Finding My Center
Yoga has always invited me into moments of self-realization, but this time felt different.
I’ve practiced yoga for four years now, and considering my age, I know that’s actually a long time. Yet after these classes at Sharanam, I realized something surprising: maybe I had never truly practiced yoga before.
The mistake I didn’t know I was making
I caught myself constantly trying to reach the furthest expression of every pose, forcing my body into shapes instead of letting it adapt to the pose naturally. I wasn’t even aware of where my center actually was.
Sometimes I feel like Aleid can see through my bones with her hands. I’m lucky to have met a teacher who can almost see inside my body from the outside and correct my alignment in real time.
“Fast yoga” and the layers underneath the practice
When Aleid talked to me about the concept of “fast yoga,” I started to see how layered a yoga practice really is, almost like consciousness itself, like the hidden side of an iceberg. We don’t always reach some final destination, but the practice grounds us physically and opens up new ways of understanding ourselves. That’s when it clicked: the real practice isn’t performing certain movements at certain intervals.
These aren’t “simple exercises,” or something women do just to stay in shape. The purpose runs much deeper.
Flexibility in the body becomes flexibility in life
The way you know your body is the way you know your thoughts. The flexibility you build on the mat is flexibility you can carry into the rest of your life.
Do you get bored of a pose and give up right away? Or do you keep sinking back into the easy position your body begs for every time it wants an escape? Your reactions, your patterns, what you notice in yourself, they tell you who you are. When a pose is hard, you can still find stillness and calm inside it, and offer that calm to yourself.
When “this is enough” turns into the beginning
I used to hold poses by holding my breath, pushing toward the furthest edge of what I thought was possible. That has shifted into something else. Instead of forcing or overreaching, I do what I can from my own center. And strangely, the moments I thought “this is it, I can’t go any further” were often the moments where, with Aleid’s guidance, I found how much more space I had; how much more I could soften, expand, and open.
In the end, I stayed in places within my body I had never explored for this long before. And that, more than any pose, is what the practice keeps teaching me.
with Love, Ceren
