Yoga Journey

Yesterday was a great day.

I attended a 90minutes live and online Yoga Class with my favorite teacher, Brent Laffoon.

The gift of a great teacher is light set on our path.

He is the one teacher that embodies all I believe to be true when it comes to practicing Yoga: it’s as hard as it is fun, demanding as it is rewarding.

I finished the session feeling like a new human.

His classes have intensity, they are challenging, definitely not for beginners, with a lot of arm strengthening and arm balancing sequences, and Asanas that require a certain degree of flexibility.

Pure fire.

During that practice I managed (not in the best form yet but still) to close two Asanas that only a year ago seemed impossible to me.

Titibasana and L sit without blocks.

This signed me leaving the intermediate category to land into advanced.

The journey, however, was anything but smooth.

I have had a love and dislove attitude towards Yoga for many years.

Now I know, my relationship to this incredible practice has been nothing but a mirror reflecting on me the relationship I have with my own self and with my body.

Falling from stairs like a potato sack while in Dharamshala, India, in 2010, (I was running under the rain to go get some papers to make a spliff of good Himalayan charas), I broke my back heavily. I couldn’t walk properly for months.

Because of my crooked back, when I started practicing sports I could not reach my toes with my hands when standing and I suffered of chronic pain.

I went to my first Yoga Class when living in Berlin in 2013.

After it, I never went back for two entire years.

Cause my broken ego hurt too bad.

I felt horrible being the goofy sweaty struggling person among a bevy of elegant swans.

Yoga was booming on social media.

In my eyes, it was all about showing off.

I was telling myself:

I am not that pretty cute hyperflexible girl with the top that matches the color of her nails and that puts makeup on to practice.

I am not an elegant flower.

I am a fighter.

I need muscles, not proper breathing.

Yoga is not for me.

Fucking hippies.

The things we tell ourselves that create so much damage.

I began going to the gym instead, I found martial arts and boxing.

Things I was naturally good at.

My love to sports and movement was forged.

When I became a physio, I fell in love with the human’s machines for real.

Just not with my own.

And yet, Yoga was always there in the back of my mind.

Tempting.

I would force myself to practice here and then, struggling with the breath in, breath out, struggling cause gosh was it hard to keep calm in an Asana.

I wanted out.

I wanted to run away from difficulty.

But I could feel the benefits, of course.

On top of that, I was studying to become a physio, and I found that some Yoga Asanas would work much better to rehabilitate a patient than the one axes exercises other therapists would assign.

And so, because my grandma had died, leaving behind a little money, I decided to go to India and do a 500hours in 2018.

Again, being the opposite of flexible and being the worse of my group during that TTC was a huge frustration that carried me away to practices where I could survive the challenge.

I found circus, acrobatics, arm balancing practices that were just so much more fun cause they were accessible to me.

I was so demanding of myself, and Yoga put me in a place where I had to be still and humble.

Where I had to start from scratch.

Yoga was showing me the incredible impatience I had towards myself and all the things I craved to be but I told myself I was not.

I used to hate my body.

I went through years of heavy eating disorders and self hatred growing up.

I used to throw deplorable words to my physical vessel.

At times, I struggled to look at myself in the mirror.

I got taught from an early age that only perfection is beautiful, and that I was not perfect, and thus I was not pretty.

Yoga, I know now, is not perfect splits.

Yoga is compassion towards ourselves.

Because of the crazy things I put my body through to prove myself I am good enough, I have endured other bad injuries the past couple of years.

And guess what.

It’s exactly those injuries that have been the best teachers.

Suddenly, Yoga was the only thing I could do while recovering.

And Yoga was the one thing that healed me so fast that I finally could not look away anymore.

It became my number 1 practice.

It became my work, too, because I am a dedicated teacher now, and good at it.

It sets goals that can be reached slowly slowly and still there is improvement among every cm of the journey.

The body finds harmony, ease, breath.

The mind gets calmer.

I am an advanced Yogini now.

I realised this yesterday.

But I am not gloating from my ego.

I am reaching out from a place of total gratitude towards my body.

And of self love and self appreciation towards my mind, finally.

Understanding that the moment I began loving my body for real, that’s the moment in which she finally blossomed.

And everything became accessible.

Even splits!

As of today, me and my body are a team.

And this makes all the difference.

Thank you to all the teachers I met along the way that have been an inspiration to me.

You are gold.

With love,

The Alchemy of Fire