Among my other interests, I’m a yoga freak. Before that, I spent a lot of time in the gym lifting weights. And before that, I spent a lot of time THINKING about getting fit but never really getting around to it. I have to credit my ability to hyperfocus for getting me so interested in weightlifting - I spent hours and hours poring over information about fitness and health and learned an incredible amount in a short time. As a result, I went from being my absolute worst shape in years to nearing my college weight. Then I moved to Boston, things fell apart, and I gained most of it back. After I straightened out the rest of my life, I returned to the gym and again dropped down close to my college weight - which brings me to beginning yoga this year.
I started yoga because it meshed with my meditative Buddhist practice, and because it provided a more active way to improve the health of both body and mind. In the month and a half I’ve been practicing, I’ve seen and felt more physique changes - not to mention mind changes - than I had in the past year; I’m experiencing an acceleration of results. For example, despite all the heavy lifting over the past four years, the muscles of my back remained underdeveloped. One and a half months of yoga have increased their tone and strength immeasurably, and not only that, they have begun to restructure the placement of the muscles to open my chest and my breathing - I had no idea until yoga that I had been restricting my breathing as if I wore an iron restraint on my torso.
The “down-side” to this yoga practice is that I am infinitely more aware of my body and its discomforts. I have a sense of what is connected to what that develops, it seems, naturally out of the asanas, so I am constantly seeking the still space, the place where I feel put together, in-order and comfortable. In a sense, the ignorance was bliss, but then I wonder how I ever lived with my body in such a twisted, constricted, contorted state prior to yoga?