Why I Stopped Running and Started Yoga
“I didn’t feel like I had changed so much as I had been enhanced. My original self, just more thoughtful, more mindful, more considered. ”
When you complete a yoga teacher training at Evolation, we encourage you to share your #yogastory. This week we are thrilled to share Jacki Owen’s powerful story of how hot yoga helped her find peace after injury and why you should stop putting off your own yoga teacher training.
Some Like it Hot.
After years of distance running my knees were not exactly ‘happy’ with me. The creaking sound when I bent down was also slightly disconcerting and the pain, well, I had become pretty good friends with my doctor as we debated various solutions to the inflammation loop that my knee had locked itself into. However none of these things ever stopped me from lacing on the runners and padding off down the street in search of that elusive moment. That moment didn’t happen on every run but happened often enough that I kept on chasing it mile after mile, run after run. That perfect, pure moment of flow.
Post major kidney surgery in 2015, the surgeon sternly prescribed me zero running for six long weeks. This was a disaster. I’d long become dependent on intense exercise as a way of managing my busy mind and so in despair took to google to help me find an alternative for six weeks in order to save myself from the deafening sound of my own internal chatter. And so it was that I found the yoga. Or the yoga found me. Maybe we found each other.
Whichever way, I can count on one hand the amount of runs I have been on since that first class. In the beginning the hot yoga workout was the drawcard. I loved the intensity, the heat and the sweat. I felt exhausted and depleted after a class and yet strangely energised, invigorated and ready to take on the world with a calm quiet ordered mind. Then slowly around the edges of my practice crept in some deeper understanding of the practice. Slowly, without even being aware of it, my brain was changing.
Flow became a state I could achieve each time I rolled out my mat, words like mindfulness and meditation snuck into my vocabulary. I didn’t feel like I had changed so much as I had been enhanced. My original self, just more thoughtful, more mindful, more considered. I lost some of my running strength and gained some long needed flexibility both in body and mind.
Becoming a teacher through Evolation in Denmark in 2019 has given me a deeper understanding still of the value I place on things, an awareness of the importance of guidance and leadership as well as the responsibility to allow students to find their own grace at their own pace. It has ignited a passion for anatomy and alignment that has given birth to an entrepreneurial venture, a hot yoga towel that supports the student in their alignment. And I’ve combined my interest in neuroscience and the brain with a practice that enhances cognition, memory and emotion regulation.
If you are thinking about becoming a teacher, take that next step. Don’t wait for the ‘right’ time or for ‘when the kids are older/debt is paid off/when my practice is better/have enough annual leave’ because they never come. Don’t wait for reassurance from those around you that it is the right thing. Only you know what is right for you. As the last great emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius said “be grateful for this moment, this moment is your life”.