Crescent lunge

I did not always love yoga. I’ve been pretty open about the fact that back in my work-out-until-you-vomit-and-break-your-body days, I thought yoga was a real joke of an “exercise.” But, my, how my opinion has changed over the past three years (three years??). If you, too, feel like yoga is a joke, I would like to try and persuade to reconsider it and perhaps even give it a try. And this is why:

1. You’ll learn to do things you never thought you could - I looked awkward as hell when I first started doing yoga. There’s no way around it. I was tight and weak and rigid and a whole host of other adjectives that do not equate to balance, beauty and grace. There were many, many poses that I looked at and thought, “My body will never move like that.” In trying to get into certain poses, I honestly felt like my joints were cemented shut, never to open into proper form. The amazing thing about yoga, though, is that if you give it your time and your patience, it will give you a new body that does move like that. You’ll be able to do poses you never ever thought you could (like this one and this one). And before you know it, you’ll start to realize there are other things you never thought you could do that are suddenly within reach (like quit your job, go back to school, live in a hammock or move away from someone you love).
2. You’ll push your physical and mental limits (and reap the benefits of both) – I think one of the reasons I never took yoga seriously is that I never understood that the asanas (physical poses) are only the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge is controlling your breath, calming your mind and twisting yourself into a pretzel all at the same time. Yoga is very much a mental challenge and if you can learn to master your own mind in the face of great physical stress, you’ll find that you can replicate this feeling in stressful situations off the mat, too. Suddenly traffic jams, empty bank accounts, snarky coworkers and the like don’t carry as much weight as they once did. When you can control how you react to challenges in life, you hold the entire world in the palm of your hand. It’s a powerful thing. I’m still working on this.
3. You will have something to depend on – If you want it to be, yoga can be just a workout. You can come and sweat and stress your muscles and leave thinking, “Damn, that was a good workout.” But you can also make it more if that’s what you’re looking for. As someone with a rather hectic schedule, I found that yoga very quickly became a reliable retreat where I knew I could come day after day for peace, quiet, calm and balance. Similarly, as someone with a weak-to-nonexistent foundation of faith, I found that yoga gave me something to believe in even if, at first anyway, that something was just me. Yoga does not have to be a religious experience, but one of the yoga sutras, ishvarapranidhana, does call for surrender to a higher power for a complete practice. I have found that my desire to get the most I can out of my yoga practice has led me to seek out what I really believe and, in doing so, I have plucked myself out of the center of my universe and filled that spot with faith in so much more.
4. You will meet amazing people - The law of attraction states that like will attract like. I’ve found that a yoga studio is an excellent place to find like-minded people who care–about themselves, about you, about the planet and about how we treat all of those things. There is great diversity among the people you’ll meet, but you’ll see some common threads connecting you all and that’s a very nice feeling to have, especially when you’re alone in a new place. Your yoga studio will start to feel like home.
5. And ok fine… you will get a sick body – Here’s the thing… I saved this one for last because, truly, if it’s you’re only motivation in practicing yoga, you are doing yourself a serious disservice. I try to downplay the physical side of yoga to get people to focus on its countless other benefits first. But since this is what seems to be on everyone’s minds, I can assure you that, YES, yoga will transform your body. I used to scoff at celebrity interviews (I’m looking at YOU, Jennifer Anniston) in which movie stars claim that yoga is all they do. I call bullshit! That is, I did until that’s what I started doing myself. Practicing yoga has changed the look, feel and strength of every inch of my body. Not to mention, in the last three years I’ve been asked several times (sometimes even by yoga teachers) if I am a dancer. This is of particular interest because throughout my 6 years as an actual dancer in middle and high school, I was never once asked if I was a dancer. I also now have abs that you can see, biceps (biceps??) and thighs that could crush a Mack truck. So there’s that.

Now… who’s coming to yoga with me?