Stress in not your enemy

I read this post form Harvard Business Review Blogs,
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/04/stress-is-not-your-enemy.html

Few of us push ourselves nearly hard enough to realize our potential, nor do we rest, sleep, and renew nearly as deeply or for as long as we should. What the writer says is essentially distilled into the statement, "We live by the myth that stress is the enemy in our lives. The real enemy is our failure to balance stress with intermittent rest. Push the body too hard for too long — chronic stress — and the result will indeed be burnout and breakdown. But subject the body to insufficient stress, and it will weaken and atrophy."

In my practice, I see this unfold all the time. Yoga is the sweet spot where effort and relaxation. To simplify this point further, in any pose, once you learn to stack your body and achieve enough strength to hold the pose for a few moments, it is then a subtle shift happens and you get a feeling of "sinking" in, or relaxing into a pose. Almost like let gravity take over. That is your sweet spot. When you find that balance, the potential for growth is enormous.

Why I practice yoga

I find the physical movements of Hatha Yoga to be graceful and magnificent. Witnessing someone going through the movements of a vinyasa can be very beautiful and lissome, balletic, but there is an internal aesthetic that`s perceptible to me as well. The more absorbed I am in asana, the more apparent this becomes. There is a corporeal elegance that is imminent in it and yet also transcendent as ever more subtle nuances are endlessly being uncovered.

It is an internal and external adventure of discovery: A previously inexperienced lengthening, a twist, ease, or a glimpse of that which feels true and unencumbered. The travel is at a slow speed with unpremeditated direction. There is also a feeling of liberation as though all tethers have been cut, a busting out from the shackles of the physical body. Yet paradoxically, a keener sense of body cognizance occurs, a more intimate relationship with the body phenomena and a deeper familiarity, an exploration with sentience. The longer one has practiced, the deeper the relationship and the more effortless the expression. Yoga is transformative; ossification evolving into malleability, effort surrendering to stillness. It’s wide open, it`s focused. It’s liberating… but not as an escape from something, just pure freedom.

There is also the possibility that yoga can instill a speck of the unknown into the mundane, at least be a pathway to such or even an answer to the larger existential questions. I’m not so sure about that, but that’s a whole other discussion. Sometimes I think that the finality of settling on an answer is limiting, staying with the question however leaves the door open for wider potential of insight.

Why I teach yoga

People ask me, why do I teach yoga? I am reminded of a quote by Maya Angelou, it goes something like this - People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
 Teaching yoga is about standing on the other side of the mirror. When I practice on my mat, I am in my own space, contained yet  free to explore my inner self. But as a teacher, I have the privilege in being in other peoples' spaces. It is about discovering, renewing and strengthening the bonds that connect us. And when I sense that yoga has met a student exactly where they are, that feeling is indescribable, unlike anything else I can hope to experience. It is at once a powerful yet humbling feeling. Practice and teaching go hand in hand, like 2 sides of a coin. I am at once a teacher and a student.