My thoughts exactly at the beginning

For fear of leading people to believe that yoga is all rainbows and butterflies and crying on your mat, I thought I’d share my experience with yoga from the very beginning. Back when you’d find me rolling my eyes and cursing the world. Back before I liked it.

Yoga can be an incredibly intimidating practice. We see people do…

This

... or this...

or this.

… and think, “Oh helllll no.” This is a normal reaction. I still think this when I see things I can’t do. All that has changed is that I look at things I can’t do and realize I can’t do it now, but it will come. With practice, it will come.

But it took me a while to reach that mindset with yoga. Before I started doing it, I thought yoga was THE stupidest exercise a person could do. I thought it was either crazy, impossible poses like those above or calm, simple stretching. As it turns out, it is both of these things, yes, but a whole lot more in between, too.

My very fist yoga class was at a very traditional studio. I hated it. Haaaaated it. It was slow and boring and my body didn’t fit into the poses. I made up my mind that I was designed to do this. I let it rest for a while and then gave hot yoga a try. I had interviewed a woman in New York for a freelance piece and off the record when we were just chatting, she started ranting on about how gloriously wonderful hot yoga is. I looked at her the way so many people look at me now, like she was a raging lunatic.

If yoga alone sucks then yoga with heat must be what hell is like.

But I couldn’t get her words out of my mind. “When the doors open at the end of class and the cool air rushes in over you… it’s like nothing else.”

Alright fiiiiiiiine. So I tried it. It was still uncomfortable. I still looked awkward. I couldn’t do most of the poses and I wanted to vomit about 15 minutes in.

But then I came back. And I came back again. And I came back again. Why? Because I was getting better. My chaturangas (pushups) that started as an inch dip on my knees got deeper and deeper until I was able to support my weight (all of it, off my knees) all the way down to the ground and then gracefully shoot up into upward dog like Ariel on the rock in The Little Mermaid.

My triangle started out crunched over and uncomfortable. I couldn’t reach the ground. I couldn’t hold it long enough. Slowly but surely my body figured out what I wanted to do. If you ask enough times (and politely enough), your body will catch on. It’s a little slow sometimes.

I hated peaceful warrior for a long time and ranted on about how that all changed here.

Camel was the worst of all. Oh, how I loathed that damn camel. I couldn’t bend all the way back and drop my head without getting a rush of incapacitating dizziness. I don’t know what happened (it took a long time), but finally one day it just worked. I do know that camel is a very vulnerable pose with an exposed throat and heart. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to be that vulnerable at first. If you fight yoga, it will fight you back.

My point in all of this is not to say: I hated yoga but I stuck with it and now I’m an expert. No one is an expert of yoga. We are all students of the practice, even our teachers. That’s what is so cool about it. There is always something new to learn, something to do better.

So if you tried yoga and hated it, give it another try (or several). It takes a while. If you’re starting out and are expecting an intensely gratifying and emotional experience, don’t force it. It’ll come with time. For now, laugh at yourself, understand your temporary limits and let your body catch up to where you want it to be. It’ll all fall into place.

Love love love

I thought about titling this post “That Time I Took LSD,” as this was my first experience in what my studio calls the Long, Slow, Deep class, but I’ve decided to shift gears and go the heavy route on you because I cried in savasana and that is kind of setting the tone.

I used to cry a lot at my old studio. A lot might be an exaggeration. More frequently than I should have. It was a rough time for me (as rough as times get when you are well fed, employed and loved, but you know what I mean). I didn’t like my job, but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I didn’t have any local friends. I felt like a complete failure at 24.

Sometimes I came into the studio crying. Maybe work sucked or maybe I was just tired. I’d come in trying to hold it together and then lose it once I rolled out my mat and hit child’s pose. By the end of the class, I felt strong and refreshed.

Other times I’d come in fine and then be crying by the end. This was usually a combination of moving music, successful poses and a general sense of accomplishment.

Tonight’s class was kind of a combination of these two scenarios. I haven’t been practicing regularly because I’m too busy. This is an excuse that true yogis simply will not tolerate, but that’s all I’ve got. So I haven’t been practicing and that makes me sad. I haven’t been practicing because I have a billion things going on at once. I work from 6:30am to 12:30am, seven days a week. I do not stop. It’s not hard, necessarily. Just… constant. I am constantly doing something.

So when I made a promise to myself that I’d attend class tonight, I was already kind of emotional. I missed it and I was happy to be going. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with the LSD class. I assumed it would just be a slowed down version of a vinyasa (flow) class. Noooope. Not at all.

