from the archives: I found this writing in a journal from December 2016.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is the way in which yoga can be a form of communication. When I started my yoga teacher training nearly a year ago I had no idea how transformative the experience would be. On the first night of the training I was sitting in a room with 35 other people who were strangers at the time and we were told to share with the room what yoga meant to us, in one word. This was such a challenging and multifaceted question to answer. I listened to many people around the circle share and then it was my turn. I felt like it was one of those situations where thinking about it too much just wouldn’t work, so I blurted the first thing that came to my mind, “communication”. At the time I had no explanation for why I would say something like that. I don’t even think that I consciously knew what it meant, but it’s what I said and I thought about it throughout the entire teacher training.
My definition of communication as it relates to yoga is still a work in progress and I believe will always be evolving as I deepen my practice and study, however, after the training I was able to better understand why I said communication that first night. There were three major things that I identified throughout the training that defined communication for me as it relates to yoga. Yoga is a way to value the darkest and lighted parts of ourselves and bring harmony to them, it is a way to spread ideas with others, and it gives us a way to accept others and ourselves as precious beings. In some abstract way, each of those require communication.
In the dictionary communication is defined as, “the imparting or exchanging of information or news.” I read this now and it all makes sense.
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