Yoga!!!!!!!!!!

Sooooo last Monday I completed my Foundation Course at the Iyengar Yoga Institute, and I have to say that the last five weeks have given me more pleasure than almost anything else ever in my life! How mad is that?

I was having lunch with someone new in my life a few months ago and talked about 'having a go' at Tai Chi, 'having a go' at meditation classes, and how I felt (as I always did) that I was being judged negatively by the others in the class. As I was telling him this I had a bit of an epiphany and said 'This obviously says way more about me, than it does them. I guess I'm not a group person'. This wasn't a new thing, it's how I've felt most of my life, like I don't 'fit in'.

Those thoughts came back to me as I signed up for the five week course and I wondered if I'd actually stick this one out. Well I did, and I totally love being part of a group.

After the first class I walked home with a beaming smile on my face because I wasn't the worst one in the class, in fact I was in the top five I'd say. I rambled on to anyone who would listen about how yoga is the answer to all of life's problems, yada yada yada.  

I realised that for the first time ever I was fit and healthy, three years of exercising every morning has given me a good core strength, and muscles and a good heart rate. For the first time in my adult life I wasn't the red-faced, fat, sweating one, reeking of stale cigarettes, at the back of the room trying to hide. I was at the front of the class and I was doing it!

I'd been told all my life that I have lousy co-ordination and a terrible sense of balance, well guess what? Yoga is about co-ordination and balance and I have both! It's amazing how we just accept the lines we are fed as a child by over-protective or over critical parents. When that criticism stops coming from the original source we carry on doing it to ourselves.  It wasn't that I wasn't 'a group person' or that I was being judged by anyone else. The reality was I was judging myself, and doing a far harsher job of it than a stranger ever could. Because I like myself a whole lot more these days, suddenly I find I 'fit in'.

Last night I went to my first Beginners' class. This was way more hardcore than anything I'd done on the foundation course, and I was the new girl in the group again, but as I found myself standing on my shoulders with my feet over and flat on the floor behind my head, I felt a sense of pride I've never felt before. Who woulda thought that a nearly-50, former 20 stone, menopausal woman who's never been good at any sport in her life would be achieving this?

Life is good.