Starting the Winter Season With An.......OM???? Part I

 

 YOGA AND ME

The topic of Yoga practice has come up on this blog a few times. Here's a little background on my yoga journey.

 

Let's say something like 25 years ago, when I was in the throes of my adrenaline-driven dispatching career, I found that though running was keeping me sane and alive, it had a not-insignificant element of constantly pushing myself to keep that adrenaline thing going.  I decided I wanted to lend some balance to both work and running, and yoga might be the answer.  I looked in the newspaper for classes.  I saw one that looked most like it would fit my needs, called the teacher, and the rest, as they say, is history.  The teacher, Meena, taught a Yoga With Ease class in the Kripalu Yoga style at the Adult Center.  Her yoga was learned at a traditional master/guru ashram in MA based on Swami Kripalu's teachings.  She and others broke ties when the master/guru relationship was discovered to include mistress/guru relationships and all that implies.  After some mighty internal struggles, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health evolved and is well known on the high end yoga retreat circuit with numerous classes, workshops, certifications and so forth.  

 

 Meena's Yoga with Ease turned out be strictly on-the-floor mat yoga, which was exactly the balance I was looking for.  It was relaxing, yet provided the stretching, focus, etc that you might expect.  I attended weekly classes for many years. Though I intended to develop a home practice, well, it was the usual story. Meena and I became personal friends as well, and though we eventually went our ways, both the friendship and the yoga were profound experiences for me.  

 

A long break from yoga ensued.  I tried a couple of different classes a couple different times.  They were not presented as Yoga as Ease style, and they weren't.  That made them another hard physical activity, and I didn't need that.  I had off and on periods of home practice using Meena's style, but it didn't stick.

When I retired, I thought for sure yoga would take.  I even wanted to do a long retreat/study period and get serious.  It would be my retirement gift to myself.  The Kripalu Yoga Center was on my mind.  HAHAHAHA!  Readers of this blog know that my retirement reality grabbed me by the throat and hasn't let me go!  I've been WAAAAYY too busy to take time to go to a long retreat!   Every year, though, regular yoga practice made it on my annual goals list, and stopped there. For 8 years. Including this year. Then Covid-19 happened.  You'll recall I made a list of things that I would regret not doing in whatever remained of my life, however long that happened to be.  1) Play my flute again.  Check.  2) Eat more Papa Murphy's pizza.  Check.  3)  Make the yoga thing happen.  Uhhhhh.... 

I happened to be doing some casual looking on-line, as one will do when trying to not do something else and telling oneself that spending a hour or more on the computer "researching" is time well spent.  The topic:  On-line Yoga. There is no end to the yoga classes available on-line; literally, there's more free yoga than you can do in a lifetime. With Covid, many teachers and studios necessarily switched live classes to some version of Zoom for pay.  However, I'm not interested in on-line classes.  Whining here, but how the heck do you see the teacher on a desk top computer when you're on the floor on a mat?  Okay, okay, I could put our laptop on the floor, but really, I just didn't wanna.  What I wanted was yoga training from A-Z, presented in an organized fashion.  My perusal eventually led me to on-line Yoga Teacher Training.  Which does exactly that.  But can you take Yoga Teacher Training if you only want to expand your own practice, not be a yoga teacher?  Well, pay the money and of course you can!

After more than one gulp and dismissal of on-line schools due to cost, I came across a school called.....wait for it....Online Yoga School.  I looked at the curriculum.  It looked thorough.  I looked at the cost.  Suspiciously reasonable, despite a nice explanation about an intention of making yoga accessible. I looked up reviews; mostly glowing.  I put it on the back burner. I looked at it several more times.  Then on June 15, in another spasm of self-motivation,  I decided that if I completed a certain number of practices by November 1, I would reward myself with Online Yoga School for my Winter Season.  It would also serve to replace the Winter Season swimming I can't Covid-do. 

 

 

Oh, did I still a wrestle with myself!   I skipped practices and made them up. I redefined what practice meant.  I wondered if, since yoga continued to be such a struggle, did it mean I should just drop the whole idea?  Just give up, roll over, call it quits?  Well, what do you think?  Did I meet yet another self-motivation attempt and FINALLY commit to yoga????   Or did I pull the plug????

To Be Continued.........