04/14/2019
Hello everyone and welcome to Stellar's Yoga Studio!
My name is Stellar and I have been practicing yoga since 2006. I started at the age of 44 with Restorative Yoga which was being offered by the local community college. I had heard of yoga, of course, but it always seemed to be the domain of slender, hyper-flexible girls where there was no place for me. At that time, I really needed something to help get my head into a different place than it had been for years. After a semester of Restorative, I was hooked and I decided to take the regular yoga class.
What I really loved about yoga was when I was told "Where you are today is OK. It is different from yesterday and tomorrow will also be different and that is OK too." I so needed to hear that. Just about everything else in my life had contained a constant need to do better, be faster, do more (with an overt or implied "Or else!"); just hearing that brought me to the stop that I needed then. I realized that I could stop trying to be perfect and instead work on the process. Yes, inevitably, improvement happened. But it did not have to be on an artificial schedule. After years of sports, martial arts and various jobs, it was incredibly nice to just be able to relax and do the yoga. That was that "different place" that I had been needing.
Over the next several years as I got older, I came to many other realizations. One thing was that the props were there to be used and it was up to me how and in what situations I should use them. Another was that in some poses I was struggling too hard on one particular element and it was completely wrecking the rest of the pose. I was getting very little benefit and a lot of frustration and strain. In particular, I remember constantly struggling to clasp my hands under my back in Bridge Pose and realizing that my shoulders were not where they were supposed to be, my feet were too far away from my butt, and my knees were way out of alignment. I tried to think what to do about it, and it occurred to me that the best thing to do would be to unclasp my hands. So I lowered myself to the floor, laid my hands and arms flat on the floor and raised up again into the pose. Things went much better and I realized that this was my body and my practice. It was up to me to do the things I needed to do to make the poses work for me. Bridge Pose is now a favorite pose.
That is what I want to bring to people. I want to reach the people who truly are beginners and don't know what to do. I want to reach the people who may have shied away from yoga before because they took a class that was more like aerobics than yoga and it was not what they needed and would have risked injury if they had continued. And I want to reach the people who may think they are too old, too out of shape, too fat, too…something else that they think should automatically exclude them. For the most part this is going to be online, but for some people who are local to me, I will offer some limited in-person practices.
