This Is Yoga

I went back to yoga last night. For the a-hundredth time. 

I have this nutjob habit of always deciding to go on a fitness kick right around daylight savings weekend. We turn the clocks back, and suddenly I am outraged because I was just going to start going for after-work hikes twice a week! How dare they? Now what!

So, I have to start exercising indoors again. Shudder. When I was single and living the spinster dream in Northern California I had literally hundreds of options to choose from in terms of indoor after-work exercise. I could go to a different yoga studio, gym, or bar class every single day all winter. Don’t get me wrong, I still complained about the options. But here in Sandy, Utah, it’s a whole nother level of nothingness. 

Still, if you look hard enough, there are a few decent yoga studios, including one that’s only 5 minutes from my house and has sweetly painted aquamarine and seafoam-green walls that make me feel very placated, as if I’m in a nursery. That’s the one I went (back) to last night. I took a 75-minute “hot Vinyasa” class, which is generally a descriptor for a class in which the instructor has taken way too many different types of teacher trainings and can’t commit to a style, no exception in this case. We mish-mashed together old-school hatha, Pilates, and a form of yoga I particularly hate where one waves one’s limbs back and forth in tune with one’s breath, like a piece of seaweed beholden to the artificial current in a dirty fish tank.

It guess it was fine.

Image by Vanessa Fiola, a person whom I adore endlessly.

Once, I loved yoga. Then, I hated it. And for a long time, I had a tempestuous relationship with it where I hated it, but couldn’t stop going to it. And then I got pregnant, and had way bigger problems, and for-real stopped going to it. And now I’m going back. Again.

Except this time, I really get it. I get how it is to be old, and fat, and feel vaguely arthritic, and to know that gravity has finally won, and I am never going to achieve that dream of having flat abs. That is simply never going to happen.

Once, I wore tiny little spandex shorts and proudly acrobatted around in the front row of a sweaty Bikram studio in the suburbs of Seattle. Now, I dig around in my husband’s t-shirt drawer for the loosest, longest shirt I can find and layer it over a maternity tank and my biggest, most stretched-out leggings.

Once, I pathologically calculated how many days a week I could shoehorn a tough, sweaty yoga class into my schedule, doubling up if I needed to in order to always hit my marks. Now, I forlornly leave my nanny, my mom, or my husband with the girls to schlep off to the shortest class I can find on a Monday evening. I spend the entire class wondering if my daughters are okay, imagining scenarios in which they need to be rushed to the ER and I have the car with the car seat bases and no one can reach me. Did I tell them the name of the studio? Would Jon be able to figure out where I would have gone? Will they answer the phone at the front desk in an emergency?

Once, I went early to yoga to get “a good spot” and hung around after class to see and be seen. Now, I am the very last person to arrive, and end up in the deplorable front-middle spot, under a very unforgiving spotlight, where not just I but every single person in the class can scrutinize my every inch of cellulite.

This. This is yoga. I get it now.