I think that there’s a pretty distinct picture that people have of yogis. When I think of yogis, even I think of hemp-wearing, peace-loving, vegan-eating, animal-loving people that wear crystals around their neck and go out for matcha lattes after yoga class.
Sure, this is a huge stereotype, but there is something honest to be said about how yoga can change a person. However, that change usually has nothing to do with your attire or your chill attitude. It’s about you. Who you are on a genuine level.
After you start yoga and dedicate yourself to the regular practice of it, you experience a lot of changes. These changes are changes that I’ve heard others talk about having undergone, and they’re changes that I myself have experienced as well.
Whether you’ve experienced them as well or have yet to, it’s still interesting to take a look at. I think it really sheds light on what yoga is all about underneath the yoga mats and fancy yoga pants. And I think it’s beautiful.
Before
My first yoga classes made me extremely nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. I had been doing yoga for about a year by then, but I followed YouTube videos.
I didn’t know if I was doing things right, if my clothes would be okay, what I should bring, what I should do if I can’t hold a pose, and if I’d even understand what poses the teacher was telling us to move into.
Like everything else in my life, yoga made my mind run a million miles an hour. I was focused on doing things right and blending in with my classmates. I wasn’t trying to connect to myself or find my peace. I was in it for the fitness.
After a few classes, I started to love it, but I still had a lack of patience with the practice. I hated how inflexible my ankles were and I hated how my hands slipped on my mat whenever I’d do downward facing dog. I even found myself looking at the clock a few times each class because I was excited for it to end.
But then I noticed something.
During
One day leaving class, I noticed how I felt. It was different than the feeling you get after you go to the gym or finish a long run.
I felt at ease. I felt quiet. My mind wasn’t running anymore and my whole body felt relaxed. This was in stark contrast to the tension that I usually felt in my muscles, especially around the face and shoulders.
This realization made me excited for yoga class. Soon, I stopped looking at the clock and just started savoring the poses. That’s when I realized what it meant when a pose was “delicious”.
The first time I realized that was during Child’s Pose where I felt all of the tightness in my middle and lower back just let go. I wanted to stay in that pose forever.
It was around this time that I stopped shutting out the spiritual and emotional aspects of yoga and let them in alongside with it already being a physical practice for me.
I took the experience for what it wholly was and started to embrace it and all that it could offer. It was after I allowed that to happen and let go of trying to control and focus my experience on just one factor of yoga that I really started to see myself and the world around me in a different light.
The Change
A lot of things changed for me after that, and here were some of the biggest ones:
- I started to have more control over my body and my feelings.
In yoga, you learn to breathe into tightness and pain to help release it. I started doing this with headaches, back soreness, muscle soreness from working out, and even emotional pain. I’d breathe through it, as they say, and find relief. I don’t know how this works on a biological level. But being free from my pain made me see life in a more vibrant, colorful, and easy way.
- I allowed myself to feel love, especially from myself.
Loving myself has never been easy. But yoga taught me to stop judging and being hard on myself. I let go of the demands and expectations that I held of myself and was allowed to just exist and be as I am. This helped make room for love to enter instead of the opposite. I started to love, respect, and appreciate myself.
- I learned to be proud of myself.
After you do yoga for a while and really start getting into some tricky poses, especially with acro yoga, you really start to see what your body is capable of. I used to think that I got the short end of the stick with my body. I was in pain, I had injuries, I wasn’t the most healthy. But yoga helped me see past that and see what my body was really capable of. It was amazing the first time I realized I was proud of myself and eager to see what I could accomplish next. The world became my oyster that day, and I was driven to see what else I could master with this newfound confidence in my abilities!
- I trusted myself.
Not only in handstands did I learn to trust myself, but I learned to trust my gut. We all get those gut feelings of what is right for us, but we confuse them oftentimes with feelings of what we are supposed to be, what we should be doing, and others want us to do. These confuse us and make us diverge from our path. Yoga helped me to distinguish between these feelings so that I’d be able to follow the right one. It gave me the bravery to follow my own intuition, my gut feeling, and in that I learned to trust myself and that feeling entirely.
- I learned to disconnect.
I had no idea how addicted to technology I was. I must have spent hours a day staring a screen, and not for any good reason. It wasn’t like I was working or learning or being creative. I was consuming social media by the hour. It wasn’t healthy, and it gave me a completely false sense of connection. It got to the point where I never felt comfortable if I didn’t have my phone with me. Yoga forced that habit out of me because you can’t have your phone during yoga, of course! It helped me to break that habit by showing me that I didn’t need to be connected all the time.
When you practice yoga for a while, you start to learn to slow down and savor your time.
It does have physical aspects to it, but beyond that yoga is about connection. And even more, it’s about connecting to yourself.
It’s easy in this modern world to get lost in the business and chaos that surrounds us. Yoga is our break from that, and it gives us a chance to discover who we really are and who we can be.
How has yoga changed you?
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