I want to be a real boy. That’s what I think to myself at a meditation retreat beginning 3 months of travelling. I'm the youngest person there and the only one who has to sit on a chair. Everyone else is sat Buddha-like on the floor, while I tower over them and stick out like a sore thumb, with a sore back. Real boys can sit on the floor. Pinocchio probably could too.
I’ve started referring to my 52kg girlfriend as my mule because she has to carry our shared backpack everywhere as it gives me back pain. I am a hefty 82 kgs…the heaviest I have ever been. I can’t do many of the CrossFit movements I have to teach due to a shoulder injury, I can’t go on hikes while travelling because of plantar fasciitis, I can’t play football because of Achilles tendonitis. And these are just the current issues. I could add more if I did as much sport as I would like to.
I am 30 years old and have more injuries than most 70 year olds. My physiotherapist has become one of my best friends from all my appointments. My girlfriend is a Pilates teacher and my house is filled with foam rollers, lacrosse balls, mobility stars, peptides, infrared lamps and other modern technologies for healing. Yet, the one thing I have refused to do may be the oldest. Yoga.
I coach people on transforming themselves and I am going to rate yoga’s potential to transform you:
Lesson Number 1 - Routines make things easier
For the next few months I will have limited access to a gym. Now is the time to get healthy. And for me, health simply means ‘pain free’. So off I go on a journey within a journey, of 30 days of yoga…mostly in hostel bedrooms. I won’t be able to get to a class most of the time so I am just going to do 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ on Youtube. These free videos consist of 15-30 minute beginners routines. I read good reviews of her videos and didn’t want to pay for a subscription to a platform I could very well have given up on after a few days. I have dabbled with a handful of yoga classes before but never enjoyed them and never went consistently.
So here is Lesson Number 1 – It is much easier to do something every day than randomly throughout the week. When you put something in your routine every day it becomes…routine. And guess what, it worked. Spoiler alert…I did 30 days of yoga in a row.
Lesson Number 2 – Nothing worth having comes easily.
Yoga is really hard for me. Like, way, totally harder than any CrossFit WOD. Not because of a physical weakness but a mental one. In yoga, you have time to think about how hard it is and how much easier it would be to give up.
Lesson Number 2 - Yoga is a great reminder to me, a child of Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now’ generation, that nothing worth having comes easily. The harder something is, the more rewarding it becomes. In this case I have the physical benefits of being stretchier from yoga plus the mental reward of knowing that I stuck to something that was extremely hard.
Lesson Number 3 – Do what you need to do, not what you want to do.
The first few days of the practice go well but on day ten I get the chance to go to a group class in Saigon. This is when I discover what yoga is supposed to look like…tiny Vietnamese ladies doing the most advanced contortionism I have ever seen, while I slosh sweat all over my mat and stumble on the simplest of balances. This is the reminder of why I hate yoga… because I am sh*t at it. Nobody likes doing things they are bad at, do they?
The lesson… Train your weaknesses, not your strengths. Exercisers seem to fit into one of these three categories:
1. People who are already big and strong lifting weights.
2. Skinny people with good stamina repeatedly doing long distance cardio.
3. Flexible people becoming more flexible by doing yoga.
Nobody is really doing themselves any favours, they are simply massaging their egos.
Lesson Number 4 – Get out of your head and into the present
I am a victim of the Calvinist idea of time being limited and running out. (You probably are too btw). I am constantly looking at my watch. I love productivity and ‘getting stuff done’. I’m using a Pomodoro timer right now to measure my work in blocks of 25 minutes.
Towards the end of my thirty days I went to a yoga and Reiki retreat in Cambodia. Every morning we would have a ninety-minute yoga class. (Three times the length of my longest YouTube video!) The first few days were torturous. Although the moves were fine, I got bored a lot and my eyes wandered to the clock. The only thing that could make time go faster was not thinking about time. Every occasion that I thought about the time would be a reminder that I was not being present and an opportunity to come back to the breath and the present. This is essentially what mindfulness meditation is.
Lesson Number 4 - When you’re trying to escape a situation, stop thinking about it, get out of your head and into the present moment. Lesson Number 4 is basically 236 pages of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ condensed into one sentence. Cash Back!
Lesson Number 5 – Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone’s Chapter 18
I have a man-bun and am guilty of the worst kind of crime, looking like a yogi but not actually doing yoga. So, when the teacher sees how bad I am at yoga I feel bad about myself. When I look around and see proper yogis doing proper yoga I feel bad about myself. I sweat a lot and sometimes when I roll up from lying on my back the suction from the mat makes a fart noise, so I feel bad about myself.
Lesson Number 5* - Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 18. I am new to yoga and other people in the class could have been doing it for 20 years. Even better….. Don’t compare yourself to others at all. There will always be opportunities for you to beat yourself up if that’s what you’re in to. Or you can just be present on a yoga mat, doing what you’re doing, not thinking about anything else. Self-flagellation is an easy escape from accepting who you are and avoiding any criticism from anyone else.
Lesson Number 6 – Sticking to things is good
Flash forward to Day 30 and… Yoga works. Huzzah! My plantar fasciitis and achilles tendonitis are gone! I can touch my toes. I can sit cross legged as long as my back is supported. I can carry a backpack. I will continue to do yoga for the next 3 months and go down to 72 kgs.
Lesson number 6* Sticking to things is good. Obvious, I know. But simply sticking to something, anything, gives you a sense of achievement. Giving up gives you short term relief but in the long run you may face guilt. I felt a great deal of satisfaction just because I did something I set out to do. When people would suggest yoga to me in the past I would fend them off as I had done the odd class here and there. But for me to really understand the benefits of it, I had to do it for 30 days consistently, and unsurprisingly, I got a huge amount out of it.
Consistency matters. The same principle applies to going to the gym, dieting, spiritual/therapeutic practices. If you do one 10k run, if you eat one Buddha bowl, if you go to one therapy session or do 10 minutes of meditation, you will not notice the benefits. Or even if you do a week of eating clean, a month of meditation, a year of Zumba, as soon as you stop, the tangible benefits fade. Stick with it. Make it a habit.
Lesson Number 7 – “80% of anything in life is just showing up.”
Resilience is the most important of traits to cultivate. This is Tony Robbins’ favourite attribute. If you have resilience you can do anything. While travelling I faced many minor obstacles to getting the yoga done and ‘showing up’. I didn’t have a mat, we were staying in hostels without enough floor space, it was so humid that my sweat would drench the mat making it impossible to hold a position, I didn't have yoga blocks, blah blah blah…. But somehow, I cultivated enough resilience to do this and the more I thought about this, the more resilience I found.
As Woody Allen once said, “80% of anything in life is just showing up”. I had crap days as well as good days of yoga. When I just got on the matt, and didn’t worry about how well I was going to do yoga, things were fine. Things got easier. I just got out of my head and got on with it. Sometimes its okay just to go easy on yourself.
So here is the final score for yoga and how much I think it can help people transform their lives.
