The end is a new beginning.

Hello fellow yogis who have followed this blog

It has been a long time since I last wrote here. It is time for an update and a closure of this blog.

Did I go to teacher training? No.

Will I ever go to teacher training? Maybe one day, but not now.

Some big questions in my life has always been; How can I gain weight when practicing so much? How can it be that my mind gets weaker and weaker? Why did my practice go backwards and not stronger after all these years of training? 

It has been like I have had an alien in my head, and the alien has not wanted the best for me, but in a very subtle way trying to convince me to do things his way and to let him run the show. For him to take over. For him to be the one in charge. Slowly but surely I let him take over. I gave up the fight.

One day I came across a book and I realized one important thing about myself, I have an addiction, not to alcohol, not to drugs, not to medicine, not to any of those things what we normally call drugs, but to sugar, starches and any product that will become sugar in my body or that the brain believes is sugar. 

This alien fed and grew stronger on sugar. What did I do before class, drink some rehydration mixture with sugar in it. After class, some dried fruits and nuts or a coconut juice with sugar in it. When I got home, I ate some pasta that is all starches and become sugar in the body. For breakfast I ate bread and guess what? It became sugar in the body. The alien had the time of his life!

Did the alien move in after I started practice yoga? No, he has lived there for a long long time, probably since I was a very small girl. Will he ever leave? No, he will live in my brain for ever. In one way that is the best thing ever that happened to me.

Because now I have to choose to feed or not to feed the alien, every day, every hour, and sometimes every minute I have to choose; Do I want to feed that alien in the brain or do I want to feed the Real Me?

Feeding the Real Me involves a lot of different things.

• First I need to eat the kind of foods that is good for me. My diet excludes everything that is or will become sugar in the body, it also excludes anything that is a substitute for these products.
• Then I need my 12-step program and the knowledge about the disease addiction.
• Last but not least I need the yoga. Yoga is a great healer of the body and the mind.

Is my life boring since I can’t eat certain foods? No! Since that day when I read that book my yoga practice has changed. My body has changed. My mind has changed. My entire life has change. Everything has changed for the better!

I wish you all the best that you can have in your life.

/A Truly Happy Yogi

Breakthrough

Hello world!

It’s not so often that I do write at the moment, it has been much lately so when I come home it is food, fix with the household and then bed to be ready for a new day.

I started another 30 day challenge with the studio. Today is day 12.

This challenge is such a different challenge from the others that I have done.

It all started a couple of months ago when I felt that my lower back and hips started to open up. That area has been so tight that my 2 m tall, former basket-ball player with hands like a toilete lid, chiropractor hasn’t been able to adjust it. He has been using massage, stretching and acupunture, but nothing has helped. Hip area stuff and stuck as a cement-block. Something started and then came the pain. The pain has been there in every class, like little knifes digging around in almost every posture. Can you imagen Wind Removing or Half Tortoise beeing painful? Camel, Triangle, Balancing Stick or Stadning Head to knee is understandable.

It has been tough, it has been painful, it has been emotional.

Slowly it has become better, less painful and I have become stronger.

Yesterday I did a double, 7 am and 6 pm and in the evening class something poped in the hip area. When walking home from the bus it was so strange to walk, like the hips didn’t really know how to do this motion anymore. It was so totally wiered.

Today the hips where sore and I feel that I do walk a bit different than before. During class it was amazing, the first class in a long time that was totally pain free. This is what I have been working towards for so long now that I had almost forgotten how it was to have class where it feels like I am working in the postures to a greater depth and not meeting the pain and having to breath though and into it. Pain releases something in the body that, at least for me, makes me quite a bit overwhelmed.

I guess it will be a bumpy road from here and I will still have classes meeting the knives but it feels like I am over the huge mountain and it will only get better from here.

It is all up to me

Hello World!

It’s been some of those crazy weeks again. Lots of work, with the totally moment for everybdoy to be able to take responsibility for their actions. My learning is that I have to and can say: No. No we can’t develop this in the short timespan that you give us if you want some kind of quality to go with it. I like my job and as long as I learn something everyday it is a great job.

I alone are the one who chooses how I feel about all the things that happens around and with me.

During this week I only had the possibility to go to one class and it was 8 days since the previous class. That is not my normal routine. But it happens when things at work piles up.

After a kind of rough standing series and the painful spine strengthening, in one of the the Savasanas my body was so happy and I just layed there with a huge smile on my face. Then the little man on the other shoulder came out and wispered in my ear: How can you allow yourself to be happy, it is 8 days since your last class, your back hurts, your stomach hurts and that is by definition the entire you – be miserable!

I could at that moment choose to be miserable. Did I? No, I choose to be happy.

It would have been easier to be miserable as then I could have skipped some postures, layed there and feeling pity for myself in my miserable state, and ofcourse, I did consider this, but somewhere deep inside me I choose and decided, No I will not go that path today, today I will choose to go the happy path.

Every day and every moment there is the possibility to choose how to feel, if we can choose the happy path once it is so much easier the next time.