Help Beginners End Their Fear of Yoga


A long time ago, we learned to crawl and then we learned to walk. The idea is a cliché of sorts, but it represents a natural progression of things. When we’re babies and learn things like crawling, there isn’t a whole lot of technique involved, we just do it again and again until we get it right. Doing yoga poses requires the same approach in many ways.

We do have to be careful in certain ways, like knowing to stretch our front in cobra instead of compressing the spine and not forcing ourselves into lotus pose by twisting our knees. But while we remember certain rules about protecting our bodies in yoga poses, our minds need to just go with it like we did when we were toddlers who were learning to walk.

Most of us probably do remember when we first learned to drive a car. We did have to be careful, but at some point, we let go of our fears and trusted ourselves to actually go the speed limit as we finally convinced ourselves it wouldn’t kill us to do it. Think back on that time. Remember when going 30 or 40 miles per hour seemed really fast?

It wasn’t fast compared to the higher speeds on the highway, but it didn’t matter. It was the fastest you had ever gone before, so it was thrilling. It was an accomplishment. It was a never-before-experience of a personal best.

When you move into a Yoga pose that you don’t have experience with, think back to that day in the car. Don’t compare it to what the person next to you is doing. Experience it in the present tense, just like you did that first time the speedometer hit 40mph, and let yourself feel truly like you are flying.

Yogasync Me!  New to Yoga and curious about backbends?  Try this:

45 min Beginner’s Backbend Workshop


Share the love

About Vincent Gerbino

Vincent Gerbino is a YogaFit™ Certified Yoga Teacher. “Yoga isn’t what I do, it is who I am.” Yoga completely changed my life for the better. Soon after I started my own practice, I said to myself that I had to eventually become a teacher so I could give to the world what Yoga gave to me. In 2006, Vincent began teaching Yoga, five years after he began his own practice. Vincent is also a trained barefoot runner, a co-organizer of the Boulder Barefoot Running Club, and enjoys bicycling, rollerblading and hiking.


Leave a Reply

