How did you come to yoga?

[Emma]

Let's hear your story about how you first got involved in yoga! =)

I will share mine soon, too.

[YogaDawg]

Thanks Mahita, you have inspired me!!!

[Parthena]

Mine is on my blog and I'm on my way to reading some of yours....


"[Pattabhi] Jois is fond of quoting chapter 6, verse 44 of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna proclaims that one comes to yoga in his life only by having practiced it in a previous life, and is pulled toward it against one's will, as toward a magnet."
-Eddie Stern's Foreword in Sri K. Pattabhi Jois' Yoga Mala.

[Parthena]

Hello and Namaste all.
This was already posted on my blog, but I thought it made sense to paste it here. Thank you to those who have already read it! With that being said--
Please let me relay, in a stream of consciousness kind of way, an abbreviated version of my yoga journey and how it led me to this moment with you.
I’ve been living in Florida for over 20 years, coming from the Pittsburgh area where I was born, but later spent time living in Boulder CO and in the mountains of Appalachia where I helped build cabins and grew my own vegetables, made my own beer and wine, chopped wood and all that Mother Earth stuff (which I loved!) Living in Boulder during the punk era was fun. I’ve always been an eclectic kind of girl, can’t really pin me down with one description, yet during all that time I was looking for MY yoga. See, back in Appalachia where I finished high school, I found a dusty book in the local hardware store at the bottom of this rusty display rack that discussed healthy eating and showed pictures of someone doing sun salutations and a few simple hatha postures. Go figure, but it’s true. I immediately connected to the eating-well part and promptly became a vegetarian, and at age 16, rebelled against my mom’s cooking (oh, she never understood that one). Shortly after, I began doing yoga on a friend’s old carpet while looking at diagrams in this book. In college, I continuously educated myself about health and wellness, and persisted in my search in finding MY yoga, the one I would love to do, the one that would take me THERE, the one that would answer the question about why it was such a big draw for me in the first place.

But who could teach me? No one was doing it. Forget about mats and yoga studios and Yoga Journal, I mean, in the 70’s it just wasn’t that widespread. Shortly (like a week) after college graduation I moved to Boulder (I hitched a ride out there with a friend’s friend and was dropped off near Naropa and was on my own with 2 boxes, a suitcase and $290) and a street performer whom I met and hung with for a while told me about his good friend Richard, who he said was really good at THE yoga. Who knew that this was going to be THE Richard (Freeman)? Somehow, someway, as fate would have it (damn) our paths didn’t cross and I moved back to PA and worked on my masters and by this time I thought I’d never get the yoga I was meant to get, though my spiritual practices and studies continued-- mainly through self-study and attracting like-minded folks.
Ashram living.
In 1987 after graduate school I moved to an ashram in Florida. There’s a long story behind that one, though I wasn’t depressed or searching for happiness or anything like that—I just wanted to be around a more concentrated bunch of like-minded folks to see where the Eastern, mystical path would take me, and some of my friends from Boulder lived there and hey, who knew where this path may lead? Plus, I was going to be 30 and was tired of going out all the time and had traveled a lot too and this was my way of settling down. Forget finding a husband or someone to settle with, just go to an ashram. It was another adventure for me. There was a lot of conscious stuff happening there and the teacher would demonstrate incredible yoga postures for us and there was plenty of karma yoga and meditation and chanting and all that stuff and I sure learned a lot and met countless cool people and spiritual teachers from around the world. But yoga just wasn’t an integral part of my daily life, though I did practice pranayama and the basic hatha I’d been doing since I found the book in the Appalachian hardware store years before.
Interestingly enough, my big yoga discovery was at a local gym, a place where guys sweat and grunt with outdated 90’s music playing in the background. I wanted to get in great shape for my 40th, so I had gotten into lifting weights and running on the machines, etc. This is as far from yoga as you can get, really, unless you’re sitting on your couch eating Fritos. I mean, it keeps the body in shape but forget about pranayama or stilling the mind when you’re reading CNN crawlers while on the elliptical. Now this is several years after I had left the ashram and I was continuing on with my spiritual self, but not doing much pranayama or meditation. It was put on the back burner because I was taking a break from some of the routine ashram practices; I just wanted and needed a respite. One day after lifting barbells or something, I saw that they added a yoga class to the gym schedule. Mmmm, another way to get fit okay and I didn’t have any big expectations that I would connect to it with the spiritual depth that I had been looking for in yoga. I mean, my depth was there already, right? and I just wanted to get in shape.
I took the class.
The asanas were connected.
There was this breath.
It slowed and blew my mind at the same time.
It was, Wow.
Right after class, I said to the instructor, “What kind of yoga is this?” I remember the moment when she looked at me and enunciated “ash-tan-ga.”
After arriving home that evening, I was online right away and saw that David Williams was coming to South Florida for a workshop, shortly after I met a local teacher Greg Nardi who had just come back from India and authorized by Pattahbhi Jois, then there was the 40 hour training with David Swenson, and back to Boulder for some Richard Freeman classes (finally!), then onto New York to practice with Guruji himself and his family, then Kino McGregor and Annie Pace and Mark Darby…..
And daily practice.
The essence of yoga really. That quiet time one has to make space for in order to delve into the postures, into the Self, stilling the mind by using the body.
Now this is about 30 years after my first sun salutations on that dirty carpet back in Appalachia. I had found my yoga, I had gotten it—the breath and the movements and the mind-snapping that happens when one is able to go deep into asana. Ahhhhh. Not easy, but ahhhhhh.
Today, I still live in Florida. And I have a beautiful 16-year-old daughter and an Aussie husband from the years associated with the ashram. I taught middle and high school, various subjects, for a couple decades and have recently taken a leave. I mean, I just quit. I’m poorer for it but richer because of it. But I’m happier and I really believe it’s because I’ve finally found MY yoga.