Yoga found me and so did sobriety

I started doing yoga about two weeks into sobriety.  Right before I quit drinking, I had had this urge to start doing yoga.  My mind was going a million miles a minute and I thought maybe yoga could help with that.  When I decided to do yoga, I was not doing it for the physical benefits but for the mental benefits.  I did one of those 30 day introductory offers.

During those 30 days, I fell in love with yoga.  I found myself in tears on my yoga mat on more than one occasion.  It was during that Shavasana that I surrendered to my alcoholism.  It was during Shavasana that I realized that my friends don’t have to “get it”.  It was during Shavasana that I felt my higher power talking to me through my yoga teacher (Baron Baptiste).  It is during Shavasana that I get this euphoric feeling that could not be produced by any outside source. It comes from within me and that right there is AMAZING!

I am normally not one to do things spur of the moment.  I am careful about my decisions and tend to over think most decisions, especially financial.  So, when I saw that there was a yoga festival in Hawaii and it was 10 days away, I booked it without a lot of the usual guilt that goes along with any big decision like that.  I knew that I really needed this retreat and I was right.

This trip was a few days after my weekend with my girlfriends.  I came off of that trip a bit stressed and anxious.  This trip was the complete opposite.  It was a sober vacation, no alcohol in sight.  My mom and step-dad went with us and watched the kids during the day while my hubby and I did 3 classes of yoga each day.  I learned so much during those three days.  I felt just about as zen as a person could feel by day 3.  I felt empowered.  I felt grateful. I felt like I had my entire life ahead of me.

In that last class, I was so beat because he kicked our asses and I laid there in shavasana and I reflected on the last few day’s events. I thought about how none of this would be possible if I was still drinking. Yes, I could be doing yoga, plenty of people do yoga and drink, but it wouldn’t be the same because I don’t drink like most people.  I was laying there and grateful for my sobriety and this wonderful opportunity to completely look at life in a different way. Right as I was thinking this, Baron Baptiste (the amazing yoga teacher) had been talking the entire time but I was tuning him out. I was having these thoughts of gratefulness for being sober and how it is amazing that I got sober and found yoga and right at that moment I tuned into what he was saying and these were his exact words:

“Sometimes one door has to close for another to open. You shut the other door and walk through that new door and now you follow this pathway and THIS is your new pathway”

I thought WOW! It was like he was reading my mind and talking to just me (not the 300 other yogis in the room). I now realize this was probably my higher power talking to me.

Getting sober is by far the most amazing and life changing experience I have been through. While drinking, I had no idea what I was missing out on. Fully enjoying the experience of yoga has just been one of the gifts of sobriety.

During one of my classes one of the teachers said “you did not find yoga, yoga found you” and I believe that.  I also believe that sobriety found me.  It was not by chance that I stumbled upon that first recovery blog that eventually led me to other recovery blogs, the Booze Free Brigade, The Bubble Hour, Alcoholics Anonynous and all of the other tools I have been using to help me on this journey.