A Yogi

I AM a Yogi. The words popped up in my head, one day last week, and then repeatedly rang in my ears like a earworm, a melody that you cannot get out of your head. I don’t now whether to call it intuition or synchronicity. I had been having a mental block with my A-Z letter this time and here it came to me, quite out of the blue: Y for Yogi. It was almost like an inner calling.

Let me go back in time and try to explain maybe how it might have come about.

Last year, I had participated in a healthy lifestyle programme. (My blog on Health addresses some of my concerns.) The diet part of it was challenging but I had risen up to it successfully. It was the exercise element that had been insurmountable for me. By the end of the year, we were supposed to have chosen one activity in particular, on which to focus on and master. It could be athletics, walking, cycling or yoga. But the main point behind it was for you to take on that identity of a walker, athlete, cyclist or yogi. I definitely didn’t see myself as a walker, athlete or a cyclist as I felt my knees and my joints didn’t support me. Every time I exercised or just walked,I felt discouraged as I would put something out of joint. It had been like that for a while. Sometimes even whilst doing yoga. So even though yoga was the most likely fit for me, at that time, I couldn’t even imagine being a yogi. The test had been to do 108 Suryanamaskars (the Sun Salutation sequence) in a day…and I was still doing them on a chair. Thus my disillusionment.

My relationship with yoga has been a long and rocky one. I must have taken it up some eons ago most probably because I was always into alternative options and at that time yoga had still not really come into its own. Yoga’s benefits are well-known now and I found it gentle and relaxing. However, my Achilles’ heel being inconsistency for a long time (something which I am now working on), I did it for a while and then there would be long lapses. I would go back to it when I had issues and then once better, my yoga mat would fall by the wayside again. Sometimes, I feel if I had practised it religiously all those years not only would I have been a yogi by now but I might not have so many health issues!

But regrets are futile. By nature, I am Young-at-heart and I do believe it is never too late and there is only today, the here and now.

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” George Eliot

There are so many people out there doing great things in their eighties and even nineties. They are an inspiration for me and give me hope that I can still become a full-fledged Yogi.

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