The Transformative Power of Yoga
An Ode to 30 Years of Yoga (and Its Surprising Benefits)
I have been practicing yoga for 30 years. I began when I was swimming on a U.S. Masters swim team (a team comprised of adults 18 and older). I was logging lots of yardage in the pool (10,000-15,000 yards a week), mostly freestyle and some backstroke. As much as I like swimming, that much repetitive movement combined with less weight bearing in the water caused imbalances in my body. The symptoms were a severely stiff lower back and continuously sore shoulders and neck. Those muscles would loosen up with movement but gradually became tighter and more uncomfortable over time.
My First Yoga Session Was an Eye-Opener
A friend introduced me to Nikki Costello, then a young yoga teacher (see the recent picture of us, above). Our first session was at my home. We concentrated on my legs and body, doing strength and balance poses like triangle pose (Trikonasana) and warrior pose (Virabhadrasana). We also focused on bilateral twists and breathing exercises. At the time I wasn’t interested in the “inner” practice of yoga; I just wanted relief from my stiffness. If the pose didn’t directly affect where I was feeling stiff, I wondered how it could be doing me any good. I was completely unaware of all the complementary interaction and imbalances that my body’s muscles, joints, and inner organs were contributing to my “unrelated” stiff back, shoulders, and neck.
The poses were hard. Without realizing it, by mainly swimming for exercise, I had allowed my load-bearing leg strength to weaken to an extraordinary degree. “Feeling the burn” on my legs was an understatement. Warrior pose, for instance, is a straight-out lunge that I had to hold for 10 long breaths, then change sides, then repeat 3 or 4 times. In addition, Nikki told me to rotate my upper legs and my upper arms in ways that felt completely unnatural. I eventually found out that these rotations allowed my hips and shoulders to open in all-new ways.
I remember taking the subway afterward. When I sat down my legs shook so uncontrollably that I had to stand up to stop them, even though they were wobbly! It was a revelation about the strength and attention needed to practice yoga well. Over time, the burn and discomfort began to lessen, and I could concentrate on my breathing as I held the poses longer. A new, unforeseen benefit of that phase was an enhanced sense of “inner space” in my body and mind.
The other thing I remember, which has stayed with me and continues to deepen to this day, is the micro-sensitivity to different parts of my body as I did the poses. All yoga disciplines concentrate on this inner awareness, but the Iyengar variations (named for B.K.S Iyengar) that Nikki practices are particularly focused on alignment. She was always making small adjustments to my poses, telling me to shift something this way or rotate a body part that way. This inner awareness was just being awakened in me back then. It has since become a mainstay of my health practice, a kind of self-diagnostic tool that helps me regularly assess strength, flexibility, or inflammation and watch for any indications of problems.
My Fully Integrated Whole-Body
Over time, I came to understand that yoga treats the entire body as one dynamic, interactive organism, something modern medicine, with its specialization in different parts of the body, does not. Every pose is a “whole-body pose,” not an exercise that narrowly focuses on a specific body part. A good yoga instructor will teach you to work on and be aware of breathing, effort, and relaxation all at the same time. It is truly an integrated mind/body workout.
As I’ve stressed in other posts (LINK to Session with Graham), moving your whole body in accordance with how it evolved and how it is built is essential to our physical health. Isolated movement in front of a mirror is not useful in terms of our overall physical health and certainly isn’t integrated. Yoga elevates the mind/body integration to a new level. It is the product of 2,500 years of mind/body wisdom, practiced by millions of people around the world.
I had the privilege of catching up with Nikki when she stayed with me on one of her recent teaching trips to New York. In a class of hers I attended she asked us to find the alignment in the pose we were doing to make the pose effortless, as if the universe, “the river inside us” was how she described it, was supporting us. With that dynamic and those sensations inside of me, I was able to hold that pose and other poses much longer than I usually can. This is ultimately how yoga is meant to be practiced. It can be so much more than just muscles and joints.
A Pathway to God?
B.K.S. Iyengar (who lived to 95 in perfect health), once wrote that the purpose of yoga is to find God within yourself. “The yogi does not look heavenward for he knows that He is within. He feels the kingdom of God within and without and knows that heaven lies in himself.” If you take the view that I do—that the universe has been working at creating us and our amazing bodies for billions of years and the life force within us that keeps us alive is the wonder and miracle we call God—then this statement is certainly true. Aligning yourself with this universal power is one of the many surprising benefits of practicing yoga.
