Question

I love my yoga, so why does it make me sad? Should it make me happy? Help!

Answer

It can be useful to get things moving that are trapped and immovable. This goes equally for bodies and minds, and includes our emotions. For some people, practicing yoga can give that first release for an often-surprising rush of feeling.

These unlocked feelings might travel alongside specific memories, or they might be more generalized. They may simply feel like sadness. The release can be challenging. But even sadness, as it moves from unconscious to conscious, can feel like a comforting, safe bubble.

Comforting and safe can be a good thing. It can also become a next stop for trapped and immovable. This is a big one for some yoga-goers: getting stuck in the sad bubble.

Going from stuck to movable – in your body and your feeling – is great! Releasing old sadness can feel particularly intoxicating. But, attaching to that feeling of release might just send you back to something familiar: new place, same stuck. Hitting the repeat button in your yoga, and in your life, is sometimes not so useful. It can be a trap lasts a very long time.

Luckily, we create our own bubbles, so we get to create what we want. We can make them happy or sad, grow them and burst them. We can even walk outside them and have a look.

This is where the why and how of our yoga becomes important. For most of us, our why has a lot in common. We’re here to explore, discover, and grow. We’re here to create capable, helpful lives. We’re here to be happy and have fun. We’re probably not here to get stuck in any ruts, or hit the same button over and over.

Once we pick our why, then we can design our own how. If we’re here not to get stuck but to move in our lives, then we get to do exactly this in our yoga.

Move, feel, respond to how you feel. Keep moving, keep responding, keep growing.

Rather than get stuck in the same pose every day, move and explore. Rather than wait for someone else to tell you what you should feel or how you can move, discover your own way. Create your own bubbles, look around, break your own bubbles.

Yoga can give you something great in you every day. You could settle in to that one thing. Or you could keep moving, discovering new things, growing. It’s all in how you practice.

Your yoga is up to you. Your life is up to you. Have fun with it!

-Mike

About Strala Yoga Training

Strala combines the movement and healing wisdom of tai chi with the form vocabularies of yoga, tai chi, qigong, and Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine, to help people release stress, move easily through challenge, and live radiantly inspiring lives.

It begins with a mindset, that says our best way to get where we’re going is to feel good along the way. It also works miracles for whole health, helping us to find ease in our bodies and minds, and create the right conditions both for healing and optimal performance.

In our Strala Yoga Training Courses, you learn to shape your destiny on every level that counts, from your psychology, chemistry and neurology, to your chromosomes and even gene expression. The unique set of skills you develop – for connecting with yourself and others, unblocking your energy, healing what needs healing and accomplishing challenge with ease – uncovers your ability to create the life you want, and be an inspiring leader to the people around you.

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