How Yoga First Changed My Life

Yoga started working on me in a basement about 10 years ago. I was looking for something more in yoga, and I found it. Jeffry Clark, an amazing yoga teacher, started leading yoga classes in his beautifully renovated basement room. My yoga experience up until than consisted of Iyengar, Ashtanga, and classes at the YMCA. Jeffry's classes were something I had never experienced before. The movements were connected, organic, graceful and choreographed with music and inspiring words. I went every Friday morning. After a few months, I started to notice how strange I felt after class. First of all, noticing how I felt was something new. Second, the feeling I was having was confusing. It was not the post yoga bliss that we often feel from yoga (at this point I didn't know the difference). It was like something was opening inside me, something was stirring and I didn't know what it was. When I would practice on my own at home, tears would come. Real tears of release. It was confusing. It was amazing! I felt lighter after every practice. I was beginning to feel. The icebergs around my heart were melting. My muscles, asleep from years of disintegration, were waking up. For a long time, sadness dominated my emotional body. There was a very deep well of tears that took several years to run dry.

Yoga gave me permission to be vulnerable, to be seen and heard. No masks, no pretension, no shields, no walls. Raw and real. A ripple effect of tears, repressed anger, love, and compassion.

Yoga brought attention to a neglected, undernourished body; yoga ignited a collapsing core; yoga opened me up in big expressive ways. 

The dictionary says vulnerability is "to be open to attack, to be easily hurt". To me, there is so much more behind this simple definition. To be vulnerable, at first, indeed feels risky and scary because of the high potential for being hurt physically, emotionally, or mentally; especially if there is a memory of being hurt. If we are living in perceived unsafe circumstances, we are in fear; and our primal brain defaults to fight or flight, and we do what we need to in order to survive. If we operate purely from this reptilian brain, whether safe or not, we remain in our conditioned ways of learning to just survive.
Yoga gave me a safe place. 

At first, I experienced some discomfort and pain in my body. But, yoga was not the cause of pain, I believe it was the awakening process of dormant emotions stored in my body that were now asking to be recognized and released. Stepping into this fire of vulnerability, in a safe way, has led to many big moments of transformation and over time has re-wired neuro pathways. These experiences have taught me how to engage, whether it is my thigh muscles or with the person in front of me. Yes, I risk being judged, criticized, falling on my face, or maybe even loved. But, I know when I am truly safe and I must trust that to engage with life, inner and outer, is to live a life that is more rich, more full, more connected, more vibrant and a lot less lonely.

(If you are not one of the 14 million who has already heard this….this is a great TEDtalk on vulnerability by Brene Brown.)