I started my yoga journey 6 years ago by a friend dragging me for a 2 days yoga retreat in the middle of nowhere (with no internet connection). At that time I didn’t know what to expect from these two days and arrived to the retreat with a preconceived idea of this discipline: modern hippies only eating seeds and avocado gluten-free toasts and singing ohms to relax! I was pleasantly surprised at how good I felt after an intense day of stretching, exercising, singing and meditating and from that weekend onwards never stopped my yoga asana practice.
I started practicing more thoroughly the following year as I moved to Singapore, land of the yoga clubs! To me yoga had become my new “sport hobby” as I hated having to sweat all the water out of my body by running outside.
Throughout my six years of weekly yoga practices, I thought my ultimate goal was to be flexible and strong enough to be able to snap an instagram shot doing peacock or fancy headstand postures.
Few months back I went through a hard time and felt depression and anxiety slowly settling in my daily life. I stopped “exercising” and felt even worse. One night my husband pushed me to register to a 200hrs YTT saying that even though I might not change want to make a leaving out of yoga it would probably help finding a new source of personal inspiration. He was so right, I do not regret a second taking some time away from home, kids, work, daily routine to focus purely on myself.
Of course practicing 2hrs of asanas everyday has “forced” me back into a physical activity and has helped me deepen my practice, feel stronger and healthier physically but it has also been the starting point of a new journey: asking myself questions I had always tried to ignore: how do I define myself, what is my life purpose, where do I want to be in a few years time. I am still currently answering these questions with too much of my “daily life” elements, but this training has definitely helped me to start focusing on who I am and who I want to be as well as how I want to live the rest of this life more deeply.
This training has opened my eyes and taught me that yoga is not a practice it is a life philosophy and it might take more than just a single life to answer some of the deepest questions it forces oneself to think about 😉
