Why Yoga?

I know my last update was a downer. I just want to acknowledge that. This post is not a downer...

I have one month left of training before I am a certified yoga instructor! Last Saturday our teacher asked us to go home and answer two questions before class the next day:

1. How does yoga affect my life?
2. What are the specific benefits I can see in myself from the practice?

Glaringly obvious to me was the fact that I actually took the time to do the assignment. What!?! Before I took the plunge into yoga, my follow through muscle was weak but its been strengthened through my practice. Here are my answers:

1. How yoga affects my life:

• Yoga stretches me to move my body in ways I normally wouldn't.
• Yoga is a reminder to, at every moment, return to my breath.
• Yoga reminds me of the preciousness that is every moment and what can be created through intention and action.
• Yoga fills me up and empties me out. It washes over me like a wave.
• Yoga is a force that has connected me to others who share my interest and continues to connect me in a meaningful way to those who are curious about it. I am already connected to those who are neither into nor curious about yoga because yoga means union.
• Yoga reminds me that in the midst of all that we create, out in the world and inside our minds, we ourselves are a creation. We are intimately connected to one another and to the rest of the world. We come from the same basic materials as everything else and will also return to these same building blocks one day. I forget this often.

2. Specific benefits to me include:

• Hot body and muscle tone!
  
• Improved decisiveness
• Sense of play
• Mental clarity
• Body awareness
• Focus
• Increased follow-through (doing homework AND writing this blog!)
• Flow of creative energy
• Better able to handle stressful situations
• I get to hang out with really interesting and flexible people :)

All these changes!

I recently came across a college entry essay I wrote about the year of high school I chose to leave Arkansas and live with my dad in California. I found 17 year-old me (talking about 14 year-old me) quite inspirational. As I'm about to finish up my teacher training and embark on an even larger journey of change - becoming a teacher - I think I needed to hear young Brennan's wisdom. Here's what she had to say about change:

"I had changed my way of life. I had changed an attitude. I was a changed woman and it wasn't all that bad. I had overcome my fears and slapped them in the face with change! I still had change left over!"

What unbridled exuberance! I'm impressed I only included two exclamation points in those five sentences. Its clear I was excited about the results of changes I had made. Its pretty cool to step back and realize what has changed in myself, during the teacher training and since junior year of High School. I don't often get the opportunity to take that step back. I guess that's just one more thing yoga has given me.

My training is coming to a close and I'm a bit scared about the change coming my way. Its scary for me to think about sharing something I love on such a big scale. Its hard for me to make changes, even when (and perhaps especially when) they're based on choices I've made to follow my heart. But, I've changed before and I'm going to keep on slapping my fears in the face and being a changed woman. Surely, other specific benefits are yet to come...

A picture of the "change left over."

Check out my website!

www.brennantayloryoga.com

Taa daa!

Create, Sustain, Dissolve is a phrase we learned in my Tantric Philosophy class that really resonates with me. As it relates to my last post, the neck strain and my drawing closer to god = dissolve.

Riding out an injury on a vision board...

Fridays are my days off and I use them to do important things like pay bills, answer emails, paint my toes and create vision boards. What's that last thing, you say?

A vision board is basically a collage of things that you want to see in your life. After hearing about them a few years ago, I promptly filed them into my "Things I would have loved in 5th grade" file and steered clear of them. Lately, however, I've been refiling things and came across this one. What would I want my life to look like if it was full of things I'm totally excited about?

Then, a couple of days ago, I ran across a facebook post of a friend raving about her vision board session and she shared this great article from, where else, Oprah.com:
What the Heck's a Vision Board And How Can it Change Your Life.

I won't re-write the article because she does a great and snarky job but, in short, its a pretty cool experience. Basically you just cut things out of magazines that scream "That's for me!" and glue them to cardboard. Then you toss it aside and let some magic happen.

What I will say is that mine was made up of three basic components. Inspiring quotes, Desmond Tutu, and hot men holding babies.

This vision quest, if you will, comes at the tail end of what has been for me a rough past few weeks. I was feeling kind of down on life about a month ago and finally admitted to myself that despite the blessings I have, my health, my friends and a good job, something wasn't quite right in my life. Then, two weeks ago, I strained a muscle in my neck doing a headstand and had to put my yoga practice on hold for a while. That was when the meltdown happened. Walking out of the yoga studio to the chiropractor's office with huge hot tears running down my face I knew that the intense pain I was feeling was not the only reason for my intense emotions. I was letting out emotions that had been festering for a while.


I wailed like a crazy person down Dolores St., sitting down once in a small puddle front of a church to catch my breath, and hoped that I didn't see anyone I knew. The massage therapist opened the door to the Chiropractic office and quickly ushered my crying self into her massage room where she rubbed arnica on my neck and held me to her chest as I let out the last few sobs of the morning. It was then that I knew the process of healing whatever pain I had in my neck and my heart couldn't be done alone.

Over that weekend I talked to my mom for probably 20 hours and talked to my friends who reminded me that I'm going to be ok. I am so grateful for them. I also had a lot of time to sit with a hot pad and think. Tons of things came up in my mind that were frustrating and painful for me: not making enough money, not having a boyfriend, the oil spill in the gulf and human suffering in general. I realized that I'd developed a lot of anxiousness about having everything at once (see Veruca Salt post). About doing everything perfectly (see post about my shoulder injury). About fixing everything (see earlier comment about the oil spill and human suffering).

I also realized that I want a deeper relationship with God and that I want to look for a spiritual community. I've eschewed religion for a long time but the more I practice yoga and delve into its philosophy, the more I realize I love this stuff because it brings me closer to a divine power. Even the strains and the challenges (maybe especially these), when I see them through the perspective that I am a piece of something larger, are ways for me to check myself before I wreck myself.

I'm coming out of the fog that descended when I hurt myself. The lessons I've learned are much deeper than I've explained and I'm not even sure I can do justice to what is now at work inside of me. I do know its pretty miraculous that my neck is almost 100% healed. I can go back to practicing next Tuesday. YAY! I also know that this vision board was a step in the right direction for me. It feels like an act of creation in the midst of sadness. Its not a religion or a spiritual community - though I am searching for one of those - but it is a declaration of what my heart desires. And knowing, thank you Oprah, that its ok for my heart to desire things and for me to feel connected to something larger than myself, even if I feel somewhat broken, is something I can have faith in.