“Oh, are you here to do yoga?” asked a lady at the yoga show, looking at me and seeing my wheelchair.  “Yes, and I can do Crow,” came my surprisingly quick-witted response.  She was a yoga teacher.  Her expression soon shifted from confusion to admiration, with more than a hint of embarrassment. 

As Mind Body Solutions says, yoga is for everybody.  Its founder, Matthew Sanford, is an internationally recognised yoga teacher.  Aged 13, he was involved in a tragic car accident that killed his father and sister, and left him paralysed from the chest down.  “I know what it feels like to leave my body,” he wrote.  So do I.  When I read those words in the introduction to Matthew’s book Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, I felt a tearful wave of relief.  Somebody else understands.  It’s such a difficult concept to articulate and share, you begin to wonder if you’re the only person who experiences it.  Just as I am, he is constantly seeking to connect his mind and body.  He too created a healing story from a traumatic time in hospital, and he also uses yoga to unify his experience.

That’s what yoga is for me.  It’s a way to be in my body; to tune into the subtle energies and rhythms.  It’s a way to connect to my mind; to listen to my inner being.  The yoga teacher at the show realised that to hold Crow pose takes mental focus, strength and trust.  Not that I can do it every day, but that’s another thing yoga teaches you; to be flexible in more ways than one.  My practice can range from simply imagining being in poses when my body can’t move, to Sun Salutations in my garden; from participating in a class in my wheelchair, to standing tall in Tree pose.  However I feel each day, there’s yoga I can do, and I love it.

To help raise awareness of adaptive yoga, the idea of taking a yoga pose and adapting it to meet an individual’s needs, and to further my own practice, I’ve signed up to participate in Mind Body Solutions’ fundraiser Kiss My Asana.  It’s a yogathon running throughout February and I can’t wait to share my Kiss My Asana month here.  In case you were wondering, ‘asana’ means ‘pose’ in Sanskrit!  If you’d like to read more about the challenge I’m setting myself, help spread awareness and maybe even sponsor me, you can find my fundraising page here.  I’d love to help other people discover the power of yoga; people who may otherwise never enter a class in fear of the reaction I had, but who could really change their quality of life through the practice.  Maybe they too could feel the exhilaration of flying in Crow.

Photo taken in the beautiful Thaxted Yoga studio.