Weekend 1: Survived! and We are Nothing!

I survived the first weekend!  Barely.  I am so sore.  Kind of everywhere, but it is localized in a few places: my shoulder, calves, core.  I wish I had a giant body-sized heating pad to use.  Hopefully it will subside after a couple of days.  Saturday was pretty great and really fun and then the tiredness and soreness started to hit Sunday.  I definitely felt a lot less focused due to the soreness and such the second day.  And now today it's just all catching up on me.  I think I'll live, though.

One thing I learned this weekend was how much longer I've been practicing and how much more reading I've already done on this than a lot of the other participants.  I'm definitely trying to not let myself judge - as people have pointed out, well, this is why you go to yoga teacher training, to learn this stuff.  And I have to remember that I'm sure I didn't know all this stuff after only 3 or 4 years of practice.  Anyway, this has led to me sometimes getting over-involved in some of the conversations so I'm trying to balance that with this!  I will just jot down notes while in class and ramble on here so that you, dear reader, can be privy to my all my glorious (or gloriously dumb) insights!  Are't you lucky?  (You know, or you can just stop reading/skip ahead at any time, your call.)

So obviously our first discussion was What is yoga?  The term yoga come from "to yoke" or unite, or union.  So I liked what one person in the class pointed out that it is different from religion because religion is exclusive whereas yoga is inclusive, seeking to create union.  I think that though religion doesn't really seek to exclude people, that is, after all, the end product.  But this seeking to create union and harmony with everything is very evident in Buddhism as well.  The goal in Buddhist meditation is to remove the boundaries of the self to understand that you are one with everything.  So one way this was explained to me in undergrad was that everything is made up of atoms.  Everything.  Really we are all the same stuff.  And going further, the vast majority of any atom is empty space, really.  What is empty space?  Empty space is nothing.  So we are made up of nothing.  As is this laptop I'm typing on and this couch I'm sitting on and that pizza I just ate...and even you!  You are made up of nothing!  How cool is that?  So clearly were are all the same, because we are all nothing.  All of us.  And even your dog and that squirrel and everything.  Everything is nothing.  Sometimes we just need yoga to remind us.

I think I'll leave my ramblings at that for now, but there is more to come.  Stay tuned!