I Thought I Was Doing Yoga Until I Did it … 6 Years in.

I was doing Yoga for 6 years, every morning. Greeting the sun, going through a flow of asanas and breathing all the way through. I thought I was killing it since I got much better and more flexible. I had no idea that the thought of getting better alone, was the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish in doing Yoga. Honestly, I had no idea WHAT I was doing. I was just following teachers with my movements. Disciplined like I was used to from my childhood where I had to compete a lot. This idea was still trapped inside of me. And whenever I did yoga with others I compared myself to them. How deep could they go into a pose, could they make it look easy and effortlessly, were they flexible like me? I was moving from one goal to the other.

Split? Check!
Bending backward into a bridge? Check!
Lotus seat? Check!
This'n'that? Check, Check, Check! I was even proud of my breathing for it was longer than most people's breath …

I was competing with myself and others until I finally had a life-changing Yoga lesson. We were doing lots of poses to open our hips and the teacher spoke about its connection to the root chakra. I felt the resistance in my hip that I am used to for all my life. This block on my right side is somehow connected to sexual abuse during my childhood and it has been there forever. This time, something popped open in this region. Like a bursting bubble, it felt while I was moving into a downward facing dog. I never landed in the pose for I collapsed in this movement. I fell to the ground, grabbed after my knees, coiled myself up into an embryo position and cried like an infant. I was shocked. Just like others who interrupt their flows and looked at me. The teacher approached me, placed her hand on my back and told everyone else to go on with a few chaturangas (a flow of particular asanas) or take a break in child's position. Well, I was. Not the child position from the asanas, I was a child, however, and I felt disgusting. She softly stroke my back and said: "Congratulations. You have just opened up your root chakra. I am happy for you. Mother earth loves you, you're safe. Everything you'll ever need will be provided for. You will always have whatever you need. Trust in your mother. Your true mother, Gaia. Just stay in this feeling. Look where it comes from, embrace it. Stay as long as you want. You're done for today. If you should have any questions, I am gonna leave my phone number next to your mat. Have a wonderful birth, my dear."

I had never in my life felt this way. I would have never dared to have such a meltdown in front of those I was competing with. But competition ended this day. It was the first time I understood what I was doing here. I was opening up my hips, my mind, my blocks, my chakras, I was overcoming my traumas! That was it all about! I had always been doing it wrong. At this moment, I just let it overfloat me. All the grief, the desperation, the urge to be loved by my other mother, the one my teacher had just called my fake mum. Fake mum. This term. I repeated it in my mind, over and over, until it became "redrum, redrum".

Fake mum, fake mum
see my longing baby arms
Fake mum, wake mum!
I'm using all my charms

I cried until I fell asleep. When I woke up, I felt fresh and new. Nobody was there, I left the empty studio and called the teacher. She congratulated me and asked how I felt. I told her how I had been crying about my mum and now felt some kind of relief. In my hips and emotionally. She told me that I had started my journey.

"Today was the first time you did yoga, dear, Welcome to your healing!"

I knew she was right. I felt better than ever before. I had never reached this point before. I felt the connection between my bodily blocks and traumas, how everything in my muscles and organs was just mirroring my emotional body and that I could move my breath and intention to where it hurts to heal. It was the last time I competed with anyone. In fact, I have seldom visited a yoga class since that day. I am always doing it by myself, every day for 13 years in total now. But it has only been for the last 7 years of it that I am really doing it. I am healing and I am tuning into my mother's frequency. Gaia's 7,83 Hertz of love.