Celebrating One Year of Faith-Based Yoga

This was shared in class on September 28, 2023 to mark one year of teaching Faith-Based Yoga at the Cleveland Family YMCA.

In the last year and a half, I have been adjusting to major life change. We had our second daughter. Then we moved from Colorado, where I’m from, here to Tennessee. And after 12 years of work experience planning events in the nonprofit sector that really shaped my adult life, I became a stay at home mom to our two girls. Then I started teaching faith based yoga here at the Cleveland Family YMCA.

Leaving everything that was familiar and that had shaped my life up to that point caused me to feel like I was re-learning life. My ways of operating didn’t work anymore and my hard-earned life experience didn’t translate to this new season. It would feel incredibly angering or heartbreaking at times when the things I felt to be guiding principles in my life no longer worked in this new chapter.   

So teaching these faith-based yoga classes has been a huge part of my own spiritual and emotional journey in the last year. It has given me a space where I can begin to release my need for control and find new ways of operating.

For example, in my work life of planning events, I was extremely meticulous, thorough and left nothing to chance. Now, I am able to embrace new ways of planning, preparing and arriving to teach yoga as a mom of two toddlers (where control is an illusion). It’s much less of controlling every variable and much more of gratefully finding windows of time to prepare, avoiding haste or panic and moving slowly and patiently, and having an abundance of grace for myself in the process.

Perhaps most of all, though, as I have walked through this season of re-learning life and everything feeling unfamiliar, it has highlighted my need for our loving, faithful, redeeming God. I am grateful that I didn’t know how hard this move would be or I wouldn’t have done it!

But I have had hope knowing these things:

1)      God uses hardship for our good and for his glory. I am grateful to the Lord he has been and is working all things for good in our move to Tennessee, even when I have been angry or hurt by the feelings of change or loss. 

2)      I have also had hope experiencing that God draws us closer to himself and transforms us through our hardship. I am grateful for how God has been and is using this move to change me and draw me to rely on Him.

3)      Lastly, I’ve had hope experiencing how grief and joy can coexist. I have felt this over and over in the last year and half. The pain of change and being changed but also the joy of new blessings coming to light.

Some of those blessings are the friendships I have formed and these Faith-Based Yoga classes. When friends come to yoga class or those in yoga class become friends, I am especially overwhelmed with gratitude. I am in awe of God’s kindness, provision and timing. I didn’t know that when I was certified in yoga 4 years ago, that he would bring me to Cleveland, TN, with all of you, to get to teach, at a time when he knew I would need it too.

Now that I can look back on a year of teaching yoga, I believe he has provided immeasurably more than I could have asked or imagined. I am grateful for how he intended and worked this move for our good, even when I didn’t see it or believe it.

Our devotion again says “You may not know what’s before you, but you know the One who has already been there. You can’t do anything about what’s behind you, but you can trust the One who is with you, the One who is going before and following you, the One who is working all things together for your good and His glory.”

As we go into our final resting pose, I invite you to reflect on something in your own life within the last year where you have seen God working all things for God and his glory, maybe in a difficult situation. Take a few minutes of reflection and gratitude to the Lord for how you have seen his faithfulness and kindness.

I will pray to close our time.

Lord, thank you for hemming us in, going before and behind, keeping us in your presence even when we doubt or fear. We are grateful for your promise to work all things for good. Thank you for the ways you have gone before me and prepared a place for me among these people and these friends – beyond what I could have imagined. As each of us today has reflected in our own experience in the last year, thank you for all the ways you have shown your kindness, faithfulness and provision. And may we believe those things to be true, even when we don’t see it and the ways you are working. Lord, thank you for loving us so much. In Jesus name, Amen.