[yoga? isn't that for super bendy types?]

Action adventure sports, mixed martial arts, adrenaline junkie. Yoga? Seriously?!?! Over the years, I have taken yoga classes here and there. It simply did not get me excited. Not helping matters; even though I was a black belt karate instructor in my mid twenties, I never achieved a great level of flexibility. These days, I could not even touch my toes. So why bother? I mean, for yoga, I need to be crazy flexible right?

[filling the gap]

For me, it's always been about the rush. I had found the source of my daily spiritual training by surfing many mornings before work, practicing kung fu for hours at night, or technical mountain biking. All of these practices demand your complete awareness in the now and strong physical conditioning. Moving to the center of Belgium, my options became limited and there was a major gap in my spiritual training.

Due to this gap, I decided to join a yoga retreat and fully immerse myself into the practice. After all, those things aren't cheap and I needed to get my money's worth. But before I could train for 3 sequential hours everyday for a week, I would need to train and transform towards a yoga body. I had around 6 or 7 months. So the plan was to start slow at 1 hour every 2 or 3 days and work my way up at a steady pace to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week just before the trip.

[holy hamstrings!]

That's how I describe my spiritual and physical reacquaintance with yoga. It felt like leg day at the gym except it was all over my entire body. Maybe more like the first day of football training after a lazy summer. During the first few practices, I fell asleep during savasana. I am quite experienced at meditation, but I was simply dead.

After a few weeks, after I left the yoga studio this one particular day, I noticed something was different. It was a state of awareness that I had only felt with my other activities. The reason this time was different was because the instructor had taken us through pranayama and it set the rhythm in a way that none of the previous yoga teachers had done. The rush was back and from that day forward, I have been practicing nearly everyday.

[what happened?]

Several things occurred to create this sensation. I finally learned to breathe correctly, my body was adapting and learning the asanas so that I could focus on my breathing, and the instructor closed the class with Nadi Shodhana (alternate nose breathing) to the count of 8 seconds. Even though I was not aware of it at the time, I started to learn how to use controlled breathing to

Although I was still a long ways from reaching my toes, that goal seemed to no longer matter.

I started to learn that yoga was not about how flexible you were or how perfect your alignment looked in the mirror.