WHY YOGA? by Lisa (Bear) Hamil
" Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self" -- Bhagavad Gita
Yoga had always been just another exercise class. The class I went to so the voices in my head would stop reminding me that I never stretch enough after my "real workouts". The sweaty ones designed to keep me thin enough to fit in. The workouts I could brag about to family and friends so that they knew that I was still taking care of myself, despite being insanely drunk the last time they saw me. To prove, to myself and others, that I was still a functioning and healthy individual, not an alcoholic. I understood that exercise was important to my health, but towards the end of my addiction it became something I only talked about; I was too sick to participate. It took sobriety, and literally not being able to get out of bed in the morning, to bring me back to physical movement. I tried the sweaty workouts again but was too depleted to really participate and then stopped attending. This only served to make me more frustrated and feel that perhaps sobriety wasn't for me after all. I was too far gone. Ironically, it is the "stretching" class that helped me the most in the end and in ways I could never have predicted.
When I started my yoga training, I expected to learn about the postures, how to sequence them, and I wanted to understand how gentle physical movement could keep me in shape. I wanted core strength and more of the flexibility that I knew was missing. Training, however, did not start with how to do a down dog. It started with why are you here in the first place? Not just in this class, but here, on this planet, in this life? And what do you want from it? I started drinking when I was 13 and I did not stop until I was 59. These are questions that I had been asking myself during my entire journey thus far. And, in the beginning, I saw yoga teacher training as just another class in a long string of classes, books, seminars, psychotherapists, and a million other methods I had participated in to try and find those answers. To find myself. “Good luck!”, I thought and initially I wondered if I would even stick it out. Those questions had haunted me, and I was tired of asking, but finding no answers.
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