Friends, thank you so much to your responses to my letter to my 12-year-old self.  I loved reading all the things you would tell your 12-year-old selves.

La Gitane asked an interesting question – what would my 12-year-old self say to me?  That reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague a few days ago.  We were talking about books, about what we used to read in our early teens and it turned out we both lived on a diet of Stephen King, James Herbert and rather gruesome murder mysteries.  We both commented on how we used to devour books like “It” and “The Shining” without thinking twice about it but when we return to them now as adults the scare the bejezus out of both of us.

This made me reflect on the sheer amount of fear and baggage we drag behind us as we progress through adulthood.   As kids we can happily get sucked into ghost stories but as adults we read them with more trepidation, noticing every unusal noise.  Well I do at least.

There’s fear and there’s fear of course.  The fear that kicks in when we are actually in danger is one thing, that’s healthy.  The fear of life in general is something else.  Every negative emotion finds its basis in fear; jealousy, anger, bitteness, judgement – the root cause is always fear.  Letting go of this day to day fear and allowing change to happen is hard and takes huge courage.  I spent two years being unhappy in my legal job but too afraid to leave the security of the salary and pension scheme.  When I actually took the plunge and quit everything turned out just fine.  Yes there were hard times when I wondered if I’d made the right choice, yes there was a period of adjustment, but ultimately when it came down to the fundamentals such as my happiness and health it was the right thing to do.

I’m not suggesting you all go out and quit the day job.  By no means!  But most of us have something in our lives we’d like to change but feel as if we are being held back.  Maybe it’s time to feel the fear and do it anyway.**

So in answer to La Gitane, my 12-year-old self would tell me to play more and not worry about things that go bump in the night.  Which ironically is pretty much what I told her.  Make of that what you will!

“It takes tremendous courage to walk [our] spiritual paths with integrity and honour.  No-one relishes the the thought of leaving familiar surroundings… but courage allows us to rise out of that fear into life.  It takes courage to step up to the plate and walk head first into our deepest fears.”

–Darren Main “Spiritual Journeys along the Yellow Brick Road” (p.111)

**Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway is a book by Susan Jeffers.  It was the first “self help” book I ever read and is probably responsible for all this living in the moment yoga stuff I make a living from.  I highly recommend it!

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Apologies for the rather heavy weekend post!  Himself and I are off to Birmingham for a couple of days for a break and to see the wonderful Flight of the Conchords.  I’ll be back Tuesday evening with a fun picture post, so I leave you with this.  I’m sure you’ve all seen it before but these guys never stop being funny.  Have a great weekend!!

(mum and dad c. 1978 – apologies for lack of framing in photo, I was only 4)

My mother used to go to a yoga class once a week. I would have been about 4 or 5 and I remember watching her get ready thinking how elegant she looked in her leotard and footless tights, her long hair hanging down her back. It must have been Thursdays because I used to stay home with my Nan and watch Top of the Pops in my personal favourite evening attire of red dressing gown and Adidas trainers. This yoga, I thought to myself as I danced along to the music on the television imagining what my mother was doing at that moment, must be a beautiful thing. When I grow up I want to do that.

(me with my Nan outside Kings College Chapel, Cambridge c.1978 – check out my tree pose!)

I didn’t have to grow up by much. I went to my first yoga class alongside my mum when I was about 7 or 8 years old and I don’t really remember a time when yoga wasn’t a part of my life.

I wasn’t what you would call a sporty child at school. In fact I was rubbish. Everything always hurt, everything always seemed so difficult. I remember one summer practicing backward somersaults in the back garden all weekend just so I wouldn’t be the laughing stock in gym class the next week, as usual. I never really questioned my bad co-ordination, I just thought we can’t all be good at everything and left it at that. After all I had something that my classmates didn’t. I had yoga.

When I was 15 and working for my Duke of Edinburgh Bronze award, I chose yoga as my “sport” module. When I was 18 and I was doing a lot of performance art alongside my A Levels, I found yoga helped me stretch, breathe, relax. When I was travelling, yoga was a talking point with other backpackers. When I was at university, the Tuesday night yoga class became the hub of my social life, although looking back I suspect I had quite a sedate university education in comparison to a lot of my peers. Yoga was just there. It never felt like a sport, or a gym class. It just felt like my body moving in the way it needed to move, powered by my breath, as my mind stilled and my stresses, my tensions, my worries fell away.

Despite all this it was years before I considered teaching yoga for a living. I still remembered the little girl who couldn’t do a backward somersault to save her life. Who wanted to be taught yoga by her? But then the strangest thing happened. My dad qualified as a yoga teacher.

(dad and me on his 70th birthday – November 2008)

Now I love my dad very much, but if you saw him, you just couldn’t picture it. He’s a slightly overweight accountant who does love a glass of wine now and again (well now really). I guess somewhere along the line mum must have dragged him along to a class too and, like me, he just had to keep going back. Before he knew it he was signed up on a teacher training course.

I talk about how yoga is for EVERYONE a lot, but this was my turning point. This is the point when I realised that yoga isn’t about how strong you are or what you look like. It isn’t about how “perfect” your postures are, or whether you are wearing the right clothes. It isn’t even about austere living and strict rules. I realised that most aspiring yogis and yoginis are just ordinary folk like me with bad back, dodgy hips and podgy tummies, with ordinary jobs that on some days they can’t stand, and ordinary families who, on some days, can’t stand them. And I realised that maybe I could share my experiences of yoga with other people too, just like my dad.

Yogi(ni) readers, what are your earliest memories of yoga? Where did they take you?

Non Yogi(ni) readers, what is your passion, and what are your earliest memories of it?

I’ve been coughing for about three days now and have had to cancel my New Year’s Eve plans for a hot date with the sofa and TV instead. Sigh. Still I’ve been being productive from my sick bed.

As you can see, the Suburban Yogini has undergone an overhaul in preparation for the new year. I have felt this blog has been heading in a new direction for a while so I figured it was time to make it look that way. I’ve added a whole new “About Me” section which should appear in the previous post and also if you click on the pretty pink “About” button! (Thanks to shabbyblogs for that and the awesome header!)

I feel as though I have undergone an overhaul over the last few months as well. I’m not going to pretend 2009 has been an easy year, it hasn’t. It’s been one of the toughest years of my life. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and without this transitionary year I wouldn’t be in the position I am in now – to really live my life to its fullest in 2010.

Happy new year, dear dear readers and thank you for reading. I leave you, not with poetic genius as such, but with the very simple words of Dave Grohl.

It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again