Lately I've felt like I needed to create a space to organize and keep track of all the ideas and thoughts I've had as I've begun to study yoga more intensely. It's a bit surprising to me that it has now been almost five years since my mom convinced me over a Christmas break holiday that it wouldn't be a complete assault on my manhood to give yoga a try. I wasn't so sure at the time, but we popped in Rodney Yee's A.M./P.M. Yoga, and since then I've plodded along with varying degrees of intensity in my yoga practice. Just as good-old life experience is similar to a ride on a roller coaster, so has been the ups and downs of my yoga experience. Having been to only a handful of formal classes, most of my practice has been just me, my yoga mat, and some yoga book or a Yoga Journal. Nowadays I very rarely look at books during my practice, but instead just flow wherever I feel like that day. Even still, I'll look at books or dvds when I feel like I'm getting in a rut and need to push myself to stretch a little deeper physically or mentally.

Not that I'm some great yogi or anything (I can still barely touch my toes, dang hamstrings), but I've found that yoga has more to offer than just stretchy muscles. Yoga truly has been a light to me these last few years as I've tried to deal with the various twists and turns of life. With one semester left of law school right now, yoga was instrumental in helping me stay sane and recognize that life doesn't have to be all about who has the top rank or best job after school. And instead of trashing myself when I didn't do as well on a test as I thought I should have, I've just tried to stay in the moment and breathe my way through life.

So far my yoga practice has been an enjoyable journey, and I think I'd surprise my five-year-old self with how much yoga has become a part of my life, even when I'm not physically on the mat. Now that I can tell an eagle from a pigeon pose, I guess I wanted to start this little blog as an effort to catalog and organize what yoga has been, and is becoming to me. I won't be so pretentious to think that this blog could be useful or fun to anyone but myself--I'm making it mainly for my own enjoyment and benefit--but if it ends up being a useful means for someone else's journey into the light of yoga practice, history, philosophy, and whatever else, well I guess that's great too.