Yogic Anxieties

A few years ago, my friend and I went down to Santa Fe for the weekend. My friend is a yoga enthusiast and I am a secretly reluctant participator, so while we were there, she found a yoga class for us which I (secretly reluctantly) agreed to. The studio was impressive, airy, bright, very Santa-Fe-like, with its own café and store selling yoga gear and made-to-order smoothies. The people working the counter seemed only marginally above me on the crunchy scale. I felt encouraged.

Our class was held in a room the size of a high school gymnasium, cavernous, tall ceilings, as wide as it was long, which was different than the squat, steamy, an-inch-from-your-neighbor classes I was used to. Everyone set up their mats in rows facing each other. After getting over that oddness, I was further encouraged to see that there was a nice mix of men and women, all seemingly peaceful and quiet, no loud talkers, just there to start their Saturdays off right. Then the teacher walked in.  She was tall, svelte, dressed in shades of gray, with triumphant tufts of hair sprouting from her armpits and pale skin that had never seen the sun and a turban on her head. I was accustomed to athletic, outdoorsy types in sports bras and Lycra pants and ponytails, but OK—to each their own.

We began the class seated and the teacher instructed us to blow air out of first one and then the other nostril, with the aid of thumb and forefinger. Thirty snot-nosed people dutifully began to make rude noises for at least five minutes. I couldn’t look at my friend; I was biting my lip so hard I was about to draw blood and filled with the anxiety that nervous laughter would simply burst out of me. After the nose-blowing agony, the class proceeded in a familiar way—at least I recognized most of the poses. But at one point the teacher called out serenely that if any woman in the class was menstruating, it was best not to do a particular move. I, in fact, was menstruating, and—slightly panicked about whether or not to heed her advice and what it would do to me if I didn’t—refrained from doing the pose. I was the only one. It felt like middle school again. Sixty minutes later when my patience had reached its limit and I no longer cared that there was a nice mix of peaceful men and women starting their Saturdays off right, we lay down in final savasana—ahh, the best part—while the instructor then began to bang on a giant gong at one end of the room. The ultimate pose of relaxation destroyed by my laughter barely contained for the second time in an hour and a dull ringing in my ears.

Bless the turbaned one, the gong, the clearing of the noses—but my God. I realized again that day, for the millionth time, that I am not a yogi.

I try. I like the yoga sculpt classes at our local yoga franchise which consist of poses, aerobics, and strength training in a heated room with hand weights and dance music pumping. Six-pound weights feel like 50. Sweat pours out of my body and mingles with the sweat from everyone else until there is a river on the floor. Afterwards I feel boiled, woozy, spent. I never actually feel better on the day I take yoga sculpt, probably because I’ve lost all my electrolytes, but at least I burned several hundred calories, I tell myself. And yet even yoga sculpt has its hidden pitfalls. During the last sculpt class we took, my boyfriend somehow got fluid in his inner ear and spent the rest of the weekend with horrible vertigo and nausea. My self-satisfaction at getting through such a difficult workout pales when my love is suffering. Is this yoga? Is this the suffering Buddha talked about?

Living in Denver, the epicenter of health and exercise, there is a yoga studio on every block. I see stay-at-home moms going in and out in the middle of the day, lots of young beautiful single people on the weekends eying each other in the mirror, and even a few old codgers who got hip to exercise later in life and became devoted practitioners—wrinkles, creaky joints, and all. People bike down the streets with their yoga mats on their backs. My mat is rolled up in the trunk of my car for that sudden I-need-to-take-a-yoga-class attack that I never seem to have. At any given moment, in any neighborhood in the city, at least half the people are wearing workout clothes, whether they’re on the way to the gym or not. I include myself in this. I don’t care how much the television makeover experts rant and condemn, there is a reason why we’re all wearing yoga pants and it has nothing to do with trying to look cute (although many of us do accidentally look cute in them). People I know went through a yoga teacher training at one point or another, and even if they’re not actively teaching yoga, they could be. They could have a sudden I-need-to-teach-a-yoga-class attack. Friends take up to seven classes a week—that’s once per day, or doubling up sometimes—and tell me they wouldn’t know how to get through life without it.

But I don’t get it. So all right, it’s a trend. It falls in line with the new push for mindfulness in this hyperstressed, obsessed-with-devices, close-to-dystopian society of ours. It’s meant to be both relaxing and invigorating at the same time, which delights us in its contradiction. It’s meditation lite, complete with inspiring thoughts and sincere connection. Aside from those who have actually studied it, we know almost zilch about what yoga really is (as in its origins and principles), but that’s OK because to most of us it’s just a term for a popular form of exercise that makes us all feel better about ourselves.

But what do I feel? If I’m being dead honest: boredom. Yoga classes with no music make me want to run out of the room screaming. Yoga classes with that gentle New Age stuff are only slightly less irritating (and I like New Age stuff). Yoga classes with 9,000 chaturanga push-ups make me mad. Breathing in and breathing out does not center me; it makes me hyperventilate. My body is accustomed to everything in a turned-out position (thanks to half a lifetime of ballet) and doesn’t want to be parallel and rages against parallel and starts a throbbing in my lower back that doesn’t let up when I have to do something in parallel. My upper body gets a decent workout (from all those damn push-ups), but my lower body takes a nap. I spend the whole class wondering when it will be over. And I’m pretty sure that defeats the point. Yoga sculpt aside (in which I feel like I’m truly getting a workout), I just can’t do it. I need to move. I need a rhythm. I need to dance, people. And if I’m going to meditate, I’m going to do it at home, on my couch.

These are my anxieties.

Which really cover up an underlying layer of anxieties that have to do with this:

“Millions of people have been looking desperately for solutions to their sense of impotency, their loneliness, their frustration, their estrangement from other people, from their world, from their work, from themselves. They have been adopting new religions, joining self-help groups of all kinds. It is as if a whole nation were going through a critical point in its middle age, a life crisis of self-doubt, self-examination.” – Howard Zinn, The People’s History of the United States

And there you have it.

So yoga isn’t my thing. But it doesn’t matter because I know why I’m searching. I see the elephant.

And so, maybe, do you.