Yoga makes me feel something. I want to say it’s hard to describe, and yet I want to describe it for you.
When I step onto my mat it’s as if everything falls out of me. No matter what I’m experiencing—good or bad—my mat becomes my sanctuary. A peaceful place. It catches my pain, love, fear; it is the keeper of my dreams.
I might start with a simple meditation or some breathwork and as I enter this otherworldly space I sense my body beginning to release beneath me. There is a humming sensation within my heart.
I come to stand—slowly—and start to breathe. Deeply, in time.
Moving through some physical poses my limbs lengthen and my body awakens. I am at one: with my breath and with the earth.
All noise drifts in and out of my ears as I feel a sense of letting go. I consider the pain in this world, but feel only love.
Only love.
As beads of sweat begin to ease their way down my temples I know I am working my body in a way that seems more energetic than what I appear to be doing. I am strong, capable, free.
Slowly I come to rest, sometimes a mere 15 minutes later. But in that time I know I have transformed pain into love, sadness into joy, fear into possibility, and that I am leaving my mat with more to offer this world than when I arrived.
The energy created from this daily practice leads me to read, learn, deepen, nourish, grow…ever further into yoga, which is so much more than just this that I have written.
For yoga is a whole way of living, a way I now know I am here to share.
Yoga, a Love Letter