Yoga: my happy hour

Namaste! (actually means "hello," though it has been misappropriated by the West). Well, I like buying pants from a company called Prana (Sanskrit for "breathe of life"). I will tell you, getting into those pants requires me to exhale and hold the breathe of life!

Yoga, like so many things, benefits us when we make in investment in the process. What does this investment cost? First of all: time. As Jim Rohn put it, "Time is our most valuable asset..." 

Time is probably not a renewable resource, at least in this dimension. But unlike forests or water supplies, when we deplete time, we generally aren't taking something from anyone else or the planet, but rather from our own potential.

And potential is an operative word in terms of my yoga experiences. Little by little I am gaining in range of motion, flexibility, posture and balance. Yoga is not one stop shopping. You have to keep investing time into it - along with a healthy dose of NSAIDs.

Yoga has also brought me into a group of kind and loving souls. We are all bonded through our varied life experiences, which as different as they may be, have all turned toward this wonderful form of self-love and healing. My yoga family is not making @Instagratuity posts or trying to otherwise be something outside of themselves (yeah, take that social media!). They are gentle and self-forgiving, and they try in earnest to love their bodies and hearts without criticizing themselves. And trust me when I say, people who lovingly know how to not criticize themselves will be the last to criticize others. Just as first loving oneself leads to true compassion toward others. 

So after investing some time for a yoga session, working loose some tight spots, and focusing on gentle, fluid breathing, it comes to an end. That end is symbolic of every body's ending, in the pose called "Savasana," a.k.a. the corpse pose. My instructor (Jo. I love her!) often reads a poem while we lie in state. This is actually a fairly common practice. Now you know.

As a person who actually writes poems, I have tried my hand at this form. Yoga poems tend to be written in straightforward terms, mostly without complex innuendo. They often end with a statement or realization of simple truths, like "I am connected to the whole" or "Let the mystery in me see the mystery in you." You get the idea - poems with all the feels.

I have dropped a few here for your reading. One of my yoga classmates even said my words reminded her of Mary Oliver. Those are big props, thank you. But maybe it was just the endorphins humming.