This excerpt is from the 25th Dahn Yoga printed newsletter (not the email newsletter). I want to share it in this space because I think it is a great example of the benefits of Dahn Yoga, the little things that make life so much better. I hope you enjoy reading it.
I realized that [...] I was treating my body as an enemy. My life was firmly divided into two camps—what I should do and what I wanted to do. I should eat lettuce and butter beans, but I wanted Doritos and some Dairy Queen. I should run until the bottoms of my feet blistered, but I wanted to lie under a tree and read a book. Even the language I was using toward fitness—“fight the urge,” “carving” and “sculpting”—perpetuated this idea that I was in conflict with myself and trying to force my body to be something it wasn’t. All I could do was load up my arsenal in hopes that I could win the war.
Almost immediately, Dahn Yoga showed me that the only way to win this war was to stop fighting. When your mind, body and spirit are working together, this gap between what you want and what you should have slowly but surely closes. When you are taking care of yourself, listening to what your body wants, suddenly Doritos become utterly irrelevant. The body is supposed to remain in equilibrium and not in conflict. With the help of Dahn Yoga, I now use “healing” language rather than “battle” language to describe the process of working on my body.
