Reflections from Susan (ETE Worker)

Due to lockdown my yoga community set up a daily practise at 6.30am to support our wellbeing. I had recently moved home and hadn’t found a new yoga centre yet, so this gave me an instant community in my new area. The fact it was on zoom delivered into my home every morning was a true gift for my mental, emotional, physical & spiritual wellbeing to carry me through the crazy time of lockdown.

We did the same yoga sequence each day and the hardest pose was to hold the triangle for 5 minutes, I hated this pose, I couldn’t even do it for 15 seconds. Every morning I would be dreading this pose and once I got into it, my mind would start screaming to stop ‘this is impossible, grrrr why do we have to do it, this is so stupid….etc’. And they even call Triangle a relaxation pose lol!

I wake up every day as me (I know, shocker!), a woman with wildly unbalanced hormones due to the menopause, so I need to do something daily to help myself. Through the yoga I am re-setting my nervous system with this new pattern of calmness and not letting my head run the show, like not listening to it in triangle pose. I am giving myself time for me and that frame of mind filters into the rest of my day.

We started to hang around more after the class for chats and it was so lovely to connect with people at the start of my day. We supported each other with whatever each of us had going on that day and that commitment to the group carried me through on the days I wanted to stay in bed.

In yogic terms it takes 40 days to break a habit, 90 to create a new habit and 120 days to embed it. When we completed 40 days, we knew we had to keep going as we had just started to break some of the patterns, to come out of our heads and each posture became easier but we were far from mastering the triangle. Also the morning practise had become the rock that kept us solid with whatever anxieties or fears were going on with Covid.

We completed 120 days and celebrated by taking some photos on zoom, it always made me chuckle to see us on top of each other in triangle on the screen. And yes by the end I did find triangle pose relaxing, well at moments. Can you guess who I am?

I am happy to say that we are still practising together, a new sequence, this one includes plank for 3 minutes. I don’t think I need to say more about what I think of the plank…….…….