#80 - Going To Yoga

On Monday I had never been to a yoga class before. And now I’ve gone to two!

I’ve been having a lot of big feelings and tumultuous realizations lately (this isn’t surprising necessarily but the rate at which things have come to a head has been wild) and a friend suggested Yin Yoga for me.

I’ve been following Yoga With Adrienne videos intermittently for the past four years. I did it daily for a while, picked it up again during the pandemic, and now currently ensure that I spend at least 10 minutes a day doing it because I have programmed it into the start of my workday. The daily videos are hyperlinked on our little weekly Notion page to be the exact start time & skip the first 30 seconds of chit-chat. It’s great, we feel accomplished and more focused, and I get to stretch a little at the start of the day.

I’ve always been flexible, but I’ve never been great at slowing down. I have also been suffering from what I can only describe as a social phobia for the last year. I’d become convinced I was unmitigatedly awkward and offputting, and that I didn’t know how to interact with new people. Every interaction felt make-or-break which made it all the harder to assess, and all the riskier to attempt at all.

It’s not easy to get over being treated as if you are unwanted. Really breaks the meter in terms of understanding that no one’s presence is a burden, and the world isn’t actually better when we remove ourselves from it. But I have to try to get over it and develop better metrics because the truth is—I am an extremely social person. I love telling everyone my business and my inner thoughts (👋), and I love hearing other people’s stories. New connections are exhilarating!! I had just shut down the desire because I felt I had no path forward and it was hard to want something without being able to plan for how to get it.

But no state is static. Just because it felt unfathomable to me that I would be willingly vulnerable enough to engage, didn’t mean that it was going to be that way forever. (When you’re in the middle of a Big Emotion it can be impossible to remember that you’ve ever felt anything else, or that you’ll ever feel differently again.)

I googled Yin Yoga there was a class happening a 12-minute walk from my apartment that night.

So I immediately signed up.

Now, did I enter as the last class was still finishing and walk straight into the sweltering sweat-filled room because I had scoured the website like a dozen times and it said to be 10 minutes early and I figured there would be some kind of…divide at least? Yes, yes I did. I was a little bit in the way, my coat kept falling off the hook, I had my hair in a kicky ponytail that felt antithetical to all the low pony’s that shuffled off their mats, but it was…fine. It was fine! I signed in with the instructor, I met someone who was also there for the first time and rolled out my mat next to theirs, we chatted about apartments during the pandemic and problematic landlords (their landlord charges them a monthly rental fee for the washer/dryer that they have in unit which is certainly one I hadn’t heard before) and it was just really nice.

I was sweaty right away due to the the temp shock of coming into the clammy room from the cold, my voice couldn’t regulate to the gentle tone everyone was speaking to me in and fluctuated between an inaudible whisper and my too-loud laugh, but I was okay. I was fine. Good, even!

Yin Yoga is chill by definition. The point is to hold gentle poses for long periods of time to reach a meditative state in each one. There was cedar burned and candles lit and music chanting away about wisdom and giving ourselves over, curtains covering the window, and of course, the sound of honking cars and shrieking laughter coming in from the sidewalk. Because it’s still Brooklyn out there babes!

Afterward we trekked all of our props back over to the wall, rolled up the mats, and bid adieu. I went home buzzing. The sleepiness I had accumulated over the last hour absolutely eradicated by the rush of doing something new.

I signed up for the Wednesday class the following morning.

The second class was physically much harder (and I was, in fact, holding in a fart for most of the class). The poses were a little more work (and I don’t know if this is true for anyone else but I have a weirdly hard time with child’s pose? Of all the poses! Like maybe it’s the fact that I basically have to put my face directly into my boobs so breathing is weirdly hard but I’ve never been able to find a relaxing state in that pose so the fact that it’s seen as the beginner easy pose has always baffled me) and I am definitely still a bit sore from the deeeeeep stretches we did, but actually managed to achieve like some form of ascension during meditation so that was new and incredible.

Anyway, nothing I’m saying hasn’t been described thousands of times by other people discovering that they too enjoy going to classes with other people because it’s nice to feel a kinship and yoga allows us to get in touch with our bodies and energy in an intensely connective way. Yoga isn’t some new discovery. Like, the reason it’s been appropriated so heavily is because it works for so many people.

I keep hearing people in my life express shame around discovery. The desire to have understood something about themselves sooner, the embarrassment of coming to a conclusion that was already acknowledged by others, the idea that it’s not special or unique to have realizations about themselves.

I think we live in a world with so much information that it rarely feels like we are saying or doing anything new, so we have to self-flagellate in order to not seem like we think we’re the first/only person to ever experience this. But life isn’t individualistic. We have the same primal urges as our ancestors even if the minutia of daily interaction has shifted. Of course we come to the same conclusions over and over again. We reach awareness when we are ready to be aware. There is always time to discover new information even if that information is only new to us. It doesn’t matter that others know, it matters that we learned it at all.

