Purpose

My reasoning behind a personal yoga blog has something to do with journaling. I'm not a great journaler, despite the fact that I love to write poetry and creative non-fiction. Going back and re-reading a wholly personal and entirely inartistic account of my days leaves me cold and usually causes me to blush and stop whichever journal I have very recently started. Thus, the blog. I hope this blog will encourage me to keep a committed and pictorial record of my yoga life.

My yoga journey is no different from anyone else's in its profound uniqueness. I have been doing asana since before I knew there was such a word--I used to watch television with my feet behind my head because I liked the way it made my back feel. When I attended college (the first time around), I took some very aerobic yoga classes and liked the way I felt afterward, but not enough to stick with it.

After having my first child at the age of 21, I bought a yoga tape (Ali McGraw's Yoga Mind & Body with Erich Schiffman) to help me get my figure back, but found that I liked the portions of the video between the asana practice where Schiffman talked mystically and spiritually most. The experience of hearing this yoga-speak encouraged me to begin a home practice of whatever yoga postures felt good (like the feet-behind-the-head I had loved in childhood) followed by a little (very little) meditation.

Many years later, as an ER nurse, I was asked by coworkers who knew me as a yogi to teach asana and meditation to children who had lost loved ones through trauma at a camp sponsored by the hospital where I worked. I was pregnant again at the time, but loved teaching the classes and could see the immediate and profound results in the faces of my tiny pupils. A few years later, I completed a 200 hour teacher training, and taught formal classes to adults and children (including children with autism) for about one year before making a decision to finish my graduate level degree in English and Creative Writing, which is where I am now. My life has always been driven by certain loves--yoga as the union of mind/body, the power of language and the written word, and naturally-inclined health practices for women and children, and no matter where I am or what I am doing, it almost certainly is related to one of these loves. I am better at flexibility than strength. I am better at stimulating my ajna chakra than I am at stilling my mind. I've a primarily vata-type dosha and have difficulty being still at all.