Sit on your ASANA

Take a moment, grab a cuppa and have a seat. This is my first ever blog. What I hope for is to share my lessons as a yoga teacher, practising yogi, a mum of 2, a wife, a SENDCO, daughter, sister and friend; essentially a straightforward human being and I would like you to come with me.

Before I start, i'm not an 'expert' in any field; I just like to observe and try to understand myself and the world around me, then share what I have discovered...et voilá Sit on you ASANA is born.

For every block of yoga sessions I teach, I have a theme. For my current block we are looking at "what yoga is not".

Yoga is not... something you can be bad at, something that you can complete, just to help you relax or something just reserved for the mat.

Yoga is "an exploration of yourself, through yourself"

[I thought I had seen this quoted somewhere, but I can't find it, so maybe I made it up?]

In other words, yoga helps us to observe, listen to, connect, and experience what is going on in our body and our mind. It is not just about making shapes with our body. If we are making the shape and thinking about what we are having for dinner, then it's not yoga. If we are making a shape and know we are making the shape, we can feel the shape, know that we are breathing in the shape - then we are practising yoga. Your shape might look different to mine; who cares? What matters is that we are listening to what our bodies are telling us. If we choose to ignore the messages, we can injure ourselves, or cause dis-ease - which is when most of us tend to listen. Therefore we can't really ever 'complete' our yoga practice, it is a continuation, a deepening and dare I say it an awakening. Likewise, many people come to yoga to relax (which by the way is a wonderful by-product) but it can also help with overcoming challenge, learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings, learning to ease off, learning to let things be as they are. And because of all this, yoga is not reserved just for the mat. The transformations you make on the mat will naturally be felt off the mat, by you and the people around you. Basically yoga.is.great!

This has been fun. Until the next one... Namaste