competition

Many adults I spoke with at the Wanderlust Festival this summer in Stratton, Vermont were athletes growing up. When I asked them how their lives would have been different had they practiced yoga as children, they all agreed that they would likely have discovered their strengths as athletes and as individuals in a more gentle and less competitive way.

In today’s world of youth organized sports, much of the focus is on winning, moving fast and being the best. Many of these goals come from outside pressures of parents, coaches and society. Yoga dissolves the external pressures to perform at a fast pace, allowing participants to slow down and realize that they are perfect exactly where and how they are, in the moment.

We have all met people with so-called “Type A” personalities: driven, competitive people who believe they can do a better job at work, coaches who believes that their way is the only way, and live to prove it on the field, the court, or the stadium, and, yes, sports parents who are determined to prove that their child is the next sports superstar.  What motivates such people is a need which can become addictive, so much so that there are those who suggest that adrenaline/epinephrine addiction should be considered in the DSM (the manual classifying mental disorders) as an addiction, alongside addiction to illegal drugs.