Mind Body Bowl: Think, move and eat your way to a more balanced life. Annie Clarke

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СКАЧАТЬ my teenage years, and especially as I got to university, I struggled a lot with both energy levels and digestive issues. Things seemed to get worse and worse until eventually I felt that it was having such an impact on my quality of life that I totally despaired. I remember calling my mum on an almost daily basis at a total loss about what to do. Every time I ate I was in so much discomfort, and not a moment went by that I wasn’t aware of some sort of stomach-bloating after eating. I didn’t even understand that it wasn’t normal until my mum tried to get me to describe what I was feeling and I realized that other people didn’t have this 24/7 digestive awareness. On top of all that, I got to the point where my body was seemingly so exhausted just trying to digest whatever I fed it that I couldn’t physically stay awake after eating.

      I eventually got to the point where I was so miserable that something really had to change. I decided to do a total 360-degree lifestyle turnaround and take out everything and anything from my diet that I thought could possibly cause any sort of stomach issues. I felt that structure would be really valuable to me, so I followed a strict high-protein diet, eating very simple meals based around chicken, turkey, eggs and fish, usually accompanied by brown rice and steamed veg. It was the sort of diet you would expect a body-builder to follow and, combined with some serious gym training to try to keep myself feeling strong and confident, I really bought into this rigid plan. I was in the best shape of my life: strong, fit and healthy, and for the first time in a long while I had the energy to get through each day again. My gut was almost healed, too – in fact, after just six weeks the improvement was so dramatic that I couldn’t believe I had waited so long to make changes.

      However, while I felt as though I had proved a miracle to myself in terms of my body, I began to struggle in other areas of my life. I was no longer drinking alcohol, and as a young adult in London whose friends had all started working in the City and many of whom were boozing their way from Wednesday to Sunday, I felt as though I was pretty isolated socially. My diet and newly discovered teetotal ways didn’t go down particularly well in social situations, and often I would just choose not to go to that party, or dinner, or anything else due to a fear of the undesired attention I might draw.

      I found that I developed a totally different lifestyle imbalance, whereby my quest for feeling good physically had caused me to shut myself away and lose out on quality time with the people I loved. I created space between me and my friends because although I was paying meticulous attention to making choices that made me feel good physically, I wasn’t allowing myself to really relax in social situations. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by eating and drinking differently to everyone else, but I didn’t want to sabotage all the progress I had made, either.

      Over time I began to develop my understanding of true health and happiness as being so much more than just committing to a certain plan or regime created by someone else. While regimes absolutely served their purpose at points along my journey in helping to rid me of old habits, ultimately they were created for someone else with a different body and lifestyle from mine. Also, trying to stick to something so rigid led me, in the long run, to feel deprived in other areas of my life.

      What I discovered was that you don’t have to take an all-or-nothing approach, committing 100 per cent to taking what works for someone else and pasting it into your own life. You can draw inspiration from different theories, examples and other people’s experiences, holding on to just the bits that work for you and letting go of the things that don’t – without any guilt or feelings of failure.

      As I became more in touch with my own body, I began to understand how to adapt to what it needed at different times. I began to think of being healthy as a dynamic process whereby different days, weeks, seasons and shifts in day-to-day activity levels, the weather and a hundred other factors affected how I felt, and that responding directly to how I was feeling was much more beneficial than adhering to some rigid plan just because I thought it was healthy. I found myself learning so much about how my own body responds to different foods and exercises that I was able to discover what makes me feel my best. The difficulty was sticking with things long enough to figure out what really made a difference, and also accepting that even if something suits my body at a certain time, it doesn’t mean it will a few months later. So, of course, it takes a lot of patience and trust that the entire process is ultimately a positive experience.

      After outgrowing a job that I absolutely loved, I was a little lost about what to do with myself. I decided to qualify as a personal trainer as a way of earning a living. It made sense at the time as I had trained myself so much in the past that it seemed like a natural step. I wanted to share what I had learned, develop my own knowledge of the body and to help people build better relationships with themselves. I began training a few clients, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t feel driven to become the best trainer I could be. I wanted to take on more clients, but didn’t feel that I should be building new relationships when I wasn’t 100 per cent committed. I needed to find a way to earn a living and decided that I was probably going to have to find myself a ‘real’ job. I had always wanted to do a yoga teacher training course to develop my own practice and learn more about it, and so I decided to scrape together the last of my savings to take that time for myself before I got into the world of work where, inevitably, it would be a struggle to take a month out at any point in the foreseeable future. I booked a last-minute flight to Goa, India, and found a yoga school with a spare space in Agonda, South Goa.

       ‘Understanding what works for you is an amazing skill to develop.’

      As part of the training we started teaching just a few days in – and I finally realized I had found my thing. As clichéd as it sounds, for the first time in as long as I could remember I felt totally at home, comfortable, confident, calm and peaceful. Something about it seemed so natural to me and I loved every minute of teaching from day one. I felt like I was creating a really wonderful connection with every student, and opening the door for them to connect with themselves. Facilitating that is one of the most wonderful things to watch. I really believe that I am offering them the key to something that they already have within themselves but don’t know how to access. It is so moving to see how my students develop and grow, not just in their physical practice but also in the mental and emotional strength that they discover.

      Becoming a teacher came at exactly the right moment. I really believe that all those occasions in the past when I had looked into doing a course and had decided for one reason or another not to do so was because it wasn’t my time yet. To really give all that you can as a teacher takes a lot of hard work, and in my own experience with personal training I wasn’t doing the right thing, or perhaps the timing wasn’t right for having the necessary drive to develop myself in that direction. But a few short months later, with my qualification in hand, I felt – and still feel – driven to become the best yoga teacher I can be.

      I was thrown in at the deep end with teaching, and I made a pact with myself to say ‘yes’ as often as possible to develop my teaching experience and to continue to learn and grow both as a teacher and as a student myself. I had to give myself a pep talk on many occasions to rid myself of the ‘new teacher nerves’ and find the confidence to accept opportunities with an open mind. Within two months of returning from India, I was teaching a room of sixty students for an event, and teaching more hours in a week than I expected to have done in the first few months. My confidence grew and I would bound out of bed at 5.30 a.m., ready for my first class or client of the day without a single thought of how anti-social the hour was! I was working seven days a week but it hardly felt like work. I was saying ‘yes’ to everything, keen to learn СКАЧАТЬ