My husband had tried ashtanga yoga while living in the USA and fell in love with the practice, so he asked me to come along, so I brought my competitive, stiff and anxious self to my first ever yoga class.<\/p>\n
To be honest, it hurt and did not feel good neither physically nor mentally. I was stiff in my body (and mind), but I felt that the practice could teach me things I did not know about myself if I kept going.<\/p>\n
So I did.<\/p>\n
I practiced hard and diligently, but I was not attentive to the limits of my body or my mind. I pushed myself way beyond my abilities, and ended up with a long-term knee injury, severe anxiety, depression and exhaustion.<\/p>\n
This psychological pattern kept repeating itself both on and off the mat, and eventually I ended up with suicidal thoughts. The low self-worth that I tried to cover up with extreme ambition led me to hit rock-bottom and my life contained no meaning, not even for practice.<\/p>\n
During my rehabilitation as I was lying in my hospital bed, I decided to listen to one of Kino MacGregor\u2019s yoga talks on youtube. She talked about yoga as a spiritual path and the philosophy behind the practice. She said, \u201cwhat if everything in your life is happening for a specific reason, that everything is exactly how it is supposed to be in whatever you are going through\u201d.<\/p>\n
These words made me realize that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and in the midst of my suffering I realized even that was meaningful. My only way out was through practicing acceptance every step of the way.<\/p>\n
The next day I walked to a local yoga studio\u2019s mysorestyle practice in all my misery, and started over. There was no way I could even handle a sun salutation, let alone standing up properly. I knew I had to build myself back up from zero, starting with the acceptance of where my body and mind were at that time. From that day on yoga gave me a purpose to continue my life and work through the repetitive psychological patterns that had been stuck in my mind.<\/p>\n
For the first time, I felt that I had been put on this earth for a reason and that alone was already enough. I no longer felt the need to achieve anything to prove my self-worth. With time and practice my body and mind grew stronger and the depression, anxiety, exhaustion and physical problems decreased. In some ways yoga saved my life and I have had a continuous practice ever since, (accepting my limits and all).<\/p>\n
My husband and I both work fulltime jobs and we have a son, so we have a hard time going to a yoga studio as regularly as we would like. Sometimes we would practice together at home, but not regularly.<\/p>\n
When Omstars launched, we knew it was exactly what we needed to start practicing every single day in a way that worked with our schedules. \u00a0Even our 4-year old son loves Omstars and tries out some asanas along with us. Kino, to you I would like to say Thank you<\/strong> from the bottom of my heart, it is thanks to your bravery in sharing the practice of yoga with the world that I now live a happy and peaceful life. Had I not listened to your talk that day, I might still be suffering from severe mental health issues.<\/p>\n When I was ill I opened my Instagram account @yogalogen to share my recovery through the vehicle of yoga and hopefully spread some hope and light to other people suffering from mental (and physical) disorders. As a psychologist and as a patient I knew my story might lead to less stigma around mental health issues and it felt like a meaningful thing to do.<\/p>\n I am a living example that the quote of Sri Patthabi Jois really is true… \u201cDo your practice and all is coming\u201d. Thank you Omstars for sharing my story.<\/p>\n Shanti and Namaste.<\/p>\n By Johanna @yogalogen <\/p>\n We love hearing and sharing stories from our students, so this month, we reached out to\u00a0Johanna Kivinen (@yogalogen on Instagram!). Johanna and her husband live in Sweden. Together, they\u00a0practice yoga on OmStars every day, and she has a very inspiring story to share about her own personal journey with the yoga practice. My name is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[185,180,182,179,181,184,183],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-practice","tag-inspirational","tag-member-feature","tag-mental-health","tag-omstars-student-feature","tag-student-story","tag-yoga-for-mental-health","tag-yoga-practice"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/joshua-earle-63441.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":505,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"OmStars](\"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Omstars-300x199.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"