Breathing In

Our yoga studio.  I love the exposed brick, the wood floors, the "earthiness" of the place.

My daughter Hannah took me with her to her yoga class last summer up in West Vancouver, B.C.  As I wrote while we were in Hawaii, that was my first experience with yoga.  I was surprised at how rigorous it is and wondered whether I could make it through to the end of the class.

Then, while in Maui, Mark and I started doing poses every morning on the beach, adding one new pose each day.

Other than these experiences, yesterday was my first yoga class, and I loved it.

The class was a "restore" class, which was billed as one that is designed to “restore energy, vitality, mobility and in a gentle viniyoga-based movement class.”  Throughout the gentle stretching, breathing was emphasized.  It didn't take me long to realize that I had no problems breathing out, but breathing in over a sustained period was proving challenging for me.

As I experienced this phenomenon, I thought about it being a metaphor of sorts for challenges I'm facing in my "spiritual practice."  Just that morning, as I was driving to the studio, I was thinking about recent experiences that had reminded me, yet once again, of the difficulties I face in loving and honoring myself and the very real consequences that flow from this handicap.  

I had been discussing this with Mark over the weekend and he had reminded me of something he had learned in his own spiritual practice:  when we have an unhealthy tendency to judge ourselves, we then find ourselves guilty, and in consequence we then find ways to appropriately punish ourselves.  To put it mildly, this is a self-destructive behavior pattern that brings happiness and fulfillment only to the ego, but no one else.

As I was pulling into the parking place in front of the studio it hit me:  one of those totally self-evident realizations that nevertheless transform our thinking:  a big step in learning to love myself is to stop judging myself.  Then once I've stopped judging, I need to feed myself, to honor myself.

Which brings me back to breathing.  In one pose that I found particularly energizing as well as enlightening, we laid back on a bolster, then brought the soles of our feet together.  It's called the Reclined Cobbler's Pose.  My whole body felt energized as I did this, but my spirit was energized as I listened to the teacher encourage us to breathe out bad "stuff" with every exhale and to breathe in good stuff - whatever we needed - with every inhale.

Just as I need to work on improving my inhalation capacity, I also need to work on feeding my spirit and psyche by breathing in positive energy, rather than constantly judging myself and feeding my own poor self-esteem.

That's what I learned at my first yoga class.  Not bad, I thought.  Can't wait for the next one.

"It's not what you look at that matters.

It's what you see."

~ Henry David Thoreau

"Self esteem is the immune system of the mind and of the spirit."

~ Lee Pulos