Ahimsa

I have been teaching yoga!!! Yay :) It's been a wonderful experience. I was pretty nervous about it the first few times but now I'm looking forward to Thursday nights. I have one very loyal student who comes every week. She's actually the inspiration to start teaching from my home. She's a good friend and neighbor who found out she has MS. All of our neighbors had been gathered in our house for a holiday get together and she was giving us the update on her status. My reply, of course, was to do yoga. She immediately jumped on the opportunity and we've been getting together every week since. (Except for a couple weeks that were pretty crazy with selling our house, but that's another story).

I've been trying to incorporate a theme into some of my classes. Luckily my friends at Infinite Light Yoga keep me in their loop,  keeping me on the same pages as them. I've been using the same themes they use for the week, although sometimes a week behind them. The first week I started incorporating a theme was the week they practiced Ahimsa, or non-violence.

Ahimsa is the first of the five Yamas (restrictions) of yoga, the Yamas being first of the eight limbs of yoga. To practice ahimsa means to be kind to all living things, including animals. Of course we can not always practice non violence toward bugs we may step on, or squirrels we may run over because it would be more harmful to stop our car in the middle of traffic. The belief is that all living things are connected. That is the reason some yogis go so far as to become vegetarian. Harming another would be to harm yourself. Non violence to oneself, I believe, is probably harder than being non violent to others. Often times we are so hard on ourselves, physically, emotionally and mentally. For example, I was feeling pretty guilty at the beginning of my motherhood adventure if I couldn't get to Kailey right away when she was crying (a past blog post for those of you wondering more about this). I realized it was making me sad and decided to let it go (easier said than done). I could only do what I could do. In a way I was taking the non violent path with myself and not beating myself up because I couldn't be there every second. Another example of being violent with oneself could be forcing the body to do things it really shouldn't or doesn't want to do....like drinking another glass of wine even though you know it's too much (over eating is a form of violence to yourself also), doing drugs or smoking, lifting something that's too heavy because you have no one to help you, forcing yourself to run that extra mile even when your body is screaming stop, and the obvious in yoga, forcing your body into a pose because you want to look "perfect" or you want to be doing it "all the way" with no modifications. When you're doing a pose the way it feels delicious in your body, it is perfect.

Let's be honest, you have to be honest with yourself to practice non violence. You have to honor what your body is telling you. Let go of what you think you should be and be what you are, enjoy the body you have and continue to honor it at all times. Someone once said, "Yoga practice is not about doing the perfect pose, it's about the experience." Non violence begins with our thoughts and our ego. We have to be non violent in our thoughts to be non violent in our actions. These two things are closely connected. If we are constantly thinking about how ugly, fat, stupid and unattractive we are, we will never honor our physical body. Practicing non violent thoughts doesn't mean to be non violent with thoughts of ourselves only. Judging others is a form of violence. The hardest thing for me to do is to be non violent with the person cutting me off in traffic, or with the woman who is moving slowly in the grocery store when I just want to be done and on my way home. Man do my judgemental thoughts come rushing in. I didn't really notice it so much until I started to research ahimsa and ways I could bring it into my classes.

Overall, the theme for that yoga class came through loud and clear. Lori told me a week or two later how she was doing something and realized she wasn't practicing ahimsa towards her body. I was smiling, knowing I'd actually woven something into a class that someone would hold onto.

I just have to add this picture of Sweets because I went in to check on her and she had her hand in this little mudra. It made me smile. Maybe she's a yogini after all :)