January 12, 2024
Shedding Skin
Elizabeth Brass
Certified Senior Iyengar Yoga Teacher & Yoga Therapist (IAYT)
It's the small progressions in ourselves that often go unseen.
By not recognizing our own progress, it's easy to become frustrated.
The positive changes in our posture, in our energy, in our outlook over time are impossible to measure.
Because we can't measure the transformations that occur in us from our yoga practice, they go under valued.
I've had a slow start to the new year, which is something new for me. In the past, I taught on and around the holidays. Being a self-employed yoga teacher since age 25, it's ingrained in me to work whenever I can. So, when other people are off from work, it's normal to offer yoga classes and workshops. Teaching on quiet days brings a special energy and focus for yoga.
But over time, it occurred to me that it might also be nice to experience personally the rhythm of slowing down or shifting gears around holidays. As yoga practitioners, we observe our changing impulses and actions in body and mind. It's not always easy to observe these changes in ourselves. To allow for change, a letting go has to occur, and this is one of the great and hard lessons of yoga. We see our former self, the self that we knew, and it can begin to feel like clothes that don't fit anymore because we're changing. Change can be disorienting and destabilizing and this is where our yoga practice can help. In times of change, by opening ourselves to the discomfort and acknowledging it, we can then seek practices that nourish and cultivate peace within ourselves. Then we can return to the world, hopefully, a little calmer and a little stronger.
Especially now, given the high-stress world in which we live. We need more than ever the teachings and practices of yoga. In Light on Life, Guruji Iyengar writes about savasana as a shedding process:
We have many skins, sheaths, thought, prejudices, preconceptions, ideas, memories, and projects for the future. Savasana is a shedding of all these skins, to see how glossy and gorgeous and serene and aware is the beautiful rainbow-colored snake who lies within.
Allowing ourselves to shed our old selves and the past is to look squarely in the present and fortifies us for what is to come. Yoga develops our willpower, our open-heartedness, and compassion for all beings. This process begins with ourselves. We don't need the new year to begin, but we can take it, every day and for a lifetime.
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