Despite my semi-regular yoga practice, I am surprisingly unflexible. I like the flow classes because when I don’t have to hold something for a long time, I can kind of just breeze over it without noticing my inadequacies. This was not that class. This was a class where we held all of the poses I hate the most for, like, 5 minutes each… for a total hour and a half. This was a class where your inadequacies stare you in the face. But it felt kind of perfect.

It was the first hour and a half in about a month that I didn’t feel like I was supposed to be doing something else. This kind of class is as much a mental challenge as anything else. I fidgeted a good bit but succeeded in clearing my mind on and off.

My teacher Tanner is the best teacher I’ve ever had… perhaps for anything. I can be slumped into some turd of a pose and he’ll come over and pull me in all kinds of directions and suddenly it’s like I’m in a new body, a new, gorgeous, graceful, bendy body. My body does things it probably should not when Tanner pushes me. I love that.

So here I am stretching and bending and fidgeting and sweating and maybe I don’t notice that I’m opening and releasing and renewing all at once. But when it came time for savasana just like always and Tanner draped a chilled lavender towel over my face just like always, I cried for the first time at this studio.

Some people theorize that yoga can make you cry because we hold emotions in our body, that the body holds on to trauma long after the mind has moved on. So we tense up and tighten ourselves into little stress balls and it’s not until those muscles are pulled and stretched that the emotion is released, perhaps in the form of a puddle of tears on a yoga mat.

I think that makes sense. But I also know that a yoga studio feels like the safest place in the world to me. It’s a good place to cry because it’s a safe place to cry. I remember being intimidated by yoga, but now I feel like I belong… even when I’m not bendy. I think anyone can belong in a yoga studio because it’s a place of calm, a place of support, a place of love and a place of strength.

Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” happened to be our savasana song and maybe that contributed to the tears. She says, “may you find some comfort here,” and I did. I always do.

My fruit basket runneth over, too.

Yesterday went something like this:

• 6:30am – 8am – freelance work / blog
• 8:30am – 12:30pm – Graduate Associateship
• 12:30pm – 1:45pm – freelance work / blog
• 2pm – 3pm – class
• 3:15pm – 3:45pm – grocery shop while on a conference call (truth)
• 4pm – 4:30pm – make supercharge me cookies for a potluck
• 4:30pm – 4:45pm – breathe
• 5pm – 6:30pm – turbokick class
• 6:30pm – 6:45pm – ab crunch class
• 7pm – 7:30pm – Student Dietetic Association meeting
• 7:45pm – 10pm – blog / email / freelance work
• 10pm – 1am – homework
• 2am – bed

But a funny thing happened yesterday as my mind was running nonstop and my body was running from one commitment to the next… I felt lucky. I felt lucky and capable and energized and all the things I haven’t felt since struggling to keep my head above water this past year.

I can’t keep up this pace forever, but on days when I need to I know I can look at my schedule as an opportunity rather than a burden. Yesterday, one of my professor’s read us an op-ed on how to drive your professor crazy. It included points like missing class and then asking if you missed something “important”, not acknowledging email receipt, sleeping in class, expecting special help and attention after missing class, etc. I agree with all of that.

And one of the most important things she said was that students need to look at schoolwork with the understanding that we chose to be there. We chose the institution, chose the major, chose the classes (to an extent, excluding required courses), chose the schedule. Some may have been limited to a certain institution due to finances or to a certain major due to those offered at the school or to certain classes that are offered in a term or to a schedule that fits their life. But even within those confines and with all those limiting factors, somewhere in there we each made a choice. No one can force us to be there.

It’s the same way with life, I think. We’re often limited by finances, social standards, work schedules, geography, education level and (sadly still) race and gender. But somewhere in there, we still have a choice.

It may not be something practical or tangible (workout or Jersey Shore? sleep or study? peanut butter or almond butter?? oh, the horror). And having choices doesn’t necessarily associate with an abundance of options either. So if you’re feeling without, try to find something within.

Today, regardless of my surroundings and schedule, I choose strength from within.

Today, regardless of my surroundings and schedule, I choose love from within.

Today, regardless of my surroundings and schedule, I choose peace from within.

We can’t control what goes on around us, but we can choose to control everything that goes on inside of us. When we feel least free to live our lives the way we want is when we are most free to choose how we interpret that, how we let it affect us and how we move forward.

How will you choose to make this day your own?

“Raise your hopeful voice; you have a choice. You make it now.“