10. Chapter 6: The Pull to Practice Yoga

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Transcript

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Chapter 6. The Pull to Practice Yoga. Yoga wasn't a brand new concept to me. I had been innately drawn to it when I was 10 years old, and it was offered at my school as a yoga for kids extracurricular. I remember flipping through the pamphlet of after four activities offered and being so excited when I came across yoga. I called my best childhood friends at the time, Charlotte and Olivia, and convinced them to sign up with me. I don't remember most of the asanas or postures themselves, but the one I do remember was Shavasana, corpse pose. At the end of the class, I remember that we laid down on our backs, the room became dark, we closed our eyes, and the yoga teacher led us to imagine floating on clouds. It felt serene and peaceful. What I loved about it was that while practicing, my turbulent brain felt calm and still for the first time ever. At that point in time, I also loved to write. And I would publish my own newspaper called The Family Times on A4 paper that I would mail out to my Nana and granddad and Uncle Rick each month. Years later, my sister found an article from this time in my Nana's closet that read, Breaking News, Alex wants to become a yoga teacher when she grows up. In hindsight, it was clear that I felt yoga was my purpose from very early on. After the yoga for kids class ended, I begged my mom to allow me to continue with classes. And when I was 13, she took me to a beginner's yoga class for adults. My mom chose that class because it was the only yoga studio in walking distance from our house. We didn't know that there were hundreds of different modern styles of asana practices and that one class could be vastly different from the next. I didn't enjoy this class as much. On the first day when I arrived, the yoga teacher told me I'd worn the wrong pants for yoga. It was ironic because I'd worn Lululemon bell bottoms, which were the new yoga pants on the market at the time, and all the affluent moms and their daughters in my neighborhood were wearing them. I had chosen these pants specifically because that's what they were called, yoga pants. The teacher told me not to wear them again because she wouldn't be able to see and correct my postures properly. I shrank back, feeling small. According to this teacher and this style of practice, there was a right and wrong way to do everything. The teacher picked apart every pose by having one individual demonstrate, while all the students gathered around and watched. She spent large chunks of time critiquing everyone's alignment, trying to conform our bodies to the perfect warrior one or two. Every week I feared and dreaded she would pick me to be in the spotlight, and I'd end up on display for everyone to pick me apart. Luckily, I can't remember that ever happening. Maybe she decided to skip me, sensing how insecure I was. At that time in my life, I was just beginning to experience anxiety. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but it meant that I was constantly profusely sweaty, particularly in my armpits and on the palms of my hands. It meant that I couldn't hold a downward-facing dog without slipping right off the mat. I learned by the second class that I should bring a towel with me to lay over my mat. This helped keep my hands in place and my body upright, so I wasn't panicking as much about falling or sliding off the mat during the pose. I laid out my towel in mid-class, the teacher announced in a poetic, over-exaggerated, flowery voice for anyone using a towel, you need to learn how to correctly press through your finger pads and engage the whole circumference of the palm of your hands. You don't need a towel, you just aren't engaging your hands properly. I was mortified because obviously I was the only person in the room using a towel. And that comment was directed at me. I'm sure that everyone could see that. In my head, I thought all the people around me were thinking, what a stupid girl who brought a towel to yoga. Everyone knows you don't need a towel for yoga. This negative self-talk probably made me increasingly more anxious. Twenty years later, I know that we create a narrative in our own heads that shapes our experience. I bet in reality, most of them were thinking, that poor girl, she looks so anxious. I didn't want to explain to the teacher why I needed it. If I didn't have the towel, I could not physically hold the pose. That's how sweaty and anxious I was. Without the towel, I'd slide straight off the mat and fall on my face. When I returned to yoga years later, there was a moment of looking back and remembering how anxious that one teacher made me. I prepped up by finding a yoga mat that was sticky enough and a towel that was grippy to bring with me so that I didn't have to worry about my sweaty hands. This preparation made me feel more at ease walking into the experience. When I started yoga as a teenager, I never imagined that years later I'd be on the other side of the room leading people through yoga classes. I learned throughout my 20s that the more uncomfortable a situation is, the more we learn from it. Through discomfort, we gain wisdom. My young experiences in yoga shaped me. Now, as a yoga teacher, I'm mindful to never call out beginners and put them on the spot, publicly call out misalignment in their poses, or tell them that any props they have in place, such as a towel, are not allowed. My mission is to make my yoga classes as safe as possible. Years after finding and leaving yoga, after the counselor's recommendation in my second year of university, I went for my first hot yoga session. It was at a yoga studio in downtown Kingston. The studio was tiny, and when I pushed open the door, I was met with rows of shoes in the hall. There were