So I took my sad ass out this weekend, (thanks, Windee for marching along beside me! You are a trooper!) and tried two new yoga studios,Yoga Breeze and Yoga Pura.
I really wanted to love Yoga Breeze because it's closer to my house, and I did like the studio and the two teachers I tried. However, it's in a busy strip mall, and in my first class, they didn't utilize their music in a way to cover up the outside noise, which ended up distracting me.
I even tried Yoga Breeze a second time (I wanted to love it that bad!), and when I walked in and hear music playing, I was pretty relieved. Until I realized that the same song was on repeat for the entire class. I wanted to roll my head up inside my mat after the fourth time it started over. Then for savasana, she just turned the music completely off, so we listened to the conversation of a couple of preteen girls outside the window. Not a bit relaxing for this mother of girls. During savasana, I like to tune out my real life, not be reminded of how annoying teen girl conversations are. I kept trying to tell myself if I was keeping my mind quiet, these things wouldn't bother me, but it was no use, I was irritated.
On Saturday, we went to Yoga Pura. It didn't look like much from the street, just a storefront set into a little strip mall. But when I walked in, it looked like a yoga studio, it smelled like a yoga studio and they were welcoming like a yoga studio. I felt great when I left there, although I would have to say that this teacher didn't utilize music very effectively either, but we were able to hear the gongs from the other studio, so that was cool.
I think for me, yoga is more than the physical stretching, it's the emotional stretching. I have a pretty stressful job, and it's easy to get overwhelmed and bogged down in the negativity. When I go to yoga and they start talking about the theme of their class that week, it's a time for me to open my mind and allow positive thoughts to flood me. I find if I can allow a positive phrase into my brain, I can use it all week.
One of the things said this weekend is that "You are the sky, the emotions you feel, the bad moods of others are the weather. And the weather always passes over the sky, it always changes, it never covers the sky for long.". I've heard it expressed another way, that you are your own ship and everything around you is the ocean. Will you allow others to capsize your boat? Or will you steer it into safer waters?
And for me that is true. I'm very influenced by the moods of people around me. If they are stressed, it's easy for me to become stressed. If people are unhappy at work, I feel like it's my job to fix it and it stresses me out if I can't.
But if I go to yoga regularly, I am able to have a much more zen approach to other people's feelings. I don't own them, I can't fix them, it's not mine. All I can do is live the best life that I know how, and for me that means laughing as much as I can.
Namaste.
I would shoot someone if I could hear people talking outside during my nap at the end. Great post!
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