A new student attends my Wednesday morning yoga class at Tiddenfoot Leisure Centre for the first time. I introduce myself and we have a quick chat outside the studio whilst we are waiting for the previous class to finish. She tells me that it is her very first yoga class, nor has she done pilates having focussed on cardio and weights in the gym next door.
She is a busy mother with a full time job that is quite stressful and she tells me she is terrified about joining the class. I say that since there are no objectives in yoga, no timescales, that we can leave out anything we don't want to do, stop as soon as we've had enough and modify anything we do to suit, there is really nothing to be terrified about.
I can see that she is enjoying the class as we get into it and she also appears to have reasonable body awareness. I mention that she doesn't look terrified now, at which she smiles.
At the end of the class, I ask her how she got on and she spoke about two things, firstly some work we did with ties in standing and walking to make us aware of our posture and to encourage us to adopt good posture in sitting, standing and walking.
Secondly it was the 15 minute deep relaxation at the end of the class she spoke about, describing how when I talked about relaxing each body part in turn during the relaxation, this was exactly what happened.
Clearly from what she was saying, this was something of a surprise. I said that a lot of our yoga practice is not about learning new things, but rediscovering things that we already once knew.