Me, Meditation and Yoga

Yoga and meditation, the 2 most popular exercises that every magazine, book, Youtube channel and platform related to mental health and improvement will recommend you.

Think about it, how many times have you been told to try it?

In a previous post, I was asked about my experience with meditation and, due to my lack of consistency, my point of view was too blurred to make a real conclusion. But I have been wanting to improve my “meditation skills” and make it a part of my life for a long time now. 

Also, the world seems to be telling me to try it again. Every time I open Medium I find some articles with several reasons about why we should meditate. When I read about sleeping quality, words like meditation or yoga always appear in the first paragraph. And also now, my local gym is advertising a new Yoga schedule!

But, how was my short experience really? Let’s say it was pretty… coincidental. Shutting down my mind is not an easy job, so I decided that the best way to start with meditation would be downloading some meditation Apps on my phone. Those Apps are very complete. They guide you and give you instructions on what to do and how to guide your thoughts. They come with recordings where you can select if you want to listen to a man’s or a woman’s voice and also choose the length you want that recording to last.

After testing a few of those applications, only one of them had a selection of effective recordings that truly had a positive effect on my mind.

Then again, I wasn’t consistent enough.

My second experience was with Hot Yoga. A few months ago, there was a gym in my area offering 5 days of “Hot Yoga” for a very discounted price. Given the cheap price and the fact that my curiosity about the exercise was blooming, I decided to give it a shot.

I felt extremely positive about this experience because, unlike traditional yoga classes, this one was going to be taught inside a very hot room, like a sauna. The experience itself sounded amazing. I mean, I am someone that goes to the gym thinking about finishing my exercises so I can jump inside the steam room until I sweat my soul out. Doing Yoga in a hot room simply sounded extra relaxing.

The first class went great, it was a mixture of breathing and stretching muscles carefully. Not too harsh, not too boring either. I expected to sit on a pillow and listen to my breath for 45 minutes, but far from that, the class was more focused on improving our elasticity whilst focusing on your breathing rhythm.

All under 90 degrees F. When I left, I felt like I was born again. The class was at night time. However, after leaving the gym, I felt ready to start the day all over again. I also felt more positive and my sleep quality that night was excellent.

The second time I attended, we were greeted by a different teacher. She was a very young instructor. Little did I know how different a yoga lesson could be from one trainer to another. I have never felt my skull was going to COLLAPSE as hard as that day.

The body poses weren’t too hard to balance at the beginning, but they started becoming gradually more and more complicated. In other words, I am not extremely elastic and this thing was getting painful.

I remember this instructor was very attentive, helping people in the class achieve the “perfect angle”. After explaining the posture, she would walk around the dark room and appear from behind the attendants that were struggling in order to help them. I thought that was very professional and nice of her… until she came from behind me and sweetly whispered to me “Just a bit more“, then grabbed my right ankle (which was already folded backwards), and stretched it, very strongly, like she wanted my foot to touch my left shoulder from behind!

I don’t remember the name of the pose, but it’s something similar to this one…

Yes, I felt reborn again that day. No, it wasn’t worth the anxiety of feeling my femur separating from my pelvis.

And this closes my experience with Meditation and Yoga. Let me know if your experience was as clumsy as mine. As I mentioned, the stars seem to be aligned for me to try it again.

This time, for the sake of my body’s preservation, I will do it on my own. I want to complete the 30 days Yoga with Adriene. I like her style and have tried her techniques with a couple of her videos before.

As always, will let you know the results. How do you practise Yoga and meditation? Is there any Youtube channel/book you follow?