Taking a Break From Yoga
Three months ago I was riding the yogi wave, my light was shining brighter then ever, my body was more flexible then it had been in years, and my life felt like all the pieces were in the right place. I was living in the honeymoon stage of yoga, what I now call a “yogi-moon”. My life started to become busy and soon enough, it all became to much. I started becoming overwhelmed, self sabotaging, and making up reasons to not do the things that I loved. I felt like my growth in yoga had stopped. Naturally yoga was the easiest thing to place the blame on, and the easiest thing to drop. I mean, I couldn’t stop being a daughter, sister, partner, friend, or employee, but I could stop being a yogi. The more I thought about it, I realized I needed to make some changes, the easy learning was done and maybe it is time to take a break.
For a long time yoga was my foundation, my roots. It helped me grow into the person I am today, it saw me through some very intense struggles, it stood by me when all I could do was lay in child’s pose and cry, it celebrated with me in my triumphs in life, it taught me about vitality, breath, forgiveness, and letting go. It saved my life, it gave me life, and here I was turning my back on it to focus on what I thought were more important parts of my life. I was giving up on yoga because life was tough, and the real work was happening.
Do you know what happens when you take a break from one aspect of your life and put all your energy into another? You will start to resent that one or two other areas of you life, you will start to sink deeper into the quicksand, your light will start to fade and eventually burn out, you become lost, and now you feel like no area of your life is working out. I am telling you this will happen, I am telling you it is scary, I am telling you this happened to me. I walked away from yoga thinking I needed to focus on some other things, thinking I needed to figure some “shit” out. In the end all I really did was make more of a mess then I originally had.
During my break from yoga, my fiancé decided he was going to enroll in the 40 days program. I followed the program with him, helped him along the way, and one night I re read the 40 days to transformation book. In one of laws of transformation Baron says “The whole is the goal. It may be helpful to look at your life like a symphony: if you take apart the notes and sounds you miss the magic of the music. It loses something, just as you do when you chose to work on only certain aspects of your life”. I think what Baron means by this is that when you take a step back from one part of your life and chose to focus on another, you really end up failing in all parts. Baron is right, your life is like a symphony. There are beautiful sounds coming out of one instrument, and good things in one part of your life, but when all parts of your life are working together, and all instruments are playing together, it becomes magical, fluent, and easy. Taking a break from yoga to focus on other things in life is like taking the piano out of the orchestra, it still sounds like music but it isn’t that amazing sound it could be.
So, what do you do when you feel like you have lost that part of you that was so rich and vibrant only months ago? You go back to the start, back to your foundation, back to your roots. I allowed myself back to go back to a time when everything felt okay in my life, when I felt the most solid. I busted out the goal sheet, the schedule, and I scheduled myself some yoga. I was going to do this again, from scratch, I was going to piece my life back together. Finally I was taking a step forward after months of taking steps back.
Originally, when I started at the studio I felt like I was growing into a new person, I felt like everyday I went to the studio I could see the growth in myself. When I stopped going to yoga and decided to take a break I felt like the growing stopped, it was almost like I had reached my full potential and didn’t know where else to go. Here is the thing, like a tree you never stop growing. Even when you think on the surface you have maxed out on your growth, deep down your roots are still spreading out. It took me 3 months of falling apart to realize I hadn’t taken a step back in my life I had taken a step away. I hadn’t stopped growing at all, I had just started growing in a different direction. So, I encourage you, when you feel like life is too much, that things just aren’t working for you anymore, don’t take this step away just take a step back. Don’t drop the hobby, or the easiest thing. Take yourself back to your roots and trust them, they once helped you grow into the person you are now. Don’t ever forget, Halifax Yoga is where growth happens, and trust me you never stop growing.
Jennifer Toole
www.thebankofjennifer.com
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