How Yoga saved my life

Why Yoga? My teacher asked me. When I hit rock bottom and felt like everything and everyone I'd ever loved had left me, yoga was the only thing that made me feel good. It got me through the day and through the toughest year of my life.

Tears still prickle my eyes when I think back of the young woman who felt like she'd lost it all, leaving her with no place left to call 'home'.

In hindsight it's obvious that I'd been looking for home in all the wrong places - I was trying to make people and places fit that simply didn't fit. I had abandoned myself up until the point I felt like I even no longer 'fit' myself.

The things we do to belong, right? The one thing I never did to 'belong' though, was Yoga. With no witnesses other than my own squeaky heart, Yoga managed to whisper me out of bed and onto the mat.

Having lost all control in life, the mat was my safe space where no one could hurt me anymore. The mat became my home. It took me over a decade of practicing Yoga and an entire Teacher Training to realise it was actually my body talking to me, not Yoga - I had been so disconnected from my own body that I didn't even recognise her voice.

And to understand that the mat was not my home, but merely the place where I had found my home: my body. My precious body, that had stayed with me through it all and by doing so, was silently teaching me the unconditional love I was so desperately seeking outside of myself.

Like the alchemist traveling the world, only to find he was already home.