The Relationship of the Learned Lady with Yoga

Yoga trainer motivation and satisfactions from feedback

Dedicating attention, energy invested during each training session with the individuals who enter the studio gives me satisfaction, especially when the feedback received from the other side is positive, progressive, and transforms into an experience that must be shared.

Yoga as a recovery tool for a person affected by depression

This article represents, to a large extent, the testimony of a person whom I have been training for over a year and who has experienced intense depression, with yoga having a significant impact on the recovery process.

Yoga asanas for releasing destructive emotions

The yoga sessions focused on asanas that involve opening the chest and activating the energy in the heart chakra, thus releasing destructive emotions that have contributed to muscle contraction and stiffness. The beginning was based on asanas, gradually introducing pranayama exercises and guided relaxation of the body into practice.

The benefits of back extension in managing emotions

What prompted me to work on back extension was the fact that when we are overwhelmed by emotions, thoughts, and situations that affect us on a physical level, the tendency is to bring the shoulders forward to block the physical space of the heart as well as the energetic one, considering that this way we will create an imaginary protective wall.

Back extension works on opening up to emotions, “feeling,” the reasons that have brought us to that point, and helps us confront our emotions.

The journey of discovery in the practice of yoga

In practice, the first confrontation begins with yourself on the yoga mat during each individual asana, realizing that you can handle it there, “on the mat,” courage makes its presence felt and gradually increases, helping you take action in other spheres of life.

Breathing exercises and calming the mind

Subsequently, I also included Ujjayi Breath, Kapalabhati, Alternate Breathing, and Humming Bee breathing exercises, which have a calming effect and release tensions from the body while simultaneously bringing a state of tranquility and calmness accompanied by mental clarity that contributes to viewing situations from multiple perspectives.

The story of Learned Lady’s struggle with depression

Below you can read the account of Miss Docte’s (I assigned the name of a character from a book that fascinated me to the person in question) experience.

“I was raised by a dysthymic mother, whose diagnosis still scares her to this day, in a family of intellectuals accustomed to locking away their feelings better than the hardest-to-open shells, sometimes concealing the most hidden shades of pearly grays.

I was no more than 7 or 8 years old when I realized that autumns turned my world upside down, even though none of my loved ones had ever heard of seasonal affective disorder.

Anyway, at the age of 30, after being diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, nervous urticaria (yes, believe it or not, it exists!), postpartum depression, and moderate or mild depressive episodes, I was already tired of explaining about biochemical imbalances, genetic predisposition, different levels of sensitivity, heightened perceptions, insomnia, anxiety, real problems that hurt, even though they might not be evident.

No matter how absurd it may sound, I was tired of comparing myself to people in the terminal stages of illness, to families surviving on child support, to horrific accidents that made depression seem like an unoriginal way to seek attention.

I empathized with those situations, sometimes increasing my level of discomfort and guilt, but I couldn’t wake up every morning with a feeling of happiness that I was healthy and didn’t lack anything material. I had reached a point where I felt guilty that my leg hadn’t been amputated, that I wasn’t disfigured, that I didn’t lack anything concrete that would probably be more than enough for a significant percentage of the world’s population.

Yet, I still had periods when previously unspoken problems, swarming in forgotten corners of my soul, threw me into a pit from which I felt unable to extract not only regret for the conflicts in Syria but also encouragement that I was a beautiful, strong woman, or the thought that there were people depending on me, or the pain for a colleague facing the death of a loved one.

And the thought that there was something fundamentally wrong, insufficiently sensitive, frivolous within me, which prevented me from achieving the level of self-contentment that would guarantee peace, like a normal person, drove me crazy.

So I started to keep silent. Not that I ever had a habit of complaining, to which my gender probably entitles me, but I had simply reached the point of displaying the same smile every day and invariably saying that everything was fine if someone happened to ask me how I was feeling.

After years of silence, I started compensating. Unspoken pains that I tried to hide as best as possible, to seal tightly under lids, constantly doing something obsessively to fill my time to the maximum, to avoid the tranquility of thinking, of feeling what was happening to me.

