by Renee Fedun, teacher and life long student

It was a challenging year – the deaths of two close cousins, an intense illness, periods of pressing work demands – that left me depleted emotionally and physically.  Still, yoga was a constant in my life – most of the time.  Whether due to illness, boredom, outside demands or the social whirlwind, once in while I would step away from my practice, only to return time and again to be replenished, rejuvenated, renewed.

    Why do I do yoga?  To live my life more fully, yes, but far more than that.  Yoga gives me sanctuary, a peaceful home to return to, when my life seems in chaos or just plain unmanageable. Through my practice, whether at home or in a class, I become grounded again. 

     Yoga is the union of mind, body and spirit, and the ways to achieve this are limitless. My yoga practice includes not only the physical postures and the breathwork, but a ritual that reconnects me with the Earth and the cosmos, meditation, writing, tears, laughter, whatever I need in that moment to return to wholeness.  Could I explain it better?  I don’t think so.  And I don’t think it matters – each time the experience is different or the same, but it is inexpressible, just meant to be experienced.

     To do yoga is to open up to new possibilities of movement, thought, connections, ideas, how to live life. It enlivens my body and my mind. It encourages healing – physical, emotional and spiritual. It creates new neural pathways.  It helps me see how a particular posture connects smoothly with another or a jigsaw puzzle piece whose placement eluded me suddenly becomes clear or a relationship that I thought had failed blossoms in a most delightful way. 

     Yoga brings clarity.  It rarely happens in a bolt of light, at least not for me, but in a slow unfurling. The beauty of this is that the insight or change that it has engendered stays with me. It informs my life.

     Yoga is a continuum.  There are moments of illumination along the path – bright, happy moments of discovery, ease, bliss, enlightenment – but each moment passes and life continues, sometimes gliding smoothly, sometimes lurching, sometimes stuck in the mud. That’s life.  Yoga doesn’t change any of that.  And yet, inexorably, slowly, I move forward. For that I am eternally grateful.