Why do I practise yoga?

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT... this is NOT the driving force to my yoga practice. Why then do I spend hours a day creating shapes with my body which looks anatomically self-destructive through a pair of logical eyes? Well, I practice because I FEEL great when I practice.

A FEELING can never be fully explained in words. It must be EXPERIENCED. What kind of feelings do I relate to feeling GREAT? Great means to me being at peace yet strong; being light yet grounded; being free but rooted; being creative and productive yet relaxed and at ease. And each time I practice yoga, I FEEL all of the above. These feelings have only come to being a daily occurrence in my life in my early thirties. My age as at writing this blog is 37.

I had a traditional upbringing in the sense that I studied hard and did well in school. Graduated from university then went to work earning tonnes of cash. It was all work and no play till one morning I felt a pain in my left hip whilst getting myself out of bed for work. For the first time in a long time I felt that I needed to check this pain out at the doctor's. My usual self would've just ignored the pain and gotten to work. But for some reason I was NOT my usual self this particular morning.

Surely enough the ultra-scan and tests confirmed a benign albeit big tumour which required immediate surgery as the tumour was attached right above the outside of my uterus. At approximately 10cm by 10cm by 10cm this one has to go before it feeds on what is left of me and basically take over my whole being at 48kgs. And with that diagnosis I went under the knife just one week later.

A routine 3-hour laparoscopy became a nerve-wrecking unexpected 8-hour surgery especially to my family members waiting in the hospital. I of course was in a different dimension of existence under general anaesthetic where time did not exist until the moment I woke up to an excruciating pain on my scalp which was the last thing I expected coming out of this surgery since my tumour was in my abdomen. A few hours later the bleeding on my head was attended to by a nurse who explained that this was a consequence of resting my head too long on the rubber donut whilst I was on the surgery table. My FEELING at this point was NOT so great. In fact I felt like crap. My THOUGHT at this point: "It's so painful! Why the hell am I alive with this pain on my head?! What the fuck happened to me?!"

Nothing happened to me at least under general anaesthetic. Nothing in the sense that I didn't dream, I didn't FEEL anything, I didn't exist. It was as if I was NOTHING for those 8 hours. Coming out of the general anaesthetic however was a whole different story. And waking up to a severely uncomfortable existence was disorientating to say the least as I com