Old and New

This year, looking for a suitable yoga practice due to an injury, I was introduced by lovely Josie Sykes to Vinyasa Krama. A gentle breath-led practice where you let go of any alignment of modern yoga and follow exclusively you breath, learning how to be strong and receptive at the same time.

This practice helped me so much during this year that, after class this morning, which was my last class with Josie this year, I went to her and thanked her for all her support during the year. After a hug, she thanked me for my help as a Karma Yogi for her classes and also mentioned how important it is to look back into the past year and acknowledge how it was and to be grateful for it.

After wishing her Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, I left the studio thinking of what she said about looking back to the past year and I realised that, at this time of the year, we tend to look forward to the new year, thinking about new beginnings, new projects, new plans and wishes, which is wonderful, but we usually forget about what we went through and accomplished during the year that is ending, we forget to be grateful for it.

Having noticed that, I started thinking about what I was grateful for in 2018. And even though it was a tough year, I realised I was smiling.

I'm grateful for having many amazing people and a lot of love around me, close by or on the other side of the Atlantic - love knows no boundaries, right? Also grateful for this :)

I'm grateful for being able to look around and see beauty in the most trivial daily things, like the colours on the autumn trees, the sunrise or a smile of a child on my way to work.

I'm grateful for the days I was able to practice and for the ones I wasn't and I'm grateful for learning to be ok with it. I'm grateful for learning to take it easier on myself.

I acknowledged that I'm grateful not only for the good things that happened to me, but also for the things that I would categorize as "bad" ones. It's hard to let go of those labels, but if a bad thing taught you something good, labelling it as "bad" no longer makes sense.

So, I'm grateful for the difficulties I faced in 2018. They allowed me to grow as a person and as a teacher. They took me to the Vinyasa Krama practice and my perception of the relationship with myself and the world changed. Those same obstacles allowed me to meet and make friends with wonderful people. They turned me into a stronger, but more patient and resilient person.

I’m grateful for coming across this beautiful piece, which I love reading during my classes and also to myself:

"Remember, Yoga practice is like an obstacle race; many obstructions are purposely put on the way for us to pass through. They are there to make us understand and express our own capacities. We all have that strength, but we don't seem to know it. We seem to need to be challenged and tested in order to understand our own capacities. In fact, that is the natural law. If a river just flows easily, the water in the river does not express its power. But once you put an obstacle to the flow by constructing a dam, then you can see it's strength in the form of tremendous electrical power."

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Translation and commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda

In short, I'm grateful for each day and each obstacle of 2018. It all led me to where and who I am now, strong and receptive to show all my power in 2019.