Recovering is Yoga

We teach Yoga to make life a little easier, every day

You can, and often must, just get up and keep going after a troubling experience. Life keeps moving, and to an extent, we have to, too. And to an extent, that is a part of recovering (but not all of it, as we need to rest). The problem is, it’s hard to rest when you have endured a challenging situation. Although our bodies may be still, we fidget, our minds keep moving, our hearts keep racing, our breathing remains interrupted and shallow. You can practice recovering every single day, a pivot point in our lifestyle habits that shields us from repeated, accumulated stress.

Three definitions of Yoga are integral to supporting recovery, the first being our Yoga inspiration’s TKV Desikachar’s insightful definition: “Yoga is Awareness.” Awareness requires a quiet mind, which requires tools, which require repeated, regular practice. Once we cultivate awareness in practice, we notice our nervous system calming down, we notice subtle signs and develop abilities to self-soothe, then and there. Once we cultivate awareness in practice, our mind-shift stands a chance to do this in life, to extend into life circumstances. When we can identify lonely, afraid, abandoned, ashamed, grieving, we don’t have to act out on it. We can act in. Instead of smothering the feelings with a substance or unhealthy behavior, we can Yoga our way through the discomfort.

Yoga is making a new accomplishment. That step, according to the ancient Yogi Ramanuja, where we have gained a previously absent skill or positive outcome, is Yoga. An important step, though taken alone, it’s incomplete. Let’s say we have a back pain. We did an individualized, teacher-prescribed practice. We also stopped jogging, and the back pain is gone. Yoga is sustaining that accomplishment, as well. So we have to continue adding and subtracting until the transformation is complete. And it’s not likely it will ever be, so we live with a certain awareness of what it takes to sustain and protect that which we are working to attain.

Yoga is cleansing what is no longer serving you. We are the sum total of our habits. What/when/how we eat. What we think. Feel. Do. There’s a lot we carry in the vessels called me and you. Our bag is overweight. On a bag, a zipper will bust. On us, it turns into an illness, an impulse, and outburst, poor decision making. What don’t we need anymore? What’s inhibiting healthy evolution? Just like we clear our closets of clothes that are torn, unworn, not fitting our bodies or personalities anymore, we have to do that with experience residue. Different tools are used for different build up, and in conjunction with one another, we can find the recovered, whole self beneath the fragments of our lives.