Amazing Women, Amazing Weekend.

You don't have to search to find out who you are, you have to get quiet and remember who you have been all along.

YogaFit level 5 training was held this past weekend in Longwood, Florida.

I have been to everything from a Yoga Bikini Boot Camp to a silent meditation retreat and trainings in between and have never been on a bad yoga weekend. Some experiences are more interesting than others, but I always manage to get something out of them even if it is in retrospect. This weekend was different right from the beginning. The required reading for the weekend was Deb Shapiro’s ‘Your Body Speaks Your Mind.'  About self-care and listening to what your body is telling you about your life and health. We also received Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of NOW’. How to identify your ‘pain body’ and cast it away to make room for the light that is already in you that your pain body cannot survive in, (Spoiler alert! You are the light!)

We were 19 women all together, 18 trainees and 1 trainer. The collective energy of our souls recognized what we had in this room before our ‘pain bodies’ did. Within an hour of coming together we felt comfortable enough with each other to share our stories on a very personal level. The room in the ballet school that the training was being held in was a cozy little Shangri-La and fears, competition and judgments were left on the steamy sidewalk outside.

Women of all ages, shapes and sizes welcomed, supported and gave helpful advice to each other over the course of the two days together. I hesitate to speak specifically of what was said because that belongs to the people who were there. The stories that were shared ran the spectrum of difficult times to unthinkable tragedy. We rallied around each other the way only a room full of strong women can do. (Pero), It wasn’t all Lilith Fair, we had a lot of laughs and I had a great dinner at the hotel with Janet our fearless leader, who shared a lot of her own personal stories of life. Using her own stories and encouraging us, (not that we needed encouragement!) to share ours in a way that related to the text at hand was an easy and enlightening way to understand the material on a deeper level. We can all relate to the human experience since we are all after all, human. Culminating this training into being the most personal one, for me, to date.

Of course during a guided meditation where we had to repeat affirmations it was all I could do at the end to not throw a Stuart Smalley in there and yell out, “And dog gone it, people like me!” But, I bit my tongue and giggled to myself. Someday I will be a grown up.

At the end of the two days we had listened, laughed, wept, danced and we were somehow transformed into someone else than who we were when we arrived there. We realized it is not what we learn that enlightens us but the pain from our past that we let go of LIGHTENS us. Amazing people, and a truly amazing weekend.