The light of yoga

I'm very excited about the seven day yoga challenge that we're launching tomorrow. I love sharing yoga and hope that this may encourage some of you to dust off your mat and have a go.  

I've been thinking recently how yoga can be a little bit like that saying, "people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime".  So it's the same with yoga.  For me it's certainly a lifelong practice, whilst I recognise that people flit in and out, sometimes because something is going on in their lives and they need the support and other times, because yoga gets too confronting.

I realised yesterday that I've now been practicing yoga, on a virtually daily basis for 14 years now. My body's changed a lot during that time, not least in terms of my flexibility,  but the hugest change has been in my outlook on life and my relationship with my self (which has had a knock on effect on every relationship in my life).

I was suffering with depression and PMS when I discovered yoga. It was for those reasons that I sought it out. Yoga made me feel better.  I mean not consistently better, at least not overnight, but gradually the depression eased as I made changes in my life, that the yoga has helped me to realise needed to be made, and gave me the strength to make the changes.

I came home to myself, to my heart and soul. Yoga saved my life.  It taught me how to dream and to believe in my dreams, it encouraged me to see the positive in all things. It helped me to learn to love myself again, to let go of the insecurities and the shame, to acknowledge my gifts and use them. It helped me to heal.

It also helped to deepen my connection to Mother Earth and to take responsibility for my impact on her. This recognition in itself has been hugely life changing, because it's all too easy to overlook this and not take any responsibility. It's made me more conscious then, which has been hugely rewarding, if at times confronting!

Yoga's amazing and I shall be eternally grateful to all the yogis and yoginis who came before me and led the way. Thank you. I hope that the seven day challenge may help in a way too, passing on a little of the light passed on to me. 

Happy practicing!

x