Yoga means to connect...pure and simple. It doesn’t mean to follow a rule book, or to do things that don’t feel right, it doesn’t mean to push yourself to attain a certain pose, body type, level of fitness or strength. For years I hated my body (most women’s story) I hated everything about her and I so I disconnected, from the neck down I numbed our the pain she carried, the illness, the dis-ease, i numbed the whole freaking lot, I let others do to her what they will, I dressed her in clothes that pleased others, and I fed her with food that was shit, that poisoned her slowly, when people warned me, said my diet was horrendous, I didn’t care, because I hated my body I didn’t care what I was doing to her, if push her in every way I could, and I’d beat her up in the mirror at night, I’d pick her apart, I’d never be happy with her even after she tried her best, and when she feel to her knees screaming in exhaustion I’d get angry at her for letting me down. Yes there was a her and me, we were separate, drawn apart in my early teens when others told me stories about her that made me hate her even more, they told me she was fat, ugly, useless and this narrative told me she was the reason I had no friends, she was the reason I was treated the way I was, so I drew away, into my mind, I left her behind to cope with the world all on her own and I went and did my thing. But of course you can’t separate, what you are is a whole and everything that happens to her happens to you, all the trauma she experiences you experience and all the hatred she feels you feel. Yoga is my way to reconnect with her, through Yoga I learnt to fall in love with her, care for her, nourish her and connect to her...slowly as I moved and the feels returned through the numbness I learnt to listen to her, and then suddenly there was no separateness, everything she was I was and everything I was she held, wore and felt. Yoga has given me back myself, I don’t move in a structured way, I move with a way that reconnects myself every piece of me, it’s not written in the manuals, it’s not dialogued by ancient me, it’s a full on female earth moving motion that has taught me to flow with my wild soul and nothing less.
I tried the whole fixed positions, learning each posture and trying to get there, as a teacher I tried to draw up lesson plans and detail each posture one at a time, but all of that,was too forced, to structured, to masculine and too inline with the disconnect of making my body do something and getting angry when she didn't, it took me too close to the edge of hatred.
My yoga is a wild free flowing soul reacting love inducing yoga that gets me back to the wild woman I am, that triggers my sensual, sexual, feminine and allows me to explore who I really am. As a whole.
So don't feel that yoga or anything you do has to be about rules, if it makes you disconnect more then you're on the wrong path, because as soon as we realise that we are a whole, a whole human being, feeling everything and being everything we then suddenly realise we are a whole earth, and there is no disconnect, ultimately we are yoga....we are connected.
