Path of Yoga
From a young age I was always interested in cultures and religions. As a teen I started the search for answers, hungry for knowledge I went to the Catholic church, the Christian church, the Hindu temple, the Sikh Gurdwara, the Buddhist temple, the Muslim mosque, the Jewish synagogue, and I realized that religions are like languages to communicate with the spiritual realm. They may look different and some may argue which languages sound better or are more important than others. But at the core of them, one word kept resonating, love.
Love for oneself, for people, for nature, for animals, for earth, for our families, friends, strangers in the street, the entire existence.
For years I followed the path of academics, and found my value and self worth through grades, honors, diplomas. Soon academia seemed contradictory, I saw how my mother with a unfinished elementary education was more humane and kind than some of my colleagues/professors with phds. I felt that there was more, there had to be more answers.
I took my first yoga class in 2014 and fell in love with the practice. I sensed there was a deeper purpose, more than the physical realm. I attended constantly and I started noticing immediate changes, I used to struggle with insomnia and after doing yoga I was falling asleep within seconds of my head feeling the pillow. It became a therapy. It was an outburst of accumulated energy throughout the day.
Facing death is what made me question if all these years I had invested time outside of myself to distract my inner search. One day I get a call from a paramedic saying my parents had been in a terrible car accident, while being in the hospital with despair and totally broken, I looked outside the window and I saw a pigeon, the pigeon was simply existing, for sure not worrying about housing, food, academic achievements, success, money, the future, sickness, death. I envied the pigeon and I felt very small next to him/her.
Had that pigeon figured out the true authentic prupose of life? To exist, to be, to live. As simple as that.
After getting a job teaching at Universities and at the Mexican Air Force, I was still hungry for knowledge, beyond what the classroom could offer. I stepped into the world. I travelled around the world and felt very tiny, and realized that life was so much immense and felt that the education I had received was not enough to comprehend what I was seeing in the world.
I did a 200 hour yoga teachers’ training from Shvasa from which I learned from teachers from all over India. For the first time in my yoga practice I had attended yoga classes from instructors from the motherland, I learned about the 7 limbs of yoga and for the first time learned about asanas being only a fraction of what yoga truly is.
One thing to consider is that when yoga was born in India 10 000 years ago, it was by far the richest region of the world. When people had everything, that’s when yoga emerged, what else? What else is there, if one has all of the material world needs covered and beyond? Why is there still emptiness? After the search on the outside is over, then comes the most challenging path, but also the one that was the closest: the inner search.