Cliches are such for a reason. History repeats. We’re all on our own timelines of discovery, so there is no benefit in punishing ourselves for our pacing.

I love the idea of serendipity and that we are where we are meant to be at a certain time. I went for the shortest little walk yesterday and along the route assisted a woman whose cane had fallen from the railing she’d hung it on. Holding doors, helping people navigate the subway, and freely doling out cigarettes to anyone who requests one, it’s these tiny little impacts that are only possible when I don’t stay in my apartment. I get as much out of them as the other person, because we both get to experience being humans (flaws & all) with each other.

New York is both a fiercely independent place and one that relies on the courtesies of strangers. I love this city with my whole heart and get overly upset when people refer to it as an echo chamber. There are more languages spoken in this city than anywhere else on the planet, it like, literally cannot be an echo chamber. It’s okay to not like New York, find the city overwhelming, and decide it’s not the right place for you personally, but to pretend that anywhere housing 8 million people could be a monolithic culture is patently absurd.

I’ll be honest, I was nervous about going to a yoga class as a fat person. A combination of horror stories from other fat people who constantly face fatphobia in the yoga world despite being advanced teachers (and I am not advanced in these skills and tbh that’s usually my go-to defense mechanism is being the best at whatever in order to make up for whatever deficiencies other’s assign me due to my body) and I think I’m still a little bit haunted by that XOJane article. But nothing happened! Both of my classes have been extremely diverse because that’s what happens when you live in a diverse place! And I thought about leaving this part out because I don’t want it to come across as petulant or projecting my issues onto others, but I think that the reality of living as a fat person is dealing with and overcoming these fears. So I want to document my full experience, especially when the results are far better than I dared to hope for.

Anyway, I’ll be going back to the studio again. The class is just a smidge late in the evening but I really like having an activity where I root myself to my body and the earth and give my ~woowoo energy space to grow. Might spend Saturday evening at a sound bath. Who knows!

Last year I went inside of myself to recover and I’m grateful that was possible. This year the focus is on getting myself out there to discover new sides of myself, to take in what I can from this incredible place I find myself in, and to uncover all of the new shapes that my future may take.

It’s a step. Doesn’t matter the size of it. Progress happened. Which will allow for more. It will get easier to put myself out there without requiring three pep talks, but there is no shame in the fact that I needed them this time. It’s a muscle. It’ll get stronger, which will make the lifts easier. I just have to keep showing up and lifting—even if it’s just one rep some days.

(Is that enough working out metaphors?)

I deleted the Twitter app from my phone and off of my bookmarks bar. It’s now a more deliberate choice to engage with it solely because I have to type in the website URL to get there. The internet is less than 10,000 days old and I refuse to allow it to consume my life in the same ways I’ve let it for years. Part of that is going outside and finding spaces that I feel okay enough to engage with even in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. Part of that is putting my phone on do not disturb and leaving it at home when I go for short 10-minute walks. (It feels embarrassing to admit how bad the addiction has gotten, but that’s the trap of any addiction. It’s not shameful to break it, it’s not sad to ask for help, and there is nothing pathetic about developing helpful systems. That’s just the sunk-cost fallacy talking babyyyy! Ignore those voices! Figure out if you need support and then unabashedly seek it! There are so many people out there who have the same struggles and humans heal in community!!!) It’s only been two weeks of the new year so I get anxious about making large declarations about Who I Am Now, but I think this has been building for a long time.

According to my favorite Twitter astrologer, it’s a time to reassess anchors, to understand ourselves without the expectations of others. According to the Temperance tarot card (the 14th card, my lucky number) my friend pulled for me, I need to regulate how much I accommodate others in relation to what I’m allowing myself. I don’t want to make my heart smaller though or stop filling up other people’s cups and I don’t think this is about shrinking my contributions or keeping more of myself just for me. I want to broaden the access points, I want to fill myself up so that I have more to give. I think my heart will only get bigger, and I think my relationships will only improve when I am no longer treating them as if they’re so fragile one wrong move (or semi-annoying text) could break them.

I want to leave you with two recommendations that shaped my week! The first is this super gentle Yoga With Adrienne video that I’ve done almost every morning (I find it to be one of her most meditative practices):

As well as the podcast episode from Offline with Jon Favreau all about how the internet is purposefully robbing us of our attention spans and amplifying negativity in order to levy outrage culture for clicks and longer engagement on the sites:

It’s never too late to reassess and try new things.

Wishing you all the best in the coming week! Let’s do this again next Friday, yeah?

⚡️ 🙆‍♀️ 💭