MyLifeYoga

The story on how I started yoga is not that extraordinary, however, yoga changed my life for the better.

Like many, I started to practice yoga while I was trying to find relief from stress. My grandmother had gotten ill and I was one of her main caregivers. In addition, my husband was traveling due to his job and my baby had just turned one, so to say I was over my head it’s an under statement.

I started to suffer from severe back pain and sleepless nights. In my search to find some balance again, I turned into yoga. I remembered growing up and hearing my mom always talked about yoga, metaphysics, holistic health and so on. So I guess some of that stuff stuck with me. After several months of practice, I started to notice a difference. It not only helped me at the physical level, but it also helped me re-build my confidence, a sense of connection and so much more.

I always had been an outgoing, fun, loving and self-confident girl. Hence why I wanted to become a lawyer. I wanted to make things right and help people…. When I first moved to the US, my English was not the greatest and many people were rude to me. I felt rejected, hurt and like I did not belong. This made me become self-conscious about my accent and the way I spoke and for a period of time, I only relied on my husband to speak for me in public. I had put my law studies on hold, I did not have any friends and I felt lost for the first time in my life. Continue reading →

All I remember about my first yoga class is the ceiling. We were in a large room with wooden floors, upstairs at the Student YMCA/YWCA in Austin, Texas, and the year was 1970. It was an hour that would change my life, not only by igniting my love of yoga but also by starting me on the path of a profession I love – teaching yoga.

At that first class, we would lie down between each of the poses and rest. I found this perplexing because we didn’t seem to be “doing anything.” Nevertheless, after class I felt refreshed and more alive, so much so that the next morning I practiced what I remembered from the class, and have been practicing daily ever since.

What struck me from that first experience, besides the conscious resting, was the thought that went through my head repeatedly during class: “Ahh, here is someone (the teacher) who knows that movement is sacred, that it is a form of worship.” Asana felt like a form of worship for me right from the beginning. This combination of movement and worship was something I had longed for during the Sundays I had spent in church worshipping in more traditional ways. Specifically, I longed for a deep sense of connection with something beyond myself, some sense of why I was here on the planet. Continue reading →