Home Features Yoga taught me acceptance and that was the greatest revelation on my...
By Lakhram Bhagirat
Yoga has been around for ages in ancient cultures and mostly practiced on the continent of Asia. The practice of yoga is documented in the Rigveda which is one of the oldest and most sacred books in human history, having been written 8-10 thousand years ago. 
Classical yoga is a part of this Vedic literature and was propounded by Maharishi Patanjali nearly 5000 years ago and now the world is starting to see the benefits of yoga. Though historically associated with Hinduism, yoga is now being practiced in every part of the world.
The benefits of yoga are vast and people are now catching on. Yoga studios are popping up all over the world and more and more people are travelling, particularly, to India to learn yoga.
In Guyana, the same is happening. We are seeing more and more people embrace yoga beyond the surface and are actively trying to learn the artform.
What started as a way to “get back” her childhood flexibility has turned into a journey of self-discovery for Adrienne Gomes or “Annie” as she is known to many. Annie is a 26-year-old student of yoga but she is so good that she has been teaching yoga to many persons in Guyana. 
“When I was smaller, I was very flexible, naturally and I didn’t know to call it yoga. But I would play and do my own thing. I was somewhere around 19-20 years old when me my brother were messing around and he asked if I could still do the thing I tried to do and I was like, I don’t know when I got so stiff. I couldn’t do it. So that’s how I ended up finding yoga because I now started to think well, I need to have a practice is going to help me get back my flexibility. Sounds shallow but I was like I need to get back this flexibility. Now that I’m older, when I think back on when I was much younger, my mother used to practice. So, the first time I saw the sun and the moon salutations, I saw her doing it. I didn’t have enough sense to know at the time and she never discussed it because of her change in spiritual beliefs and all of that,” Annie said.
As time progressed, Annie then discovered that yoga provided her with discipline and she started to delve more deeply in the world of yoga. She realised that it was more than just about regaining her flexibility rather it was a wholesome way of living.
For Annie, yoga is a wholesome way of living and the greatest path to self-discovery that one could imagine. The benefit of yoga is something, she said, we can never attach a price to.
“It is priceless. The most valuable thing. So hidden, so disguised as just a bunch of little stretches but oh my goodness, the wealth of knowledge and wisdom that comes with it. Not just like physically from your body but also your mind, your emotions, your view on spirituality. You can just connect with self. So, the next part of that I will say is that it’s something that you have to constantly work on. You don’t get to do it and stop. If you start on the path, stay the path because if you leave the path it,” she said.
Sitting in the padmasana (lotus) pose in Annie’s yoga studio on Lance Gibbs Street in Queenstown, conversing, she told me that yoga is something that she does for herself. It is a way of balancing her mental health and all the challenges in navigating the world we live in.
“One of the biggest (things yoga taught me) and probably the ones nearest and dearest to me it’s just acceptance. I remember when I started in the beginning, a lot of times one of the phrases people threw around in the yoga talk was progress, not perfection, progress, not perfection. That thing used to nag me because there was a part of me that believed it was perfection somewhere and I need to chase after somewhere along the line that became my thought pattern…I started learning acceptance, that was just yeah, it seems simple but it was one of the biggest door openers for me true acceptance. Then of course, by extension, I now started to see things in a different way, I started to see things, you know, this is the next thing that I got a lot from yoga was gratitude, just learning that sense of, you know, what I’m grateful for what I have.”
Another life changing thing that Annie got from yoga was discipline. The art of yoga has also helped the mother of two to get over her post-partum depression, anxiety and that whole identity crisis one gets at certain parts of their life.
Though Annie has been teaching yoga for almost four years now, she still considers herself as a student of the discipline. She believes that she only tapped in to just about one per cent of what yoga is and by no means considers herself a yogi.
She actually started teaching yoga when she was pregnant with her first child and was approached by an organisation that wanted her to share what she learnt with them. She was heavily pregnant and did not want to pursue it at the time but in the end, she agreed after gentle nudging from her husband and from there she continued climbing.
“I couldn’t have orchestrated to go from teaching a small group of people to standing up to teaching 1000s of people at Pinktober. It was just a whole switch. I think the universe truly just roll these opportunities in my path. For whatever reason, I don’t know yet…at that Pinktober I was pregnant with my daughter and nobody knew because I wore big clothes, trying to hide it. I didn’t want to know what it is yet. But yet, I did that 5k walk and taught yoga right after,” the mother related.
Annie uses the core disciplines she learned in yoga to parent her children and one of those core disciplines is patience. For her, a lot of patience is required to deal with her toddler.
“I come into motherhood, knowing, listen, this is just like when I come on my mat. This is one of my roles that I play. If I’m being a mother, I am being a mother. A mother has to be patient. She has to be loving, she has to be kind, but she has to be firm and disciplined. So, it helps you to find a good mix and balance that is suited for each child because each child is different. My daughter is one side of parenting, my son is a whole other side and they got the big personalities.”
Annie opened her own yoga studio just about two months ago at 229 Lance Gibbs Street, Queenstown, Georgetown. You can find her on Facebook – Asana Athletics; Instagram – Annieyoga_fitness.
