Keith Mitchell: Exclusive Interview
OMTimes: When yoga was first suggested to you as a therapy choice after your accident, what did you think yoga was all about?
Keith Mitchell: I took a yoga class while I was playing in New Orleans and I didn’t like it at all, I thought it was weird. That was one class. And then, coming around, when I was in the hospital and meditation was being introduced to me as a practice 
of conscious breathing – a healing breath – for some reason I gravitated to that. If you can imagine being locked in a pit and someone threw you a rope that was the rope that I held on to, the meditation and the conscious breathing of healing myself, I figured this is going to save me. I had belief in the Creator, but I believed this was the tool he has given so that I could save myself and I held on to that and it was my practice.’
OMTimes: Do you remember the moment you truly felt drawn to yoga? Was it something you read or was it one particular practice on the mat?
Keith Mitchell: I was in that space of vulnerability, when you want to heal, you want to heal, and it was resonating with my body and I was connecting with my body on a whole different level then before and it was channeling into nurturing myself – the conscious breathing is nurturing yourself with every breath that you take. I have a method: We have 21,000 breaths a day and an opportunity to nurture, heal, and massage the organs, 21,000 chances every day! All the internal trauma that we have in our first, second and third chakra, is something we can heal by connecting to movements – you create another twist, you got the spinal twist, you’re extending… it’s like a towel that is wet and you kind of wringing it out. These components made sense, it was an alignment and I just flowed with it. I am still flowing [laughing loud now].
