Yoga Certification: The Beginning of a New Life
In June, I traveled to Big Corn Island, Nicaragua for a 200 hour Ashtanga Yoga Certification course with It’s YogaNica. I joined Ainsley, Jon, Camilla, Rachel, and Megan for the three week course, which was taught by instructors Edwin and Kelli. I wanted to be able to add yoga to my fitness teaching credentials because I want to live more mindfully and help others do so as well. Every day, I practiced and lived the life of a yogi. Learning with the amazing and gifted students in the group was amazing. All of them are such special people and I will cherish the time I spent with them for the rest of my life. I also enjoyed daily early morning swims in the ocean. I swam during the sunrise and while most of the island was still sleeping. Those swims brought me so much serenity and peace. Swimming to me is meditation and in the calm, warm sea, I swam along, admiring colorful fish and coral and the occasional manta ray or nurse shark.
Over the course of the training, I became very in-tune with myself, learned how to better discipline my mind, and learned how to master most of the poses and to teach them effectively. I walked away with so much more than a yoga certificate.
I left feeling that I had begun a journey into understanding myself and my life’s purpose. In a different place, I began to break away from some of the samskaras or patterned thought processes that have been stealing my joy and keeping me from growing for too many years. It is very hard to break away from these patterned thoughts. I have many of these. Thoughts that I don’t fit in, I’m not successful enough, that I’m a chronic headache sufferer. I want to see myself as a swimmer, a yogi, an author, a compassionate and loving person with a sense of adventure. I want to feel content with my life wherever I am. That’s who I was during my yoga class in Nicaragua. After my return from Nicaragua, I saw myself starting to fall back into old patterns of thinking and it took some time to figure out how to break down those walls. I will share some of those thoughts in blog posts and in my memoir, Journey to a Better Life, to be published in 2017. One of the most important I qualities that has been imperative to my learning journey is patience. Changing thought patterns is difficult. I didn’t develop them overnight – they have been running wild in my head for years -and it takes time to change them. I have found for me the best mechanisms to break negative thought patterns are daily yoga practice and travel. I can reset my mind with meditation or yoga practice and I can often reset my mind with a change of scenery as well. In three days, I will travel to Mykonos, Greece to teach yoga classes for three weeks. There will be no past to confine me and day by day I will write the future I want to live. I will go to this far away place knowing that the people in the world that love me most understand my journey and are in my heart no matter how many miles separate us.