Recently, I found myself on the floor of a well-appointed outdoor yoga studio in a trendy neighbourhood of Los Angeles, panting as I contorted myself into what seemed like the hundredth in a series of chaturangas that wouldn’t end. Everything ached, my face was bright red, and sweat dripped off my forehead onto the spare mat I’d borrowed from my friend. Instead of losing myself in the act of physical movement, I was sharply aware of the seconds ticking by, wondering how many minutes it would take before the class — and my distinct sensation of failure — would be over.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with sweating in a yoga class, although I’ve chosen to move on from the timeworn “if you don’t sweat, it’s not exercise” maxim. (Low-impact workouts are good for you!) The thing was, I was caught off-guard. That yoga class was my first in-person class since roughly November of 2019; I’d gone to in-person yoga classes around Brooklyn fairly regularly in the Before Times, but the pandemic put an end to that. When the idea of in-person group exercise became feasible again, I still didn’t want to do it — by then, I was living in Austin, Texas, where cases were still frequently rising, and it never really seemed like a good time for me to begin sweating indoors with a bunch of other people again.
Over the past three years, I’ve gotten used to doing yoga at home my own way, which tends to mean I strip down (why bother with a pinch-y sports bra or constricting yoga pants when it’s just me?), throw on a video (always the same one: Beginners’ Yoga with Adriene), shake out my mat (or, in a pinch, a towel) and work my way through the twenty-minute sequence with relative ease. My arms still tend to shake in downward dog, and I can’t always stretch as fluidly as I want to, but even someone as physically self-critical as I am can see how much more comfortable I’ve gotten with this yoga routine over the years.
Doing the at-home Yoga with Adriene video once or twice a week for so long — at home, naked, often a little stoned, in hotel rooms and Airbnbs, alone and on trips with friends, to stretch after a long hike or to inject a little movement into an otherwise still day — has, without my noticing, caused me to completely rewrite my relationship with yoga. When I went to classes before the pandemic, I was turned outward, constantly comparing my own form to those of the people around me; now, I think of yoga as something more personal, something I do to stretch the muscles in my legs and breathe a little deeper and remind myself that I have a body (which, as someone who lives with binge eating disorder, is something I tend to need reminding of now and again).
In her 2021 book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, author and yoga practitioner Jessamyn Stanley writes about “the yoga of the everyday,” which she describes as being located not in corporate-feminist classes (the kind where everyone tends to be white and thin) but in the practice of moving the body through a series of poses to make room for the mind to stretch. Stanley’s yoga practice engages thoughtfully with the question of appropriating, making it clear how much she gets from it while holding space to wonder what it means for her — as a Black woman who is not of South Asian heritage — to practice yoga in the first place.
Reading Stanley’s book over a year into the pandemic encouraged me to think of yoga not as a wellness-culture-flavoured punishment for food behaviour I’d deemed “bad,” but as one in a series of activities I move through when I want to check in with my feelings — as well as how those feelings might be affecting my body without me realising it. In it, she writes: “I like to blend all my practices and rituals together. I like to lay out all my supplies on or near my yoga mat and move through my practices accordingly.”
The “practices” Stanley refers to include tarot, meditation, and journaling as well as yoga, and while I don’t think of mine quite so formally (as they often include online shopping and rewatching old Will & Grace episodes on Hulu), I’m trying to move toward an understanding of yoga as one in a series of rituals I can deploy to care for myself when I’m struggling — particularly with food. Maybe that’s why the outdoor yoga class in L.A. felt so weird; not through any fault of the class itself (which I have to admit was friendly and positive) but because I’d gotten used to viewing yoga through such a different, personal lens.
Once I breathed through my chaturanga-induced collapse at the outdoor yoga class, I did something I’m not sure I would have been able to do three years ago: I gave myself permission to give up. Not to quit and spend the rest of the class in the car on my phone waiting for my companions to finish, as I once might have, but to sit in the lovely outdoor garden, to fold myself into child’s pose when it felt right, and then to recall some of the moves from my Yoga with Adriene video as it felt natural. I daydreamed, I sang as much of Rihanna’s Anti album to myself in my head as I could, I snuck peeks at my partner and our friend as they did their best with what they agreed had been an unusually hard series of poses.
By the time we all agreed on this after the class, though, I didn’t need the validation. Even if it had been beginner-level, the fact I didn’t nail every pose was no longer a failure, because my yoga is — finally — for me.