scattered Buddhas, small figurines, and racks of yoga clothes and books for sale. Incense was burning in the main room. After checking in and taking off my shoes, I walked to the small room at the back of the studio. It was dark, candlelit, and 40 degrees Celsius. It had a giant stainless steel letter on the wall, which I learned later was the ohm sign. What I liked about it immediately was that it felt anonymous. It was so dark that no one would notice my mistakes. Because the room was so hot, everyone in the class had a towel, or they'd slip right off the mat. So I no longer felt like the overly sweaty, anxious one the teacher would ask to put the towel away. I felt like I mixed in amongst the crowd. I felt a twinge of separation anxiety when the teacher told me I had to leave my phone outside the yoga studio room. But soon the 75 minutes away from my BlackBerry Messenger notifications became revered. Immediately I was hooked, just like I was when I first tried yoga as a kid. It felt like the four corners of my yoga mat were the walls of a lifeboat. When you're a beginner at yoga, everything is complicated and confusing. All the poses were unfamiliar to me. Plus, it was a dark room, and all of my excess sweat from being in a heated room was dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. I had to continue to keep up in my head with all of the movements and poses that were brand new to me, while also stopping to wipe sweat and guzzle water. The teacher was speaking in Sanskrit at points, a language I'd never heard before. Where was I supposed to put my hand? Where was I supposed to put my foot? I looked around the room trying to copy what everyone else was doing. I was so distracted by trying to keep up with everything that I didn't have much time to think about anything other than the present moment. Towards the end of the class, we dropped into what is called pigeon pose, a deep hip-opening shape. Instantly tears were pouring out of me. I didn't feel self-conscious about it. The teacher didn't interrupt me, she just gave me the space to feel and cry. I didn't know why I was crying, I just cried. We rested in Savasna at the end, and just like in the kids' yoga class all those years before, I felt like I was floating on a cloud. Walking out of the room, I mindfully moved step by step, foot by foot, down the narrow long hallway. I was a different person than I was 75 minutes before. Physically, my body felt spacious and lighter, but also mentally I felt different. Up until that moment, I had lived my life walking with clouds of anxiety and depression always surrounding me. Now, for the first time in my life, I walked with neither around me. I didn't know what it was, I just knew that it was different. On the way out of the studio, I saw a sign advertising a 30-day yoga challenge starting a few days later. Without a second thought, I signed up. I went to the yoga studio every single day. And I started to experience a bit of calm, a bit of balance, and a bit of bliss. Yoga became my haven. Whenever I felt like I was sliding into a space of anxiety or slipping into depression, or my mind was beginning to race, the studio was where I went. That year I went there every day, sometimes multiple times a day. So it was only natural that not long after I began to work at the yoga studio. I was first offered a job cleaning the studio, which seems hilarious in retrospect, as I didn't even know how to use a mop or clean a toilet when I got hired. I think I made the studio messier, if anything. Not long after, I got promoted to a front desk job, managing the daily check-ins and sales. I loved everything about it. Primarily the yoga classes, but also speaking to customers, running operations, and engrossing myself in books about yoga philosophy. It often felt like working at the yoga studio was my full-time job, and going to lectures and writing papers for my degrees were just hobbies that I did on the side. Yoga was becoming my way of life. My dream was to be able to make yoga my life one day. All I wanted was to become a full-time yoga teacher and start my own yoga retreat center, helping others find the joy and the peace that I found in this practice. Alex, if you want to learn more about yoga, you should read Meditations from the Mat by Rolf Gates. This was a book recommendation from the owner of the yoga studio where I worked. I found it on the shelves of the studio and started reading it during my shifts at the front desk when the studio was empty and quiet. Immediately it became my Bible. Rolf Gates takes apart the ancient wisdom of the Yoga Sutra and breaks it down into stories from his modern day life to make the philosophy of yoga more relatable to the modern student of yoga. I learned yoga in itself means union or to yoke in Sanskrit. It's not just about the poses, which are called asana. The very idea of practicing yoga is to be able to come to a state of union or integration of the mind, body, and soul, to find peace inwardly and share peace outwardly with our world. I began to learn about the philosophy of yoga in much more depth. At that time, some yoga teachers would reference the most basic of yoga philosophy in classes. But when I picked up his book, I started to learn beyond the periphery. Rolf leaves in wisdom from the struggles throughout his life, including having served in the military and being in recovery from addiction, to show how he used the framework of the Yoga Sutra to find inner peace. I found his stories incredibly inspiring, relatable, funny, and memorable. I began to make connections to how yoga philosophy could shape and impact who I was. What yoga did was allow me to lean inwards. While I was leaning inward, my mind was going silent in a good way. The more inwards I went, the more I realized that yoga was just not fueling me now. It was going to fuel me for the rest of my life.