By Omar B.
There is something in my house I am scared of. It’s a totally normal item. It’s a game actually, my kids play it all the time. I used to play it, and I really liked it, especially because the kids found it so fun. But over the last few years, I’ve liked it less and less, and eventually I became literally afraid of it. I’m talking about our game of Twister.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Twister is a game where you and some friends are told to bend yourselves into ridiculous positions. If someone falls down, they are out of the game. Usually when someone falls down, everyone else falls with them, and it’s hilarious. But not for me. Recently, as I’ve lost my fitness, I’ve just become completely incapable of bending at all. The game is, quite simply, embarrassing for me.
So, I told a friend of mine that I wanted to fix this, that I wanted to get more in shape, and they recommended learning yoga. Honestly, I was a little unsure at first. I’ve done stretching exercises before, not regularly but sometimes, and they never helped me that much. But my friend told me to try yoga for a full month before giving up. So I did, and now I cannot recommend it highly enough.
One of the things that’s great about yoga is that literally anyone can start it. Trust me, I am not a fit person at the moment. There are no yoga poses that I can do completely right. Most of them, I can’t do at all. But I can try to do all of them, and that’s enough.
You see, yoga is all about stretching. You find out what’s the maximum you can do right now, and you try to go beyond that. Just trying (and trying over and over again) means that next time, you will be able to go a little further. Over time, I’ve noticed I’m becoming a little more flexible, and things that were tough are not so hard anymore.
But yoga has improved more than my flexibility. This surprised me, but yoga is actually really relaxing. Yes, exercise that’s relaxing. Sounds strange, but it’s true. Apparently, yoga gets your body rhythms into a nice order, so that internally everything feels a little bit more balanced. This has really helped my sense of calm during my day, which is really nice.
The most important thing here is sticking with it. Yoga, like any kind of self-improvement journey, gives you more benefits the longer you stick with it, and not many benefits if you only do it now and then. Because I had to do it for a full month before I could give up, I actually started to see that those benefits would slowly enter my life if I kept going. Now that I’m doing it continuously, I’m getting the rewards.
I plan on sticking with this for a long time. I know that the more I do it, the bigger the rewards will be for my physical and psychological health. As a parting thought, what is the biggest thing I’ve learned from yoga, and something I want to apply to the rest of my life? Doing something helpful sometimes doesn’t help much, but doing something helpful continuously helps more and more each day.
