Yoga Beginnings – How I Started Yoga Part 1

It all came down to nervous system regulation. Not words I was familiar with at the beginning.

I started yoga with commitment when I was 29, after a couple of years of trying out classes occasionally.

What got me hooked was my first Ashtanga class.

90 super tough minutes of what was called ‘led primary series’, which I struggled to ge t through and which left my entire body trembling on the two hour journey home across London. I walked through the door and said to my partner, “I’ve found it.”

I hadn’t consciously been looking for anything. I can’t recollect what motivated me to start going to yoga classes, most of which left me bemused, or in the back row of mats next to my friend, suppressing laughter.

But here ‘it’ was.

I felt really, really calm. My mind was so quiet. I felt weirdly ‘in’ my body, with a strange, unfamiliar sense of contentment.

I didn’t have the self awareness or the words to express it at the time, but I was struggling with constant anxiety and low level depression. It is a common story…..My life was outwardly ‘fine’, and I was well aware of all my privilege - but I didn’t like living in a city, or my stressful job, I was ignoring that my relationship was in trouble and I was low in energy all the time.

I have PLENTY of constructively critical things to say about the Ashtanga yoga system, but it did its job that day.

I didn’t really understand what had happened, but I started to grasp how the stress ‘off ‘ switch had been activated (hello parasympathetic response). I started to practice every day. I didn’t care that I was really weak and stiff, I never really cared about what I could and couldn’t do. I just needed to keep going for over an hour and I would feel calmer, good in my body and have more of a sense of perspective on what was going on in my life. Compared to taught classes, I loved the quiet, sweaty focus of self-practice. It became my place of strength and refuge.

Now I understand that I was regulating my nervous system. I needed to learn how to quieten an anxious mind by switching to the parasympathetic (rest and restore) response better. The continuous movement gave my jittery mind a novel way to focus. For me, the challenge of physical strength/movement also helped with developing a healthier ‘activating’ sympathetic response as well. I needed more stamina to widen my ‘window of tolerance’ to what perceived stress I could handle without feeling wiped out.

Yoga provided this integration of focus, slower steady breathing, and attuning to physical sensations which cultivates more balance in the nervous system.

A very winding path continued from there, but yoga has stayed as my lifelong practice.  It is my own wild and positive experiences which have led me to teach and now to be sharing what I find useful about the effects of yoga with you.