It’s October 2019, about 2 years after my first yoga teacher training, and I find myself back in a classroom. With what I’ve told you about me in other posts, you won’t be surprised to know that this is an advanced course on yoga for stress and anxiety, a condition that is shared by around 4% of the world’s population and which is one of the many unwanted outcomes of experiencing extreme or constant stress.
This is a weekend training in one of the then very big yoga schools in London (which has since gone bankrupt and ceased to exist). The room is surprisingly busy, a stark comparison to my previous small trainings of 12 people max, a testament to just how many people are interested in yoga in a mental health context. Ironically, this also triggers some social anxiety in me, especially seeing that many of these people seem to know each other already.
Anxiety is an interesting beast, and as I’ll discover in this training, highly tightly linked to stress. My personal experience of anxiety has meant spending much of my day feeling worried and overwhelmed for long stretches of time, completely unable to relax or switch off, sometimes culminating in a full blown nighttime attack which my husband calls ‘my spiral’ – I’ll spare you the details of that. In an anxiety state, the body and mind become trapped in a vicious cycle where every minor stressor can be perceived as a threat and lead to a full-blown unnecessary response.
In this training, we’ll move around a lot, as you’d expect from a yoga class, but in somewhat unorganised ways, emphasising feeling into our bodies. We’ll spend a lot of time feeling our feet – standing in mountain pose, doing lunges and other poses while consciously trying to feel that contact of our feet with the ground.
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