and soon graduated to plain ground. I am sure that thousands of years ago no one used yoga mats, special clothes, special props. So I cut the unnecessary. I did yoga on wooden kitchen floors, on a tiled rooftop, in balconies, next to a Christmas tree (lit, of course), in my childhood bedroom, in hostels when on the road. Even when walking Camino de Santiago, yoga became one of the highlights - co-organising it in a beautifully lit cellar with people from all around the world, stretching the muscles that worked for dozens of miles daily, for weeks.
The first time I did yoga, I couldn't follow any of it. The poses sounded somewhere between strange and spell-like (Baddha Konasana!) I was tensing up my neck to catch a glimpse of my teacher, my mind could not keep up with the unfamiliar names, my body protesting. Since then, a lot has changed - each yoga practice and teacher bringing something new, enriching my understanding not only in the quantity of poses, but the quality of practice.
My first teacher in Lisbon, a down-to-earth French lady, approached the practice with simplicity and vigour. I would get challenged by headstands, but also nourished by her analysis of yamas and nyamas. In her class I realised that what stops me most is fear - of falling. Now, my second teacher, German-Nepalese lady, held classes in the very same space, but with a completely different atmosphere of depth and mysticism. With her, I learned the importance of pranayama - breathing exercises. When I moved to the seaside, a Portuguese teacher guided me to a spot in the room with the sea view. She was strangely connected to the sea, during the first lesson I thought I am hearing music with ocean sounds, but I soon realised it was her breathing, sounding like an ocean goddess. In her class, I learned to truly breath deeply. My Venezuelan teacher taught me the sweet sense of moving deeper into the poses through sweaty repetition - when your body is exhausted, breath catching, muscles burning, and yet you keep going to reach a somewhat spiritual release. Finally, my current teacher introduced me to a form of yoga relying on self-sufficiency - no mats, no blocks. Holding poses for a long time, breathing through discomfort.
These days yoga still invokes diverse emotions in me. From feeling comfortable and at home, to feeling exposed and vulnerable. But even home can be a place to encounter uneasiness. So I just do my best, respecting the fact that I choose to be here, welcoming an opportunity to sink in deeper, to learn something about the practice of yoga, and about my body. Yoga can be a very visceral reminder of what is going on. You will feel all your dis-eases - as sharp pain, nausea or dizziness, a shift in balance. Your resistance may come from changing hormones, repressed anger or plain exhaustion. No matter what it is, it will present itself. And in hard poses there's no space for escapism - all you can do is stick with the feeling, physical or emotional, breath into it, until it dissipates. Everything feels so sweet after. True work. True rest.
My friend - an avid yoga practitioner - quotes her yoga teacher who, instead of forcing a pose on a student, asks why they want to do this pose in the first place. I like this framework - your body won't be able to do it all, at least for the time being, and that is okay. And if you struggle to accept it, it may be interesting to observe it with curiosity - why do I feel I have to do it all, do I struggle to accept my limitations in other areas in my life, do my expectations of myself sometimes become divorced from reality? Sometimes I focus on flows that feel easy and pleasant. That builds confidence to try poses that are hard. With time, my feet touched the ground in downward facing dog, my knees touched the ground in the butterfly pose, and I came close to making my crow fly.
Initially, I would anxiously glance at the clock, my aching muscles and my embarrassed mind counting minutes until the end of this challenge. Now I am able to relax into the yoga flow. Not always, but that's the deal, now I realise that always is neither realistic nor necessary. You do your best and that mere effort is what counts, and what makes you stronger. Not good sessions. All sessions. Which implies that the value is in showing up, rather than achieving. Which is a conclusion I am happy to leave you with.
