How Yoga Works

I would like to share my personal experience as to how yoga works. I mean how yoga actually works on you. In this post you will not find anything about physicality or anatomy-related issues because yoga is far beyond them.

It is quite intimate yet I feel like sharing  the thoughts – maybe it will help me process it all and let the accumulated emotions out.

I have recently completed an intensive yoga course – it is easily the best learning I have ever done and I will definitely tell you more about the school and the teachers soon.

Practicing yoga regularly for 4 years now, I have tasted this inner peace that yoga brings. My level of awareness has increased, and it has allowed me to experience a happier day to day life, to put it simply. Before the course, I made an intention to build no expectations and just surrender to yoga. Now that the course is over, I slowly start to process many insights that it brought along. I am sure it is going to take awhile.

In short, I feel overwhelmed with emotions. And the peculiar thing is that these are not new emotions caused by recent events. I am overwhelmed by the past stock of emotions that apparently got unrooted during some intense yogic practices. I pretty much forgot how these aches that used to be always present in the back of my mind feel like. It seems I am reliving them now. I am quite aware that in my present life objectively there are no such events or circumstances that would make me disturbed. I clearly remember having that constant inner confrontation which became  apparent to me only when I tasted the feeling of true inner harmony.

It seems that by yoga practice (before the recent course) I healed myself a great deal. Yet some deeply rooted impurities were still there. The recent yoga course with a full array of original yogic practices helped me undig the previously laid stitches and see that there is still some work to be done on those wounds. My superb teacher from the course – Dr. Ashutosh jee – suggested a nice metaphor to describe this process. Cosmetic surgeon who has to fix old wounds works in a different manner from a regular surgeon. A regular surgeon stitches the skin in the first place. Later, if the scar to be eliminated altogether, a cosmetic surgeon has to undo the old stitches, and by working with underlying layers of skin make a new stitch that will eventually heal completely leaving no marks on the skin.

Apparently, this is what’s happening to me now. I feel as a puzzle thrown into pieces. My mind is bombarded with a thousand out-of-nowhere worries. “What is there to do?” I ask myself. “How should I go about it?”

Not to get involved into the worries or into the thoughts, simply watch them as a distant observer  yet allowing myself to feel any surfacing emotion to the fullest. I am passing no judgement or question – as to “why?” or “how” – and simply observing while living thorouly any occuring feelings. Yes. Let it be a reminder to self.

Let me rebuild the foundation of my happy life so that no tremors could ever crack it.

Om shanti.