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Healing My Body, Mind & Spirit Through Yoga
People who don't know me well are often surprised to learn that I have spent a fair amount of my life chasing the adrenaline rush. As a kid I got it mostly through sports. From age 6 to 26 I played both hockey and baseball. In my mid 20's I was playing baseball in the amateur leagues around New England and chasing the dream of being a professional athlete. I ended up damaging my shoulder pitching in the rain on a hot Florida evening in the Chicago Cubs camp. I felt something give and knew it was not "good". After moving on from team sports, I began to seek the ol' adrenaline rush in other forms. I began teaching and working at the local climbing gym in Santa Monica. Soon enough I was hooked on the climbing rush and any other adventure sport I came across. Eventually I was traveling and climbing from Mt FuJi, to helping coordinate the Eco-challenge in Borneo. By "helping coordinate", I pretty much mean I nearly gave my life to a foolish race in the form of catching Leptospirosis in a bat cave, and having to be medevaced out. Once I recovered, I decided to take it easy and began mountain unicycling. The concept is simple, one wheel, you, and the trail. This was good for about a year, till I managed to launch myself off a cliff on a rainy day in the Santa Monica Mountains. One torn ACL later, and here I am.
The only reason I'm here to tell you this is the whole time I kept wrecking myself, I would simply recover on my mat. Turns out the only thing I did not compete in, and destroy my body with, was yoga. I am sure if they offered yoga classes where you were perched up on some precarious cliff, I would have gone right back to pushing the envelope, but instead, I somehow found the whole practice a peaceful journey in, healing my body, mind, and spirit. So with this painful education, I try to teach a class designed to help you heal. I feel that if yoga was able to help me recover from numerous significant injuries after everything I put my body through, the practice had to be safe, sane, and shared. My belief is that if the conscious practice was able to help me heal the potential is there for anyone to heal. I created this class with the hope that anyone that takes it will clearly see that a peaceful, mindful, non-attached practice, filled with compassion has the ability to not only heal the body, but also soothe the soul.
Published January 19, 2012 at 7:40 AM
