Yoga works. Yoga makes you weird.
It works, if you work it. Like any program, if you show up everyday ready to grow, it will work. Yoga isn’t about stretching. It’s not fitness. It’s a methodology to balance the body and mind. Through movement and stillness, we learn about ourselves. I had a teacher once who
said, “You don’t know a pose until you want to get out of it.” There are lessons in the asanas, or poses. There are lessons in stillness and meditation. Yoga offers this tool kit to those who are willing to work it. It will work, if you work it.
I’m painfully aware how hippy dippy the above stuff sounds. It sounds like something you’d hear at Burning Man or in a vegan cupcakery. I get it. But it’s all true-ish.
While going through my first few years learning about yoga, I continued to have the realization that most people don’t live this way. Most people don’t spend time in silence setting their intention, and they don’t typically lay quietly on the ground in a room of people they barely know. Those who do those things can come across as strange or abnormal. Knowing that yoga makes you weird to the outside world and knowing that it actually works to bring balance to life, I feel a responsibility to shed some of the hokiness from yoga and let people know that it is something we could all benefit from.