Sally’s Background
Yoga is now an integral part of my life, but it wasn’t always that way.
I was a militant materialist and a cynical nihilist, dismissing ‘things like yoga’ as ‘new-age’ nonsense. I thought ‘spirituality’ was for suckers. I was restless and impulsive, a heavy drinker, and a smoker. For many years, I also struggled with opiate addiction.
So what changed? To be completely honest, I was desperate. I had been living a party lifestyle in Asia for nearly a decade, and upon returning to Europe, I felt lost. I seemed to have little ability to regulate my energy. My life was a continuous cycle of crazy activity followed by complete crashes. Along with bouts of crippling fatigue, I experienced worsening chronic pain throughout my body. My attention was increasingly scattered.and my self-esteem was at rock bottom. I knew I had to do something.
Yoga was growing in popularity, and despite my antipathy towards ‘alternative lifestyles,’ a small voice in my head told me to try it. Doubtfully, I started to follow some videos on YouTube. I surprised myself; I actually enjoyed it.
“Yoga is not about touching your toes, it’s about what you learn on the way down.” Jigar Gor
Before starting yoga, I used to run and lift weights, but I never stretched. I was strong, but my muscles were tight. And let’s not even talk about my balance and coordination; they were terrible! I also had a very distant relationship with my body. I didn’t consciously hate my body or have a bad body image; I just felt very separate from it. I had a body, but I wasn’t my body. Because of this, I had a limited ability to intuit what my body needed. I didn’t know how to listen to what it was telling me.
As I had hoped, taking up regular yoga asana practice helped me physically. I still live with fatigue and pain, but I find them more manageable. My muscles are now flexible as well as strong, and my balance and coordination are so much better! However, unexpectedly, yoga has given me so much more. It has helped me to free myself in ways I didn’t know I was stuck.
Being able to easily touch my toes was a true revelation. It was something I had never been able to do in my adult life and it really made me think; I wondered what else I believed about myself that wasn’t true. I realised that the real problem wasn’t that my muscles were inflexible; it was that my mind was inflexible! I had discovered yoga as a method for self-inquiry.
Asana practice showed me that change was needed and also that it was possible. It taught me that incremental change leads to profound differences. I am naturally very curious and posture practice led onto breath practice, and then onto a little meditation. I found I felt more in control of my mind. And this is the primary purpose of yoga.
“Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah” – “Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind” (Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 1.2)
Consciously controlling my breath in coordination with moving my body helped me to viscerally feel that I am not just a mind that possesses a body; my mind and body are one. As I began to more fully inhabit my body, I became conscious of feeling disconnected from the world around me, as if I were apart from it rather than part of it.
I now realise that when the body and mind are experienced as separate, much of our instinctive and intuitive knowledge is lost. It had never occurred to me that the disconnect between my mind and body had such wide-ranging consequences. It’s amazing what you don’t realise even when it’s staring you in the face.
To be honest, I hadn’t even realised that feeling at one with the world was a possibility. I had thought of myself as detached from my environment and from other beings. I saw my skin as a barrier separating me from the external world. What was inside my skin was ‘me’; what was outside my skin was not ‘me’. I perceived myself as a separate entity in a world of others, so that is how I experienced reality.
Yoga has given me the felt sense that everything is one. Ultimately, everyone and everything is connected in complex ways. As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘the brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world.’ Everything exists as an inextricable whole. I firmly believe that this is something that must be felt, experienced; it cannot be understood by intellect alone.
“It’s funny how day by day nothing changes. But when you look back, everything is different.” C.S. Lewis
I’m not about to tell you that since I discovered yoga, my mind is finally fully focused. Far from it. And I’m not going to claim that I am all love and light. However, I’m no longer a smoker, drinker, or opiate addict, and I am definitely calmer, more conscious of my thought patterns and emotions, and how they affect my behaviour.
Much more importantly, I am conscious of myself as a connected being, of being part of the whole, of my intrinsic connection to others and to the world around me. I experience a deeper and more embodied life and that has been transformational. I don’t like to think of where I would be without yoga.
This is why I am so passionate about sharing the practice with others. I can’t tell you what your yoga journey will be, what path it will take, or where it will take you, because everyone’s journey will be different. As different as we are from each other. That’s the great thing about yoga. All I can do is guide you towards different practices and hold space while you explore for yourself what those practices mean to you. Yoga is not a path of inherited belief; it is a path of experimentation, reflection, and transformation.