The experiences you have doing yoga can be very intense: you are holding dog pose for 10 minutes and your muscles are shaking and you want to quit. When the instructor says, Rest, you are so grateful.
Another experience you will have is you come into yoga class hungry, stressed out, and worried. You lay down and are instantly in touch with how nervous you are and your racing mind.
This is why you do yoga.
Modern life is very intense: we want to do a lot of things, make a lot of money, travel everywhere we see on our social media, explore natural places. Because of this you want to seek out more stimulation to calm down so you watch TV, drink martinis, or jump off of cliffs to paraglide like an eagle.
Yes.
I’ve been there, and each time I encounter intensity, I have to find a way to calm down that doesn’t hurt me or the people I love.
It’s taken me many, many years of yoga breathing, poses, and meditations to get to a place where when I am in this excited state (the Chinese have a word for this called “heavy kungchi”) how to calm down.
It is not bad to be excited, and it is good to know how to calm down after safely.
It’s sort of like parachuting: it is exciting to jump out of a plane and it is good to land.
This is AI generated image of a story my husband once told me. He was a parachutist. He never landed on a cow, he only heard somebody did it by accident. Don’t try this on purpose. The cow won’t like it.
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