Change is an inevitable force that moves our lives through
their natural cycles of ebb and tide. While some change is consciously and
intently sought out, sometimes the best change comes about our lives unnoticed and
unsolicited – such as the day yogini Ohoud Saad walked into her first yoga
class by mere chance, leading her through a series of events that forever
transformed her life.
Accidentally in Love
Growing up in a big family as an angry child, Ohoud often
lived with a lot of bottled up anger, a matter which prompted her take up
jogging for a long while. Although it was momentarily relieving, jogging never
fixed anything. And it wasn’t long before a knee injury forced her to quit
jogging which led her to explore other workout options. At that point, yoga was
as good as kickboxing – it was all new to her – but she felt intrigued to try
out yoga.
“I loved it, but I loved it as a workout,” Ohoud recalls. “I
could tell that its rhythm was different. I didn’t know at the time what it was,
but it just kept really pulling me back to it.”
With newfound love for yoga, Ohoud started seeking out new
classes wherever she could find them; a search that took her through the
different kinds of yoga she never knew existed. “If you ask me today what was
the kind of yoga I started with, I wouldn’t know,” Ohoud says. “But it was
Ashtanga yoga that I eventually really liked.”
After a few months of committed practice, Ohoud put yoga on
pause for a family trip which spanned her entire summer. “During that vacation,
I had a very strange feeling because I realized that the things that I didn’t
like about myself were reemerging,” she says. “But when did they go away in the
first place?
“The only thing that had changed in that phase of my life
was that I had started doing yoga and that I stopped it for those two months.
It was then that I understood that there is a lot more to yoga than meets the
eye. The physical practice was just the beginning.”
From then on, Ohoud’s return to yoga taught her plenty on
how to deal with life’s challenges both inwardly and outwardly. “It almost
works indirectly on the things that you don’t like,” she explains. “That’s why
there’s no guidebook for how yoga influences your life. Every person is completely different in terms of what they’re open to, what they let in, and
how they process the things they go through.”
With growing commitment for yoga over time, Ohoud and her
family could clearly see the effect it had on her. “My parents thought I was
maturing, but it was really yoga, and it was the meditative part of it.”
Meditation, Awareness and Achieving Oneness
Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word yuj which means ‘to
unite’. To achieve this unison, yoga calls for the alignment of thoughts,
feelings and actions. “Let’s say someone is trying to lose weight; although
they’re aware they shouldn’t eat certain things, they may still defy that
thought and act otherwise. In that case, the thoughts and actions are not
aligned,” she explains. “This example can be scaled from the simplest to most
complex matters in life.”
Nowadays, it’s no secret that the mind can control the
entire body. Many experiments have shown how far the quality of thought can
influence the body positively or negatively, such as the case with placebo effect. “Through yoga, you do the same thing but you start with the body to
heal or to bring oneness to the mind and the soul.”
Unlike how meditation is generally perceived, it can be
quite dynamic. While most people would think meditation is just sitting and
thinking of nothing, it is actually a regulatory process of thought that gives
the mind very specific things to think about. “It’s about being present, about
being in the here and now,” says Ohoud. “You can meditate while you’re
gardening, you can meditate while you’re cooking, you can literally meditate
while doing anything so long as you live fully through whatever it is that
you’re doing right now.”
Despite meditation being fit for practice along with any
given task we undertake, the hassle of maneuvering through daily demands tends
to direct our focus outwardly most of the time, with little to no time for understanding
how we think and feel, and whether such thoughts and feelings are aligned with
our actions. “We don’t like to put ourselves under the spotlight because more
often than not we’re actually scared of what we’re going to find. A lot of us
just kind of escape, and this is how we do it; we project everything
outwardly,” says Ohoud.
What yoga does is that it redirects your awareness inside. “When
you start focusing on your breathing and you start being good to your body, this
affects your mind positively,” she adds. “Through increasing your physical
wellness, your mental wellness increases as well.”
While problems and challenges may be unique in nature, Ohoud
believes that being aware of their roots sits at the heart of coming up with
sound solutions – even if it means being aware of how we breathe.
Since her early childhood, Ohoud has suffered from asthma
which meant she was constantly on medications and vaccines in order to barely
breathe properly. However, yoga helped her achieve what modern medicine
couldn’t.
“With a lot of work on
the breath through pranayama and through Ashtanga, the regular yoga practice,
I’ve really been able to control my breathing in ways I never could have
imagined,” says Ohoud who owes her successful mountain ascents to yoga.
According to Ohoud,
proper breathing, which is focal to Ashtanga yoga, can influence us in many
more ways. “Whenever your status changes, your breathing changes as well. When
you’re angry, your breaths are short and rapid, but that may change if you’re
scared, happy, or calm,” she notes. “My yoga teacher always used to say, 'What
if we can reverse the process? If our state of mind can alter our
breath, can we through breath and through control of the breath control our
state of mind?' And the answer is ‘yes,’ because when you learn how to breathe,
when you learn how to prolong the breath and bring the heart rate down to calm
yourself down, you can adapt to any situation that arises in life.”
The Practice of Stretching the Mind
If you’ve ever seen
someone practice advanced yoga postures, you would probably be amazed by the
amount of physical flexibility they display. However, the gateway to physical
flexibility lies in mental flexibility as Ohoud puts it.
“‘I’m not flexible
enough for yoga’ is an excuse I often hear for people not practicing yoga,”
says Ohoud. “To me, it sounds like they’re saying ‘I’m too dirty to take a
shower.’ If you shower, you’ll be clean. Similarly, if you practice yoga,
you’ll be flexible.”
As a teacher, Ohoud
often finds herself addressing people’s mental rather than physical concerns.
“In practice, what often stops people isn’t their bodies, but in fact their
fear. Sometimes they’re afraid of falling, that’s why I like to tell my students
to consciously fall first to understand that it’s okay to fall,” says Ohoud. “Once
you lose that fear, you’ll see that you can actually push yourself farther than
you thought you could.”
Like many other yoga
teachings, flexibility extends beyond the yoga mat, bringing change to almost
every aspect of one’s life – a practice Ohoud has become all too familiar with.
“Sometimes you may
have the left leg in half lotus, the right leg is crossing over, you’re
twisting your spine, and everything is just really compact, and the teacher
still tells you to focus on your breath, and just keep breathing,” she says. “This
can very easily simulate a situation in your day-to-day life where you’re
feeling clobbered one way or the other, or you’re angry with all the traffic,
but then you breathe your way out of it. You relax the mind, and you relax the
body.
“So a lot of the
times, the flexibility that we work on physically is reflected in the
flexibility of the mind, being open to what you can potentially do and being
open to how you can behave in worldly situations.”
Seeing as how yoga
impacted her life in so many ways, Ohoud became a certified teacher in March
2015, a means through which she continues to keep the yoga teachings alive,
bringing positive change to as many lives as they touch. If you want to learn
more about yoga, its philosophy and basically everything yoga related, make
sure you follow Bindu by Ohoud on Facebook and Instagram.
Namaste.
