#Own it…

You know that saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, well I am here to tell you my friends, I learned you can teach an old yogi (this girl) new tricks.  A few weeks ago, I was in a Hatha class being taught by Leyette, one of Beyond’s first Yoga Teacher Training graduates.  The class was flowing along nicely, you know those ones with the great combination of poses, yoga knowledge, and a touch of humour.  Then for a moment she had us plant our feet, place our fists on our hips, and in her brilliant words “pose like superman”.

*Mike drop.

It was a gamechanger.  Seriously, it blew my mind a little bit.  I have spoken before about how much yoga can boost your confidence (honestly, I teach Warrior II pose almost every class because of it), but standing like a superhero was enlightening and truly just made me own it.

I realized something after class, most of us don’t own it very often when it comes to our physical selves.  I would love to say I do, but I don’t always.  Sadly, for the most part I think very few of us do.

And really, why don’t we own it?  These bodies of ours, they are like superheroes. Just think about this.  In one minute, your heart beats between 60-80 times circulating 4-6 litres of blood through your body.  In that same minute messages are travelling from your brain along your nerves at approximately 322 kilometers per hour; you will take on average 12 breaths and have approximately 50 different thoughts, while your nose is able to distinguish between 10,000 different smells, your eyes between about 10 million different colours and you can detect taste in .0015 seconds which is literally faster than a blink of an eye.

These are superhero numbers.  And that’s not even talking about how your liver, the organ which can regenerate itself, actually has more functions than the amount of words in this blog post; how that if you took all of your blood vessels and laid them end to end they would circle the earth 4 times, the total surface area of your lungs would spread out to the size of a tennis court, and if your DNA were uncoiled it would stretch from here to Pluto.

*Not this Pluto

*This one.

One more: our bodies are made up of around 70 000 000 000 000 cells (seriously, I counted the zeros 3 times).

That is amazing, and honestly the tip of the iceberg.  So, this my friends, is the trick I learned that perhaps we should all try more often.  Instead of focusing on the size of our arms, the length of our legs or well, the limpness of our hair, we should truly respect and have gratitude to our bodies for the incredible things they do every minute of every day, of every month, of every year and just own it.

*Oh, I think we all knew I would be Batgirl.

P.S. I would love to hear what you think.  Please “Leave a Reply” below, or you can email me directly at yogabeyondwords@gmail.com.

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