#gotoyourmat

In this moveable world, in which taking care of our physical and mental body it’s not particularly what takes our full attention, we must look up for activities or practices that feed our soul and bring peace to our mind, along with bringing well-being to our body. Human beings are busier with time, always making tons of achievement lists, with our minds focused on the next task, the next project, and for time to time we have forgotten about our own well-being, not only physical, but in mind too. At the end of the day, if we put in a balance our well-being on one side, and our projects and activities on the other side (the tilted side), leaving our well-being in a second place, then, how are we going to enjoy the results of those projects, If we don’t have a good physical and mental health?

For years Yoga has been a very complete practice that includes breath control (for a long time people have been leaving their breathing as in an automatic mode, almost as an instinct, which lead them to not fill their lungs completely with air), meditation (many studies claim that meditation has always been the answer for a healthy and peaceful life, it has tons of benefits, all based in scientific studies) and last but not least, the body postures (the physical practice, a practice as important as the mental practice; our body is our temple, and as we treat our body over time, our body will respond to our necessities).

See more of breath control benefits: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2017/11/29/how-breathing-calms-your-brain-and-other-science-based-benefits-of-controlled-breathing/

See more of meditation benefits: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-benefits-of-meditation

See Yoga poses by benefit: https://www.yogajournal.com/poses/yoga-by-benefit

But now, yoga also seems to be that challenging and terrifying practice that everyone seems to be doing right now (and everyone seems to know how to do it), or it also looks like that easy and boring practice that it’s not demanding at all, it all depends from what perspective you are looking it; what really matters is, do we really know what a yoga practice demands to our body (physically and mentally)?

For us to be really open with the idea of learning yoga, first we must ask ourselves, and also try our best to be honest with ourselves, do I really know what yoga is? Beyond the body postures I see on Instagram pictures, or the experiences that other people have told me about (their own experiences or someone else’s experience that I’ve overheard), can I make an statement on something I have never tried before or that I think I know but I really don’t know?. With those questions in mind, I start with the thought of “I don’t know that I don’t know about this”, which leads us to research as much as we can; what is Yoga? What can we expect from a yoga practice? What changes go through our bodies and mind when we start practicing yoga? Do we have to be flexible to start yoga?

After we do all that research, and we educate ourselves about yoga, we go to the second phase, our first yoga practice. In this step, we know that we don’t know about this new project, all we have in our mind is all that data gathering that we did previously, but now it’s time to put it on practice, and to be open to the new processes that are about to come within this new practice. As long as you are fully conscious and pay close attention in a yoga practice, you will get it, you will understand what it does to your body and to your mind, you will want to come back again and keep practicing; but if you only focus on the fact that everyone around you is able to touch their toes and you’re not flexible enough to do that yet, or in the fact that everyone else seems to be so relaxed and all you feel is pain because you are stretching your body (something that people usually don’t do, and don’t realize how important it is) then you might give up, without really trying. What people don’t know about yoga is that, is more of a mental practice that a physical practice (even though we tend to sweat a lot in the practice), what’s really important is to not let our ego take full control of our mind.

Now, you have made two important steps, you opened yourself to the idea of what yoga is, you gathered information and then you took the courage to go to a yoga practice, you allowed yourself to learn something new, in order to keep practicing or to make a final statement on what yoga is; well, it’s time for our third step: I keep practicing in order to master it, that’s the moment when you can say that you know that you know yoga. The first yoga classes can be challenging, that’s why people say that yoga is not something you learn as easy as any other discipline, in fact, true yogis say that in order to someone to really know yoga, can take them 10 years or more to do so, which at the beginning may be discouraging to a generation that is used to the “5 minute recipe” or the “3 steps to get that six pack”, but there comes a moment in the path of yoga where you find out that, the true practice and the true knowledge of yoga, is in the path itself; every fall, every meditation that is left undone because our mind gets distracted, every time we must listen to our body in order to know if we are ready to make or not an specific posture, that’s what the true knowledge of yoga really looks like.

Yoga is an infinite practice, one that doesn’t have an ending point, we may get experience in a specific posture, or we may master meditation completely, but the full package of yoga, is never fully achieved, basically because human beings go through so many situations, that may affect us or not, and that we always must figure out a way to deal with those situations. For that reason we must keep practicing, make it a discipline, every single day, until one day, we go through a situation that, long time ago seemed to be destructive to us, but now, because of the tools we have learned in our yoga practice, we act by instinct and we find solutions without even putting so much effort to it; or perhaps maybe it happens with a posture, we find a new posture one day and practice it enough for our body to start assimilate it, but suddenly one day, we go for it and our body is in the same page that our mind, and without even know it, we know something that we didn’t know we knew.