I attended yoga for the first time in a very long time. I am not an avid yoga person. I actually have a love/hate relationship with it. It makes me move and stretch, hold poses and breathe.
I am a shallow breather. Sometimes I wonder if I am breathing at all. I often make a conscious decision to breathe deeply and suddenly I feel alive. Fancy that.
Something the instructor said really stood out to me today. Well, there were a few things, but maybe I will share them in another post.
She said, “Holding your breath won’t help you hold the pose any better.”
I found myself doing that all the time. It is a mind trick that if you aren’t breathing you are somehow going to be stronger. Not true. I kept falling over all the time.
When I did breathe, it didn’t help me stay in the poses longer, but I felt stronger and could feel it extending to the area we were told to stretch. Like the energy of life was waking up the cells throughout me. It felt so good, better than trying to be stiff and forgetting to breathe.
Lesson learned. Don’t hold your breath. Breathe through the poses.
The struggle of life is real. We all have to go through hard things. You have to breathe through the hard, long, drawn out poses of life. It is the give and take of every moment you are alive.
Breathe.
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