Douglas Brooks, a professional scholar and teacher of the Rajanaka Yoga tradition, recently blogged that “yoga…makes roots in revelation.”
Yes!
Quite a few years back now, pretty soon after we moved to Colorado in fact, I really opened up to yoga. It was during a tremendously painful and emotional time in my life; one during which my old ways of coping betrayed me. In those vulnerable moments on my mat, I began to heal. Prayer finally made sense to me through meditation. The frightened and protective fist around my heart began to let go, revealing a bruised yet hopeful soul. I was astonished at the depth of teaching and receiving that yoga gave and the insight unveiled by moving through the physical to get to the emotional. It was a revealing experience in what I have dubbed, my “revelation revolution.”
In almost every class I’ve taught lately, I’ve asked the question, “What would you like to work on today?” Inevitably, hips and lower back work are requested, which admittedly are a constant source of collected stress. But what about those poses that we…hate. Fear. Shy away from. “Those” poses were always the ones that miraculously made me have an instant urge to go the bathroom. Yep, that was me, sneaking out of class for a few minutes, which ironically was about the same amount of time the rest of the class spent in “that” pose.