Gateway drugs & other reasons to yoga
Ever heard of the saying “came for the physical, stayed for the spiritual”? Below our teacher Celi discusses her introduction to yoga, and how there is so much more to take off the mat than what might have brought us to it in the first place…
When I was 21 I worked as a fitness trainer in a big health complex in Berkshire. I was obsessed with weight training, calories and cardio, and personally I was miserable beyond words. As a part of our roles some of the staff trained in branded fitness classes such as pump, combat and balance, which I taught there for some time. Life took some turns, as it does, so I moved back home, changed careers, stopped teaching, continued lifting and running but was still pretty uninspired.
Now don’t get me wrong, balance classes are not yoga, some had asana based movements and shapes incorporated into the sequences but none of the philosophy, none of the breath-work, none of the history. But, and this is a big but, there was something about those loosely yogic shapes that called me in. There was something about them that left an impression and an impulse to move once again in those ways.
I began a home practice using some Shiva Rea DVDs and started to revisit those shapes. For years this was how I practiced, at home, on a sh***y mat, doing the same sequences over and over again, but I loved it. It felt necessary, it felt medicinal, it felt inevitable. I was really lucky to find a local teacher many years on, through my other line of work as a tattooist, she came in for some work and we quite quickly got onto the subject of yoga and we really connected, so I started attending her classes and my love for the practice grew and grew. I am so grateful for Amis teachings and guidance into a deeper practice. And the rest is history.
“My story isn’t what I really want to talk about here, what I want to talk about is how I believe that the shapes that we make when we practice our asana/poses are in fact a gateway drug to a deep and nuanced journey into the self. ”
In our modern society we are so attached, obsessed even with the physical body, what it can do and how it looks especially. In the online yoga community I sometimes see discussions about beautiful celebrity yogis in their £100 leggings with their ripped abs in crazy-impossible-seeming arm balances and how images of them being paraded across social media is not, in fact, yoga. But, another big but here, if we see these images and feel like we have a chance of doing something like that with our own bodies, even if at first it is just to post a picture of that single moment that we held a scorpion handstand for one second on Instagram, and that draws us to attend a local class or check out a class online and brings us into the yoga community then I believe that they are all yoga.
“ Now more than ever the world needs more people practicing yoga. If we can bring people into the practice with beautiful pictures and acrobatic asana then so be it - just get them there! ”
So we start to move and balance and hold and stretch. What then? I’ll give you a clue, we do it every day, from the moment we are born, until the moment we die. We breathe. We learn to connect to the breath, to take control of the breath and tap into the potential within the breath to alter the states of our nervous systems, bio chemistry, mental wellness and our emotional body. We get calmer, we get clearer, we change the way that we exist in the world not just on our mats but off them too and that is where the gold is. Imagine a world where people are walking through their daily lives with more love in their hearts, more joy for existence and a desire to create peace for those around them and maybe even the world itself. As we start to tap into the philosophy of yoga, the ancient knowledge that teaches us how to live in this difficult world, we can’t help but open ourselves up to our connection to all beings and to the planet herself.
And it is a difficult world. We are distracted at every turn, every scroll, every news hour, every magazine page and it can be hard to keep the mind on track avoiding a spiral into fear, anxiety or depression to whatever severity we might suffer.
“The CDC recently conducted a study looking into the risk factors associated with COVID-19 hospitalisation, the first highest risk factor was obesity, but the second highest risk factor was found to be fear and anxiety related disorders. This blew my mind and highlights the importance of mental well-being practices. ”
In these darker times when we feel the weight of it all is when I love the asana the most. They bring us back, into the body, aligned as it should be, breathing as we should be, taking the time to take care of ourselves and reconnect, even when we feel like we haven’t got it in us to do our practice, a couple of minutes on the mat is sometimes all it can take to keep us there for longer, to balance our energies and allow us the freedom and space in our body-mind to deal with the world and all of its challenges. We even start to welcome those challenges, we get curious and learn how to look at things a little differently and with space between the trigger and the reaction. We learn that these difficulties are all here to teach us something, in the same way that bakasana is here to teach us core engagement, moving with skill and patience, not overreaching or feeling disappointed if we fall (not fail, that’s not a thing) tricky life situations are here to show us where we are stuck in our lives or our energies, where we have things to resolve from our past or where we need to enact patience, not to overreach and to step away from disappointment if something doesn’t go as planned.
The lessons we learn in our asanas are all transferable, in fact the time we spend on our mat is just a fraction of our practice, the skills we learn there, the skills that we take into our everyday lives, they are the main event. Those skills are what will help yoga make the world a more peaceful place.
“Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu”
May all beings everywhere be happy and free from suffering.
Namaste.
- Celi Hampton | @celi.yoga.beherenow