Yoga – Lesson on how your body should be

At the end of last year Lauren and I took a beginner’s yoga class. The primary reason for enrolling being I have hips issues. Any time I bend left or right or put pressure on my hips I can feel tightness in my hips. I went to see a physiotherapist two times and he suggested some exercises to do, but it didn’t really help. Maybe it would have, if I continued doing it on a daily basis. That’s another blog entry on procrastination. We decided to take up yoga and did a beginners class, for 8 weeks. We both found it beneficial in increasing our flexibility in our body and decided to take beginner level 1 in January.

Beginner level 1 is a whole different level altogether. It’s all about increasing or lengthening your muscles; so you can do hand and head stands, which is a very good thing to do apparently. But I could not believe the difference in the class. It’s a 90 min class and during that time you are in all manner of contortions and at the end it really feels like a workout.

Over the course of the past 5 weeks, I have been thinking how our bodies are out of whack. Yoga is all about the ability to place parts of your body in poses to attain a certain physical posture. In doing so it helps with mental, spiritual and physical well being.

To be able to get your body in the poses you must twist or move each part of your body so it’s straight in line with other parts of your body. For most of us our bodies are not straight. Our shoulders, arms, thighs, knees, calves, toes, ankles and arches of our feet are out of line with the rest of our body, specifically the spine, hips/pelvis and back.

I feel like it is going to take decades to properly do poses and get the complete benefits of yoga. I wish yoga was taught in primary school. As I get older, even though I am relatively young, I feel I need to spend time helping my body so I can grow old gracefully. But if I had learnt to do this 25 years ago, maybe I would not have a misaligned body now. I have the next 30 years to fix it or at least help my body in the right direction.