My Personal Experience with Yoga

I was re-introduced to yoga through a friend of a friend. He was an old man from Bermuda only known to me as Swami. He happened to spend some time with us in Kenya at my friends place in Nairobi. My friend Job and I listened to Swami as he told us about his travels to East Africa for the sun. He did sun yoga. It energizes him just like what physical exercise will do to you. He gets his energy through the sun. We thought that was weird and why anybody would travel the world just for the sun. Every morning before the sun came up, Swami was frail and a little bit dull just like the 75-year-old that he was. Immediately the sun came up, he was full of strength and could walk for miles and never seem to wear down.

Why I say re-introduced is because we had come across yoga 5 years before. Weighed it as a group and generally decided it was not our thing. At the time we were traveling back and forth as performing artiste. We thought yoga would make us over flexible and with our acrobatics we thought we will be more liable to injury. Mostly though, we thought yoga was for women.

Anyway, on days we sat and spoke with Swami about the difference between his country and other countries he had traveled as we discussed our lives challenges as young men in Nairobi. Swami listens and he tells us yoga would be our best shot. That in yoga we will discover our strengths and learn to convert our passion to profits. He did not stop there, he practically took us to a yoga studio. The studio was in Parklands, the Africa Yoga Project. This was way far from where we stayed. He introduced us to the administration presented our case and a teacher was send to our community shortly after. As we saw Swami off, we promised to give yoga a try mostly on my part as I was curious about yoga now that Swami spoke about it so intimately.

The teacher came to our training hall in our community. We arranged to have classes once a week for starters. We went on for almost a month and we were getting better and better as a team and it was so much fun learning.

For a long time, I had thought yoga to be “girlish.” I was so wrong, and coming from a background of intense physical practice you’d think yoga would be easy for me. Yoga kicked my butt. I was sweating and shaking in “downward dog” like I have never seen before. It was amazing to see and discover so much about my body. The most interesting bit was that, I was looking at slowly moving into teaching, I just didn’t know how to go about it and that yoga would be my field, was like a dream come true for me.

Yoga hit me and woke me up. It is with yoga that I became truly aware of my contribution, as in the way I showed up in life and how that shaped or determined the kind of results that I got in life.