Live yoga off the mat

So, I’ve decided to put my yoga practice on hold. After 7 years of ashtanga, I switched to yin yoga (for about two weeks) and currently I am practically not practicing at all except for the few poses that I do on my mat.

It may sound odd why on earth would I leave behind something so important to me. Truthfully speaking, I am not. I’m not leaving yoga. I am leaving the way I used to see yoga and how I felt I should live it.

There’s a saying from Master Yoda where he advises us to “let go of everything we fear to lose”. I had almost always been afraid of losing everything that I thought my body had accomplished. The strength, the flexibility, the dynamic, the discipline. All these things that I believed were making me an amazing person. The thing is I was never better nor worse because of it. We use our body to go deeper like a kind of temple that we have to gain access in order to realize things about ourselves that otherwise we probably would have missed. I am so glad that my yoga teachers, one way or another, always tried to help me go through this fantastic and hard process.

Regrettably, along the way I think I became a very competitive person. Probably no one noticed but myself!

This is a very personal thought. I always say that yoga practice has everything to do with intention. Good intentions make the better practitioners. But we cannot see the intention of each other, we can only acknowledge our own. How can we know if we're practicing for the right or wrong reasons? Is there such thing as right or wrong reasons? Or are these just questions of the mind completely irrelevant to the practice itself?

I remember when I started my yoga journey, I thought yoga was some kind of meditation. I would just sit down and wait for inner peace to come in. Yes. Somehow yoga is a kind of meditation but we just don’t sit and expect for things to happen on their own. We struggle with our own ego, with our feelings and emotions, with our thoughts, with the things that make us fragile, with the things that make us human. And we change, we change a lot, the practice changes and changes us, and then we change ourselves and decide to change the practice that helped us to change in the first place. 

This is yoga beyond borders, mats and shalas. This is yoga that make us look inside our soul without masks.