Finding Power and Peace with Yoga
I owe a lot to the ladies at Working Wellness Yoga. For one, WWY co-founder, Amy Orcutt, reintroduced me to yoga a little over a year ago. Amy is a good friend and when she was getting her yoga certification, I sort of reluctantly went to her driveway for some free yoga. And that summer, Amy completely changed my thoughts about yoga.
As much as fitness has always been a part of my life, I had only ever been to one or two yoga classes many years ago. I recall not being able to hold any of the poses and hating every second of it. So I just thought yoga wasn’t for me. I like cardio. I like to sweat. I’m not flexible. I am horrible at balancing. Yoga isn’t for me.
But taking yoga with Amy recently changed that for me. I actually saw how athletic the practice of yoga was. You need to be strong to control your body to flow from pose to pose. Lifting your leg while pushing your arms into the mat in a Three Legged Downward Facing Dog Pose... rising into a lunge and sending your arms up into Crescent Moon Pose… even just standing tall in a simple Mountain Pose, this all requires full body strength and awareness. The poses are powerful and when I embraced the strength of each pose, my thoughts about yoga shifted.
I came to find out that yoga in fact isn’t just about holding uncomfortable poses. Yoga is about making the poses work for you. And developing those poses and strength over time. Yoga most certainly creates strong bodies. But yoga does so much more than that. Yoga gives me 60 minutes of self care. I feel so much better, both physically and mentally, after I move my body through poses during a yoga class. And I always leave the mat feeling both powerful and peaceful. And that’s a beautiful thing! I never thought I would say this, but I actually crave yoga now.
This is how tree pose looks for me. I am proud of my strength and my balance with this pose. No, my foot isn't resting on my inner thigh and that is ok. This is what my body can do at this moment.
So for 2022, I am making sure that I practice yoga at least one time a week. My friends at Working Wellness Yoga will help me reach that goal. They just launched their new library of virtual classes. For $25 a month, you get access to tons of content— and not just yoga. There are yoga classes, pilates classes, meditations and cooking demos. It’s a complete wellness lifestyle library! And new classes are added every week.
They are also offering FREE LIVE yoga classes every Wednesday at 10 am all month long.
For this week’s virtual class, I asked Amy to teach one of her signature Power Flow classes so that you all can see exactly what I am talking about when I say that you can feel both powerful and peaceful at the same time when you practice yoga. And after yoga, Erin Sibley Doerwald (who is WWY’s resident psychotherapist and mindfulness facilitator) will lead us in a ten minute meditation. You will get the full experience of self care on the mat this Wednesday, January 12, at 10 am. Hope to see you there!
The zoom info is here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81034841524; passcode: Yoga
