It's Hard to Explain All of the Benefits that Arise from a Regular Yoga Practice...

It’s hard to explain all of the benefits that arise from a regular yoga practice. It’s not just about getting stronger or more flexible. It’s about remembering how to be fully present in your body, fully EMBODYING yourself.

In our modern culture, there is a huge disconnect for most of us between body and mind. Most of us are just a huge brain dragging a body along behind us. When we discover how to fully EMBODY ourselves again, everything about our life experience shifts.

We become more aware of our thoughts and feelings and instead of those unconscious processes controlling our experiences, we are able to create a little distance, to see things more clearly and objectively, and ultimately learn how to respond in ways that are more healthy, honest, and helpful.

As we recognize that our thoughts and feelings don’t need to control our lives, we begin to sense that there is some deeper underlying essence to us that is not our thoughts or our feelings or our bodies.

And this can be the beginning of a deeply personal spiritual experience that completely changes our lives.

We don’t change our lifestyle and our attitudes because we are told to or because we think we have to, but instead the process happens naturally, organically, and gradually because we are pushed forward by something deep and real.

And we are encouraged by how much happier and more alive we feel.

You may enter your first yoga class hoping to stretch your hamstrings, and you may end up on a deeply spiritual journey that COMPLETELY CHANGES YOUR LIFE instead.

(But don’t worry. We will still stretch our hamstrings!)

I am a Highly Sensitive Person...

I am a highly sensitive person in every sense of the phrase. I deeply feel the full range of human emotions at my core, sometimes all of them in a single day.

I am sensitive to sound, to smell, to light. I feel EVERYTHING.

Sometimes that is beautiful and allows me a deeper experience of life than most people can probably imagine. And sometimes it is just completely overwhelming.

I am sensitive to other people’s energy. I am highly empathetic to the point that sometimes other people’s feelings feel like my own. It took me a long time to realize that most people don’t experience life this way, but this is my normal.

Would it surprise you to learn that a yoga teacher with 30 years of practice still struggles with anxiety? With depression? With feeling overwhelmed? I’ve struggled with these things since I was a child.

I don’t take any form of medication for my sensitivities. Yoga is my medicine.

I didn’t fall in love with yoga because I am a naturally calm, relaxed person. I fell in love with yoga because it taught me the tools to slow myself down when I’m spinning out of control. My yoga practice has allowed me to find peace and joy in what would otherwise be a constantly tumultuous world for me.

I’ve always been envious of people who seem to be so naturally optimistic, who don’t seem to have to work so hard to center or calm themselves, who can walk into a room confidently and talk to everyone without feeling overwhelmed.

But what I’ve learned is that it is these exact struggles that I carry that allow me to deeply understand and help other sensitive people. And that is my gift.

Mindfulness Techniques for Beginners

There are two important pieces of advice I would offer to people beginning their journey into mindfulness and meditation practice.

The first is to start each day on a positive note. That means that first thing in the morning, before checking emails or news or social media or your to-do list, you take a couple of minutes to sit in stillness and offer gratitude for what is already good in your life and to contemplate what other positive things you want to attract and cultivate. These few moments will frame your experience of the whole day ahead. We spend too much time focusing on what could go wrong and not enough time focusing on what could go right. When we begin our day on a negative note, that stress carries through and colors the rest of our experiences for the day. Focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want.

The second thing is to let go of the concept that there is one right way to meditate or be mindful. Start simple. Do a 5-minute meditation and gratitude practice first thing in the morning and then find a couple of other times throughout the day just to pause and be still for 2 minutes, noticing the feeling of your body and the sounds happening around you. A big issue for beginners is that they get discouraged because they try to bite off more than they can chew. You don’t have to commit to a 30-minute meditation right away! Just sit for 2 minutes and feel the benefits it brings. This will naturally encourage you to want to do it more.

Check out this full article and insights from other mindfulness experts in Mystic Mag

What I learned in my third trimester as a pregnant yogi

The yoga practice of making peace with the moment I’m in and rolling with unexpected circumstances as they arise in pregnancy has been way harder than any asana ever could be!

Every day, being pregnant is teaching me the true meaning of releasing control and finding acceptance with what is. Having a body that is no longer solely my own has been a true lesson in humility and releasing ego. Years of dedicated, consistent physical activity have trained me to have a mind with a high tolerance for physical discomfort and a body willing to push through intensity. Being pregnant has taught me a much different, softer strength: the strength it takes to do less when I want to do more; the strength it takes to NOT push through intensity even though I want to; the strength it takes to be still and make peace with my “new” body as it is. For someone like me who relies heavily on physical activity to calm my neurotic mind, this is a true challenge!

This pregnancy has also taught me how to hold my plans loosely. As a detail-oriented planner, being given an “estimated due date” but knowing full well that it’s really a big window including 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after that date (and possibly more!) makes creating a life plan a little crazy. It’s difficult to figure out when my last day of work should be, how soon I need to start organizing all my baby stuff, when I need to take down-time just to relax and sleep more in preparation for what’s coming, etc.

Most importantly, being pregnant has really taught me about letting go of control. I have spent so many hours (and dollars!) reading, studying, visualizing, and taking natural birth classes in preparation for the calm, smooth, unmedicated, natural birth experience that I want. I thought labor and delivery would be the hard part and I have been looking forward to that ultimate challenge and intense experience. Instead what I’m finding is that the hardest part of this whole process might be letting go of the plans I have and being okay with something completely different happening. See, Baby Boy is still in breech position at 35 weeks. He might still flip and I hope he does, but maybe there’s a reason that he’s staying as he is and I need to honor that. This isn’t all about me, after all. And just like my incredible wedding day that was filled with so much love and power that it created a hurricane, this birth is going to happen the way that it’s meant to, even if it’s not the way I visualized it or thought it should be. My beautiful boy is already teaching his mama so many important lessons. He is his own free, independent spirit, and I can’t control him or his birthing.

And so I take a deep breath in, I let it go, and I leave it up to the universe to decide. I remind myself how hard it was to get pregnant and how worried I was that it wouldn’t happen for me and I remember just to be grateful that I’m here at 35 weeks with a healthy little guy growing strong inside me. I remember how fortunate I am to have a life-partner who wants this as much as I do, who loves as fiercely as I do, and who will undoubtedly be the best dad this world has ever seen. I look at our beautiful life and know that everything is already okay and is unfolding at its own time, exactly as it’s meant to.