My journey of yoga started in Mohanji’s class. As a beginner, I was still learning and wasn’t as flexible and motivated as I am now. Mohanji used to randomly call on people to recite the slogams during Surya Namaskram. In the beginning, I was scared of not knowing the slogams, but then I started to compete with my family to be the one to say the them in class. This was a motivating factor to learn it and make sure I was always prepared to be called. AT that point, when Mohanji called on me, I was extremely confident and was proud of myself afterwards. Now I can see that this has helped me better understand chakras which in turn has helped with kriya yoga practices.

As I moved into Satvinderji’s class, the difficulty level started increasing. One example of this is when we were preparing to do 108 Surya Namaskaram for the Rathasaptami practice. At first, I thought Mataji was joking. One hundred and eight Surya Namaskaram seemed impossible! I never thought I would be able to do what I did. As I practiced, the struggle in doing more, decreased. This is proof of the saying, “Practice makes perfect,” and even though I didn’t achieve perfection, I am hope fule that I can achieve that in the future. Even now, stength and balance exercises are  a challenge for me, but I can see that I have improved so much because I was barely able to keep my leg up in leg rises and stay standing for a few seconds in any balancing pose.

Overall, my motivation has increased because I was able to learn new things about how much I am capable of with the few improvements I make everyday.

Thank you both so much for guiding me through this experience. I am looking forward to seeing how I progress in the coming years. Though I have gone through lots of ups and downs, one of the many postives we gained was being given the opportunity to learn yoga along with my family from gurus.