Why I started practicing yoga: I was coping with grief, debilitating anxiety & feeling lost and worthless
Yoga helped me to deal with all of this AND find peace, meaning and purpose in my life.
Hello to everyone new here!! My name is Ashley, I'm from Canada, and I want to share a story about why I started to practice yoga. I think this is really important to share as a teacher, the WHY.
Why? Because I think it makes me relatable, I'm just like many of you - I was a beginner at one point and had no clue what was going on at the start!
I also have been thinking about the hierarchy that exists in the yoga world - guru/student model, while I don't discount this model, I do have a problem with blind followers and egotistic narcissistic teachers who are almost cult like (do x, y, z and you will be 'saved'....it unfortunately doesn't work like that and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is delusional and out of touch with reality and you should run away from them quickly!!).
I don't want to pretend I have all the answers just because I'm a yoga teacher (and I'm still first and foremost a student), I don't have them - I'm just a regular person who has done a LOT of work on my self (over a decade) and all I can share are the things that work for me. They might work for you too and help you to discover who you really are and what you really want, and start to recognise all the bullshit out there trying to pull us in a million directions, guaranteeing happiness or safety or security. These things cannot be bought or sold, you have to develop them internally for yourself through a lot of difficult and uncomfortable work - yoga, breathing and meditation work for me and that's why I'm here teaching it.
We all have a reason why we gravitate to this practice. My reason started as a way to seek the healing I desperately needed. I started yoga on the recommendation of a friend at a time when I was experiencing a profound amount of grief, while simultaneously not knowing who I was or what I wanted out of life. The grief from losing my Dad at age 23 shook me off a course that I hadn’t even really thought about in terms of direction.
I had no clue what I wanted out of life as I was in those formative years of university and discovering what was out in the real world was completely overwhelming. I was directionless and not taking care of myself in every way possible, an avoidance mechanism if I’m honest, because what I was experiencing was too much for me to comprehend at the time and it was easier to numb than to face reality.
Yoga helped to bring me back into alignment, find a way to take care of my physical and mental wellbeing at a time when I didn’t think I even deserved it. Through many years of practice and teaching and to this very day, yoga set me up to find who I am, who I want to be, how to honestly learn to accept myself with all of my imperfections and how to carry the weight of the past on my shoulders without it feeling so suffocating and heavy. To become whole and light.
Yoga teaches you to be able to walk with life’s hardships, to discover how strong you really are, to become confident: not to change who you are but to accept who you already are. Now I am passionate about helping people discover who they are, what they want, what’s important and what is not. Learning how to prioritise and take care of yourself first is essential to being able to show up whole to YOU and all of the people in your life.
I teach Sattva Yoga because it’s what I started out practicing, alongside some Ashtanga. When I started practicing I hurt my knee and hamstring in Ashtanga (pulling too hard - classic) and couldn’t practice it for almost a year, so I dedicated my practice to Sattva Yoga because it had a similar intensity to Ashtanga, Sattva felt familiar to Ashtanga and it was accessible to me because there weren’t as many seated postures as Ashtanga and I could still practice with my injury. Sattva is a challenging type of yoga, but I believe it’s very accessible if you are up for hard work. It gets you out of your busy mind and into your body and breath. It’s traditional and has a direction and a purpose (ideal for me because I need to know WHY I’m doing something). It makes sense. The same sequence is practiced for a month so there is consistency and so you learn the postures. I started practicing this exact same type of yoga that I teach to you, I was not flexible at all, I had zero strength and zero body awareness, I didn’t know left from right or my head from my toes. This is what I teach you in my vinyasa and hatha classes in the studios, with minor tweaks to fit the class descriptions, and in my Online Thursday morning Sattva class.