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| Girl you do not need those legwarmers |
After reading Anne Helen Peterson's love letter to hot yoga over at The Hairpin, I became obsessed with trying it out. Maybe it's a Saturn-return thing, but starting on New Year's Day I've had the nagging desire to just blow everything up and make my life look different, so I was eager to try anything that would "change my life, body, and spirit animal." I've been doing yoga on and off for over ten years, so I know my way around a tadasana like nobody's business. Or I thought I did!
Hot yoga is hard work. The room is heated to almost 100 degrees, so your entire body is working hard and sweating more than even I'm used to, and I regularly work outside in 100-plus temps. I knew this, and I was excited about it. I wanted more of a challenge than the more spiritual yoga classes I had been going to for years and I was confident that, even though it had been a long while since I'd been on the mat, I'd be bringing my new muscles, hard-won with a few years of weight training. I decided to start with the easiest heated class to fit into my schedule, 4pm on Sunday. Here is the write-up:
Wind down your weekend with this smooth, flowing yoga class with Noah. This class is appropriate for all, especially those looking to start a yoga practice. Mild-heat.
Start a practice! Mild heat! And then I showed up and there were only three other people there and I was the youngest person by about 30 years. I was actually worrying that I would own this class so hard it would be a waste of my time.
HERE IS THE THING NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT YOGA, and it is even truer of hot yoga, where your soul and sanity are melting down your forehead: you CAN NOT be dishonest with yourself and do yoga. It will immediately and very clearly show you each and every one of your limitations, both physically and mentally. If you don't believe me, turn your AC off, wait ten minutes, and try to hold Down Dog for ten breaths. And that's the easy part.
As a bonus, if you don't have all your existential junk sorted out beforehand, it's going to start rattling around. I knew this, actually: I took a theater class in college where we used yoga to access our deep emotions as actors and stuff. It was a crash course in how yoga will betray what you're not so sure you want to reveal. Exactly eight hours after a conversation that ended with "well you asked where this was going, but you didn't specifically ask if I had a fiancee, so no I don't think I needed to tell you that," I was able to "emote primal, raw anguish." I got an A. And it wasn't even hot in there.
Of course, these are all things I am reminded of on Sunday afternoon. While we're doing about the hundreth shoulder-stand-balance thing and all the olds are pretzeling and balancing away and I'm slipping, not just because my mat is now a slip-n-slide (although it is), but because my arms don't actually straighten so these are four-hundred times harder for me in the first place even when I'm not out of practice. And there are TONS of arm-strength poses, which goes to support my theory that yoga classes taught by men are more physical than yoga classes taught by women, and focus more on upper-body strength because men generally have more upper body strength than women. I'm probably not going to ever be able to do a push-up pose with my feet off the floor, because two-thirds of my body is below my belly button.
So I spend an hour slipping and sliding and flailing and FAILING. In every other class that I've tried, I've be able to see this as a positive: if it's easy there's no benefit, and now I have something to work on. And the irony is that you cannot fail at yoga: every pose is a process; no one does them perfectly, the point being that you use the process to learn how your body works. But I am not of a headspace that wants to have anything to do with my limitations. And because of what I said before about yoga showing you both your physical and mental limitations, the failing here comes to represent everything that's stalled out in my life. The fact that I can't get past the tipping point in crow pose to a place of balance is obviously because nothing is balanced in my life! Of course I can't get centered, there IS NO emotional center to my life! Why am I a failure at pigeon pose? Why do I feel like a failure at EVERYTHING? And the fact that I get lots of adjustment from Noah, the instructor, means that I've just been doing it wrong for years. Even my downward dog is wrong! I've been wrong about everything! Wrong all along.
So I do what I always do when I'm exhausted and defeated and can't help it: I cry. I cry at yoga! I cry in shavasana. I'm lucky that the lights are turned low and the tears could be mistaken for sweat since it is still pouring down my forehead. But deep breathing will turn into sobbing or choking so I basically have to hold my breath. Which destroys the whole purpose of the pose. Which makes me feel even worse. Nothing like a corpse pose shame spiral!
The odd thing is, even though I want to slink out of class with my head down afterward, and even though I want to cry in the car on the way home (I keep it together because, daylight, obvi), I kind of like the fact that all that deep stuff had been shaken loose from where it had been shoved down. I LIKE the mental challenge that goes with the physical one. I like that I'm fully confronted with myself, and there's nowhere for either of us to hide. It's a good place to start, and that's what it is, a beginning.
And also, I may have been the one who kept falling over in half-moon pose, but I wasn't the one who let go of a huge fart during meditation. So I may have embarrassed myself in front of some flexible olds, but I don't have to feel THAT bad about it.
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