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.