With a dedication that sometimes bordered on self-forgetfulness, but that no one noticed desperation anymore, only extreme seriousness. And yes, I took everything extremely seriously, sometimes with enormous efforts that reached the limit of physical danger, exhaustion, overwork, absurdity. I can guarantee you that I didn’t give up easily, and it took some time until I broke down.

I came to Ana because I knew her as a professional. I knew her name and professional reputation before she arrived in Brasov. I didn’t approach yoga openly and directly, as most of you probably did when you first encountered this new experience. I approached Ana as a physiotherapist.

I approached her when I felt my back giving in, when my posture was becoming increasingly defective despite my anatomical knowledge and the physical exercises I religiously performed according to the rules. I still kept a distance from yoga, a distance that, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit now, many educated and informed Romanians of our time still maintain.

I had either incomplete or completely false information and images that bordered on either the ridiculous or the pejorative. So I came to yoga starting from something that I initially called “medical gymnastics for correcting faulty posture”.

Pompous, but taken very seriously, as I did everything. At the end of the first session, Ana, although not a psychotherapist, told me with an accuracy that seemed unbelievable for someone who had only observed me breathing, that I carry too much on my shoulders for too long. And then, suddenly, completely unreasonable, irrational, incongruent with what I believed I was, I started crying after years.

In the end, invariably, I also attended a yoga session. And then came the shock of discovery, from the perspective of a dedicated sports enthusiast, of how damn difficult it is to maintain a pose, how you can sweat just by standing, how your muscles and every single myofibril speak to you, and how your body feels afterward (not just the deltoids, latissimus dorsi, biceps, or brachioradialis, but things that not only did I not know their names, but I had never perceived their presence, all together and each individually).

After admitting that I had been in profound denial and deeply underestimated the phenomenon, the phase of disbelief and fears came: no, I will never be able to do this. My balance is too deficient, my mobility too limited, my scoliosis too pronounced, the sole of my foot too deformed, the storms within me too intense and kept under

“control for too long, for yoga to ever lead me towards the ease with which postures flowed for other people, let alone towards the serenity and tranquility I envied on their faces.

Don’t imagine that I gave in easily, not even at this point. It took me a while to reach the moment of admitting to myself that I would “embrace” yoga. I started with anatomy, psychology, medicine, physics, biomechanics, scientific explanations, demonstrations, charts, explicit drawings on a small scale, manuals.

In Romanian, there weren’t many resources, but I relied on Amazon and English or French, languages in which I found plenty of yoga books written by physicians. I was surprised to discover how open allopathic medicine was towards yoga and had been for a long time.

I finally reached the point of daily practice not too long ago. In the meantime, I received diagnoses of severe depressive episodes, recurrent depression, took antidepressants and sedatives daily, was hospitalized, attended weekly psychotherapy sessions with various therapists.

Yoga remained a constant. I haven’t visualized the white light yet, but Ana’s voice calms me. I can’t let myself be carried away by a single thought, but I can calm the turmoil in my head. Meditation still surpasses me; I am still too attached to the concrete, but I can breathe using my lungs, diaphragm, and abdomen. I can hold my breath for four counts and extend the exhale to eight.

I have noticed that Kapalabhati breathing calms me and that Brahmari breathing relieves tension. I haven’t detached from my body, but I can detach from the problem. I now face withdrawal symptoms after discontinuing daily antidepressant treatment, but I try to regulate my breathing when I panic or experience chills, to rely on floral therapies when I sweat excessively or have tremors.

I have temporarily given up other forms of exercise; it seems that I already engage all my muscles and feel my neural impulses circulating through every possible synapse. It still frustrates me when my left hip doesn’t want to release, although my right one does, or when the knuckle on my right toe won’t let me stretch my leg as far as it did last week, even though I understood and daily feel that it doesn’t matter.

I still get annoyed at how stubborn my right shoulder is, but when I remember what it was like a year ago, I find the point I’ve reached now miraculous.

No, I didn’t reach yoga in a straight line. I was Doubting Thomas, the one who had to experience it for himself to be convinced. But as long as, in the end, you realize that you have arrived at the destination you desired, I believe that the length or straightness of the path that led you there matters less. To paraphrase B.K.S. Iyengar, yoga cannot be explained; it must be felt on your own skin.”