11 Nov Crying on my yoga mat

I’m sitting crossed legged in sukhasana and all of a sudden I realise I’m about to start crying on my yoga mat.  I move into child’s pose and the sniffles come. I move back into down faced dog and the kind of muffled gulps of what will be crying start.

Lucky my head was down that’s all that I can say.

Not that it scares me. It’s happened twice before in yoga class over the last ten years.

It happens when all the things you worry about build up, mix in together and get too much.

Being a worrier means worrying about a lot of things and nothing in particular. I worry about worrying too much. Even more annoying to me, I worry about things that haven’t even happened yet. So if I were to answer today’s NaBloPoMo prompt, I would permanently get rid of worrying about things that haven’t happened.

Lucky there’s yoga.

Instead of worrying about BlogHer 2020, yoga forces you to worry about the breath you’re taking right here, right now. This moment in time where you are fine.  This helps heaps when you’re crying on your yoga mat and you’re not quite sure how to get back on track and your mind starts having this conversation:

“You’ve got no tissue you’re crying and you’re in a room with ten other people, great, what are you going to do now?”

Lucky my hoody is green, it was very useful.

“Okay, good you’ve got that under control but you’re kind of a sniffling, wet eyed mess. What to do?”

“Walk to the back of the room and compose yourself in the toilet?”

“That won’t work, you’ll have to walk past those ten other people and then they will wonder why you’ve been crying.

“Keep moving. The crying will stop.”

And it does. You move through into upward facing dog and then your breath is back and your mind is following.

So what is it about yoga that gets you back on track? Back in the moment, stops you from worrying?

Yoga’s all about the breath. Get control of the breath, and the mind will follow and calm will reign. When the mind calms down, you’ll be able to concentrate on what’s happening to you right here and right now. Throw in some asanas (yoga moves) and hey presto, you’re looking like one calm cookie.

Well not really.

It won’t happen overnight but the more you get on your mat and direct your breath, the calmer your mind will become and the more your world will come into focus. Then you won’t sorry so much that you’ve been crying on your yoga mat.