Yoga and Resilience

‘The journey of my life has been a flimsy boat across storm-tossed seas’’

Michelangelo

Resilience is defined as a capacity to withstand stress and catastrophic encounters.

It is the ability to steer the flimsy boat of one’s life across the storm-tossed sea which occasionally but inevitably confront us.

It is the mental, emotional and physical resistance to stress and towards those unwanted, unexpected, uncomfortable and painful events, most of the time happening without and beyond our control.

Stress and pain, it is impossible to avoid them! Right?

Similarly to cold, hunger, joy, happiness, they are inevitable and a part of this wonderful but mundane existence.

Western life style, chasing our career and dreams does contribute to stress increase and its side effects but the good news is that there are remedies to fight with it. There is yoga!

Many of us come to yoga for all sort of reasons; curiosity, fitness level, happy, skinny, joyful friend who convinced us to try, low self-esteem, some sort of physical or mental weakness or injury- anything and everything really, including stress, insomnia, anything in our body and mind and calls for action, for a change.

Good! Yoga is clinically proved to help with all of those; to combat stress, boost self-esteem, improve your mental and physical well being and project the right image of our life and its values.

It does work, I promise and swear by it but just as resilience it is a journey. It is a process of working through your emotions, recognising them and what causes them.

Resilience, just like yoga is not something you are born with. You are not born with the ability to practice headstand and meditate for 60 minutes straight without prior understanding of it and practice of it. In fact the practice towards it is the art of resilience itself, the art of self-ego recognition and self-weakness demotivation. This demotivation comes in the form on the internal and external factors: judgement, jealousy and such but consistence and finding meaning in it will eventually bring some fruitful results.

What’d ya say? I say keep your yoga practice up and without any judgement and observe the changes and transitions in your off mat life: how you sleep and think? What you choose to eat and how you work and interact with the others? How you perceive yourself?  Are you in love with your life’?

Find your why so you could put up with any what or how!