So here I am with my ultimate goal in mind, to help others.  And where is this more applicable than in my own home.  The place where I see the problems that arise and the place I can make the most impact.  That place is in my home, with my daughter.  Recently we had parent teacher conferences and the outcome of this conference was that my daughter has “focus issues”, at least according to her teachers.  She is very smart and always exceeds the intelligence expectations but what she doesn’t do is fit into the nice, perfect little box of what our educational system has set out for her and her peers.  My question would be, is this wrong?  What does that mean?  Is there really something wrong with my daughter or maybe instead our educational system?  Or maybe a larger problem, it’s our society and our culture, its expectations of our children and that’s where things have gone wrong.  Well that’s what I came back to, our culture, our system and our expectations.  There is nothing wrong with my daughter, she is just forced to live and adapt to this environment that our western culture has created for her.  Her struggle I understand.  I have been through this same struggle myself, there are all these expectations and all this competition forced on someone who was not meant to be competitive.  I just wanted to live and grow and be open and honest and help people but these are not the goals of our society.  So I struggle to provide a routine, a ritual that can help her exist in a culture that does not support our nature.  That is what I decided was going to be the focus of my personal experiment, to create a ritual and routine of yoga practice to help my daughter deal with the daily environment she is living in so that she can still be herself.

So we started out talking about yoga and talking about putting together a nightly routine for her.  She was very excited as she’s been watching me do my do my practice and likes to imitate me.  Then we moved on to picking out a routine, I would show her some poses and she would pick what she liked.  This got us to about a 10 minute a night practice for her.  It starts out with a little be silly fun, crazy, get the vatta out practice and moves into calm periods.  We move between periods of high energy expenditure and calm quietness.  This goes on for a couple minutes to maybe five minutes before we get to a point where we can focus on just doing postures and she is in the moment and enjoying it.  Now it has gotten to the point where she asks to do yoga every night as part of her routine.  I have seen small improvements in her daily focus and vatta energy but I think the larger changes will come with more time and more training on yogic practices.  So there is my personal experiment but it’s continually changing and ever growing.  I hope that it will have a much greater and further reaching impact as continual practice impacts a small, still learning and growing life in a way that I can still not fully understand.  As it stands I still cannot even fully understand its impact on me.  But some day I will and if I can provide that opportunity for her too then I will.  I believe that’s what I was put here to do.

I began with the fact that I’m sick every couple of weeks and set out to correct that by only eating organic foods that are also good for my constitution (vata/kapha) and using eliminating lotions, shampoos anything with chemicals in them or unknown ingredients.  I used oil instead of lotion and for shampoo I put oil in my hair then disperse it with baking soda. I have not worn contacts throughout the experiment either because I’m not too sure about the solution they’re in.

Many things occurred to me during this process.  Such as its ok to feel no matter how you’re feeling it’s ok to be mad or sad or lost or happy. Another realization made was this construct I project of someone watching me that is separate from me. This is probably some conditioning from growing up Christian, I stopped attending church when I was 14 though, and it surprises me that that idea is still present in me. I recognized that this ‘watcher’ is indeed me watching myself and there is no need to feel the need to impress this other watcher because it’s simply me. This made life seem rather surreal for a while, like I’m dreaming all the time, now I type that it does seem like a dream. Also occurred to me that Divinity and the Universe is all around me I am constantly shaking hands with the Divine Universe, constantly being enveloped by the all knowing and all creating. I’ve always enjoyed warrior II because of this idea that my fingers are reaching straight into Divine Essence and for me I can really feel that in my hands.  Somewhere within the experiment my parakeet died suddenly, I was rather upset that weekend and I left the Yoga room for a moment to recollect my thoughts, sitting on the steps thinking about how odd death is and life and that my bird and my Sarajo dog (she died earlier this year) are around me all the time now just not in a physical way and they are a part of the Universe so really they aren’t ‘dead’ they’re just ‘invisible’ to me right now.  Somewhere in these thoughts I found that I profoundly despised myself and I became determined to resolve my conflict with myself.

Like many students of Axis Yoga Teacher Trainings, this student came into the journey with multiple goals and found success in each of them. This journey is an example of the transformation that occurs in life when space is given to Yoga.