Everything (well…not quiet everything) I thought that I KNEW, might after all…be wrong. Or partially true. True to a point and perspective.
Yoga woke me up and gave me power. But were those powers in my best interest? It’s all relative.
Maybe, what worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. I am developing a new spiritual practice and this time I am utilizing the teachings of Jesus and some Christian theology.
Yoga was the catalyst.
Allow me to share my story.
My yoga journey began on a bathroom floor.
8 years ago, I was employed as a plant operator on a new build pumped storage power station. Good pay and benefits. 8 hour shifts. A good stable job. Employment for which many would be grateful.
But I was suffocating.
I was a rat trapped in a cage. Was this going to be my life? Stuck in small town South Africa, living just down the road from my childhood home and all the unsorted trauma baggage that came with it.
A slave to employment and security. Completely miserable in my existence but too afraid to take steps to free myself. Too depressed to imagine that I deserved anything more than this life I’d stumbled into, blindly, lazily . On autopilot.
I didn’t care about my work and I was a terrible employee.
Which is why, without an ounce of guilt.. I’d sneak off to the ladies bathroom to practice yoga whenever I had the chance.
At first, I practiced purely for the physical gains. Vanity driven by low self esteem. (2 sides of the same coin? A topic for another day?) *
For most of my teenage years and early adult life, I’d suffered from food addiction and struggled to maintain a healthy( astetically appealing) weight.
(thanks, in large part, to my mother, who suffers from food addiction herself...and my sister…and my mothers mother…my aunts my friends my female cousins. Coincidence? I think not. *Emulating the collective: What’s yours (addiction) is mine*
To compensate for my unhealthy attachment to food, I threw myself at a lifestyle of intense exercise, hyper fixating on one fitness fad after the next, desperate to find that magical key that would open the door to a firm, slender figure.
I was vain back then, unconsciously so. My self worth based solely on appearance.
(A fate met by many an abused girl, our self esteem diminished in a conservative patriarchal society that places all emphasis on beauty and none on intellect.)
Of course, this approach yielded disappointing results(because no amount of exercise can compensate for excessive food intake…hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it?)
Also, I was damaging my body and my psyche with the intensity of the exercise which I was forcing upon myself.
There came a time when I was no longer able to lie to myself. This extreme amount of effort was yielding virtually no results, and I was still a slave to my food addiction.
Enter Yoga
I approached Yoga, initially, in much the same way. From a yang mindset. Push, sweat, suffer…”Sweat is your fat crying!” (Jillian Michaels provided my workout mantra…)
But it didn’t take long for the shift to begin, such is the power of Yoga.
My wonderful You-tube yoga teachers would sprinkle some Yogic wisdom into their asana based classes.
50% Stirha, 50% Sukha” (50% effort, 50% ease…)
This was the first message (delivered by Lesley Fightmaster, may her kind and brightly shining soul rest in peace) that I absorbed and integrated (begrudgingly) into my practice.
I was astounded by the results.
In a very short space of time, (with half the effort..) I began to see evidence of this wisdom for myself.
Their philosophy was correct.
No amount of crunches or weight lifting yielded the results that an hour of gentle, mindful yoga did. Later, I’d reduce practice time to 30minutes and still see the same results. I was getting stronger, I was losing weight, and the irony of it all…I didn’t even care any more.
Because a far more significant shift was taking place, inside of my mind.
My Self awareness began to expand and I could suddenly see, the why of my food addiction, from whence it had come… and once I understood this, it lost it’s power over me.
The weight dropped off effortlessly and 8 years later ( at the age of 35, after having twin boys…) it is STILL effortless to maintain a health weight.
It’s crazy how for me, it’s not even a THING anymore. But if I take the time to reflect, let my heart travel back in time with me… it remembers how very HARD it was, to live in a body that you knew wasn’t what is should be. Not due to natural selection or tragedy or happenstance…but because of YOU. You and your bad habits and food addiction.
To be free of food addiction is liberation for the soul as much as it is for the physique.
With this new Self awareness came a deeper understanding of the why of Me.
The weight issues were a symptom of a much larger underlying issue that I hadn’t even known was there….CPTSD. Childhood trauma.
From here it cascaded… my healing journey had begun. I made the decision to respect my soul…
And turns out, my soul hated the life I had chosen for us.
Yoga gave me the insight and the strength to ask for more for myself.
Most importantly, it opened my eyes and pointed the way to God. A God I’d run from but who had never left my heart.
It would be a poetic end to say that it was solely this expanded self awareness that led to a better way of life for me, and I suppose in small ways it did…
I was able to admit to myself that the shift work was having severe impact on my already shaky mental health. I advocated for myself, and my manager was kind enough to honor my needs.
But ultimately, it was God who provided the means for me to leave that soul destroying job I loathed and was not at all competent at.
Through a set of providential circumstances (more on that in another post…*God’s hands*)I was able to quit my job, and left that small town to move to an also rather small but not LADYSMITH small…and wonderfully international) 3rd world city.
Here in Lilongwe, capital of Malawi ,I studied yoga, and so began a 7 year long intensive yogic spiritual journey that did exactly what it said it would…expand my consciousness. BUT. It did some other not so good things too… this will ALSO (you guessed it…) be a topic for another post.(*YOGA: The good, the bad and the demons*)
Some Christians say that Yoga is evil, but look at what it has given me…
Freedom, Self awareness, direction and connection to God.
Anything that can do all this for you, cannot be totally evil my friends. (*Nuggets of truth…*)
I have partaken in powerful practices ignorantly, and maybe they brought about some mental/spiritual harm…but I believe the impact of that harm is far outweighed by the impact of the benefits.
Yoga may not be THE path to God, but for me, it was a path leading towards that path.
I will be forever grateful.
Namaste, in nomine patris et filli et spiritus sancti.
fromtheedgeofsanity.com 
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