That peaceful, easy feeling

If you practice yoga you know that peaceful, easy feeling. It's the one that you get at the end of your yoga class. Ahhhhhhh..... At the end of my yoga classes lately I've been asking my students to take a moment to feel what it's like to be in a whole room full of people who are all experiencing that feeling.

So much of our interaction with other people involves sharing a state of agitation. We get together with friends and acquaintences and get caught up in our stories of the latest disasters in our lives. We get sucked in to the media frenzy over the latest big news story. Even the email that gets forwarded has a tendency to focus on creating states of fear: spiders lurking under toilets, etc.

One of my teachers call this kind of sharing "Trauma Bonding." We bond with others when we share the same internal state. When we are feeling agitated, this is a sign that our fight/flight/freeze response is triggered. When this happens there's an urgency and intensity to telling the story and the body is actually, to a greater or lesser extent, reliving a past upsetting event. Others can get caught up in this intensity and feel compelled to tell their stories, reliving their own events. Together we spin out into greater amounts of agitation, which over time begins to cause all kinds of unpleasant symptoms. It's not the state in which we're meant to live our lives.

Practicing yoga produces just the opposite internal state: a state of calm, contentment, relaxation, and well-being. When we practice in a group we can start to feel what it's like to bond with others in a more healthy way. We can "catch" this feeling from those around us just like we can "catch" agitation. Practicing in a group helps reinforce our feeling of well-being. What would our communities be like if everyone had this experience?

Since we started offering Donation Yoga, over 150 new students have had their first taste of yoga with us at Show Me Yoga Center. We invite you to join us! Pick your class and catch that peaceful, easy feeling for yourself!