My First Yoga Experience

Feel free to drop a few lines about your first yoga experience. Here is mine.

I was a Uni student at the time. I turned 20 and the year before I had a strong calling to go vegetarian. Thinking about me back then, I was a bit strange young girl; I read Bhagavad Gita and Tibetan Book of the dead. Every night I would visualize how I go up towards the sky and then I’d go higher past the clouds and again higher past the orbit and I would get so high where there was absolutely no restriction to my mind. I’d stay there expanding and merging into a huge vast space without any limits. Well, you know where I’m coming from. Lets get back down to the Earth… lol

Flashback into the end of 90’s

The post – Soviet countries just gained their independence and there was a beginning of the great chaos. I was lucky enough to be born, raised and toughen up in the country of beetroots and sunflowers. Yes, I’m talking about Ukraine.

In the Soviet period yoga was considered to be illegal and only existed in a form of a few underground secret gatherings or practiced individually at home. People would exchange some home-printed yoga posture charts and there was only a couple of books circulating around. They were just as valuable as gold!

When I discovered yoga in 2000, it just started loosing its decadent status so the first yoga schools stated to spring up across the city. One night I walked into one of them at our Uni. One of the university teachers organised a little space for yoga at the Uni gym and there it was. The Yoga mat was still a non-existent item at that point so we had to practice on some kind of semi-soft mats for martial arts. (Remind me please I might tell you the story about how and when I got my first REAL yoga mat, more than 2 years into practicing yoga).

So I arrived for my first yoga class not knowing what to expect. It was a very dynamic yoga class, probably something close to what we call a vinyasa class these days. We were going through the postures, one after another. It was a pleasure, enjoyment and a total bliss.

What’s more important, on that night I’ve recognised that I already knew all that, postures, movements and breathing seemed to be something that was known to me but somehow forgotten. Suddenly, I could remember all of that. It was a big revelation night for me that have changed the course of my life. I knew in my heart that this is the reason why I was born and what I will be doing from that day on. It’s been 15 years since that night. I’m still madly in love with yoga. I’ve never stopped. Practiced trough dark times, through pregnancies and sometimes even through tears.