I attended a class yesterday that truly affected me.  I was having one of those days (already at 9 in the morning) where my mind was being too loud.  There was a discourse going on in my head that I couldn’t escape, even with all the practice I’ve done, there was no stopping it and here’s what I found.  The harder I tried to navigate my thoughts, the more my poor little mind was filled with noise.  There was the painful deliberation taking place in my head that was making me sad, and there was the yogi in me loudly trying to hush that voice, thereby making even more noise.  And it was literally making me nuts!  I feel like i’ve mastered my breath, and my decidedness to be present a lot, and all of a sudden I found myself utterly out of control.

Thankfully, I had planned to attend Kevan Gales’ Fluid Yoga 2 class at Stil Studio.  I am not a yoga teacher and can sometimes feel intimidated in this more advanced class but today I arrived not really thinking about that.  I unrolled my mat and took a child’s pose and started to breathe and to listen to the voices around me and my mind began to quiet.  And then Kevan said something that related exactly to what I was experiencing.  Sometimes we can try too hard.  Sometimes we need to acknowledge that our mind is wandering and gently try and bring it back.  I instantly felt relieved.  He was so right.  I was trying too hard.  Funny.

I proceeded with my practice and a funny thing happened.  I became so absorbed in what I was doing that the class literally flew by.  I even found myself in some poses that I’ve never truly achieved before.  This feeling of getting into a pose after months and months (even years) of practice is like no other.  I left the class not only feeling calm, quiet and happy, but I left the class feeling STRONG.  Strong not only in my body, a feeling which I had in fact encountered several times during this particular class, but strong in my mind.  And I realized that this sense of strength I found was exactly what I needed to manage the dilemma going on in my head.  I walked to my car knowing that I had nothing to fear.  I was going to take the bull by the horns so to speak, and I did.

-J