It all started with a poorly timed gym membership renewal. Coming off of Christmas break, I felt like the laziest of all hibernating creatures.
Candy canes. Fudge. Cinnamon popcorn. Pumpkin everything. Chocolate in all its original flavors, but made more appealing because of it’s festive shapes–bells with crunchy mint specks and christmas trees stuffed with peanut butter. Despite the fact that all of our travel airlines lost our checked bags that contained every ounce of will power we had to STOP eating when we thought we should, there could have been hope if it weren’t for the constant family parties. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Years. By the time I got back home and the festivities stopped, I was shocked to find myself still alive.
On the edge of my sugar coma, I considered what I could do to dispel the headaches and bring back what was now only a faint memory: fitness. Gyms are really good at that, because they make you pay to use them. You are HAPPY to pay, because the fact that you paid gets your lazy butt in the door more often than a free membership would. Especially if you are the kind of cheap medical school wife who can’t remember the last time she bought a brand name cereal or fresh vegetables, because honestly, who has the budget for that kind of frivolity?
It took me less than a week to fork over the $75 for 3 months of a membership at the school gym. (We miss you, AZ, and your $10/month membership options.) And because somewhere on the karmic scale I unknowingly kicked a puppy, the next day my friend gave me her set of at-home workout Insanity videos.
Obsession set in. I could spend paragraphs telling you how shocked I was to find myself participating in Insanity, seeing as I make a habit of metaphorically barfing on anything that is, has been, or ever will be trendy. (If you’re Team Edward we can’t be friends, and don’t you dare tell me to “Let It Go.”) But I’ve already spent way too long getting to my point, which is this: When you find yourself with a gym membership you are no longer interested in because more appealing options have presented themselves, the only thing to do is search for something the gym can offer that you absolutely cannot get anywhere else. That option for me was yoga.
I had been doing Insanity for about a week before I attended my first yoga class. If you’ve ever done (or watched) Insanity, you’ll know that even in a week you can make serious progress. I was very lucky, because that prepared me for the unexpectedly horrifying event that was an hour long session of every dog and warrior pose imaginable.
Look at this picture.
What do you notice? Can you see the tension leaving her skin? I notice a complete absence of sweat, fear, agony, and every emotion I was feeling during my first encounter with what every yogi (yes, that’s what yoga teachers are called–feel free if you need to pause to die laughing) claims is an amazingly centering experience. Center of what? Because I was certainly not poised in the center of any type of pleasant reality by the end.
It started with a mat. Most seasoned attendees had a cute, thin mat with adorable bamboo shoots painted on them. I had a fat, sticky, gym rental that I think was slowly leeching energy through my palms and feet.
At the end of the exercises, there is a five minute period during which we laid flat on our backs and let ourselves sink into the relaxation we had created for ourselves. I must admit, this was not entirely bad the first time. Most of this session, as dramatic as I painted it, was not entirely bad. It was challenging, and surprisingly cardiovascular, but very rewarding by the end. What got me was the next week, when I decided it would be a good idea to try again.
Surely it can only get better with practice, right?
As any good scientist knows, experiments only work out when you keep all conditions the same except one variable. The variable this time should have been the fact that it was my second time. All other factors remaining constant, things should have gotten better. But I had slacked on my Insanity workouts. My body had fallen out of shape, and I was one big lump of yoga-going mess. Thus began the session of death.
I was told halfway through that I could rest if I needed in some kind of weird, bird chirping position, and I did. For a shamefully long time. After all, yoga is best when coupled with breathing. By the last five minutes when we were supposed to sink into the floor, I had to spend the entire time praying that someday pumping air through my lungs would become subconscious again.
I wiped off my mat and left without saying a word to anyone. Several cold, dark Thursday nights since have been spent trying to ignore the soft whispers on the wind that say, “Come back to yoga, Kayla. Come back…”
Some terrors are not worth reliving, no matter how rewarding it is to stare at yourself in a wall-length mirror while standing poised with the discipline of a 17th century samurai. Know your limits, and attempt yoga at your own risk.
Cover image credit: lululemon athletica (SSC Yoga with Eoin Finn) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
