I’ve never been one that deals with stress and being overwhelmed healthy. I normally don’t do anything about it until it consumes my whole being so there’s no way to get around it. And for the longest time I didn’t really know what to do about it. Then I got intruded to yoga. Yeah yoga is something cool to do. There’s cool arm balances and you fold weirdly, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Have you ever heard the saying “take time to do what makes your soul happy”? Well that’s exactly my thought every time I get down on my mat. And for me that’s a really weird thing to say, “makes my soul happy”, but there’s really no other way to describe the emotion that I feel when I get on my mat.

At the beginning of a yoga class you normally do this thing that one of my teachers calls “dropping in”. When you drop in you’re just sitting there on your mat and breathing, ignoring the things that are going on around you and focusing on what’s going on with you. The whole world seems to disappear. Then it’s just you and your mat.

You go through the motions of the flow, not focusing on those around you, but how your insides are. Focusing on your breath, listening to the beat of your heart. Motion by motion you slowly start to feel alive. And for the next hour you know that what’s outside out this bubble that you’ve created does not matter. There’s nothing that you and your mat cannot take on. Together you can take on the world.

But then there’s that point where you have to come to a stop, get off your mat and go back to the world. But you know that that feeling of being alive will not leave you. You can always come back to your mat. You can always for a while, forget about “reality” and focus on what’s going on inside of you. Letting the stress that you might have felt earlier drain out of your body. Just focusing on the present moment, because that’s all that really matters when you’re on your mat.

If you’ve never experienced what I’m talking about, I suggest that you try it sometime. It can be hard, it took me awhile to get to that point, but when you get there I promise it’s worth it. Focus on the present moment and forget about everything else that you might have going on later in the day. Just throw your hair up, grab your mat and let go.