For the first time in about 3 months, I did yoga today. No power flow or blazing hip hop hot yoga, no baby goat yoga or whatever folks do specifically to post it to instagram. I took a virtual yin class. Yin yoga is focused on the fascia — the connective tissue of our bodies — and goes much slower than your typical practice. In yin, each pose is held from 3 to 5 minutes. That may not sound like a lot of time. In a resistant body, you can’t get out of that shit soon enough. By you, I mean me.
My resistance has been rooted in guilt and shame about my body, how I’ve spent the last (how many?) days of the stay-at-home order in my home state of Pennsylvania. Why isn’t my apartment perfectly clean? What’s stopping me from carrying my clothes down the block to the laundromat as soon as they’re dirty? This is a perfect time to reacquaint myself with all 5 seasons of The Wire, overhaul my entire apartment setup, crochet a blanket … I mean, why wouldn’t I roast a pork loin, make parmesan sage sweet potatoes, cook a head of red cabbage and inventory my kitchen as I go? Why, when the world slows down, can’t I find a moment to magically snap myself into functionality? Y’all know just like I know that is not how any of this works. It doesn’t mean that my brain isn’t telling me, in the voice of my inner critic, that I’m wasting time.
My inner critic makes me resistant to the very nature of a yin yoga class. Yin is about resting poses and letting the floor or ground* hold me while I focus on my breath. Today, I was nearly late to a yoga class in my living room. I felt I should rush because I needed to get my bluetooth speaker to work, and it wouldn’t work, and it wasn’t perfect. That awful, cruel voice wanted me to create a perfectly peaceful yoga studio vibe in my small one bedroom apartment. My inner critic told me I didn’t deserve today’s practice because it had been months since my last one. I felt a panic flood my torso as I found myself struggling to take a good breath. Not because I don’t have the lung capacity, but because I “don’t deserve” to be in this class. Yin is often the compliment to a more active, engaged practice. I haven’t hit a vinyasa class since, like, November of last year. I felt resistant, panicked, unprepared and therefore incredibly vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? It’s just me and my plants here. The vulnerability my inner critic (which is me, don’t get it twisted) avoids is the vulnerability I need to push my internal cruelty aside and get down to the business of taking care of all parts of me. Being open and willing to look closely at myself without harshness means I don’t have to feel bad when my bridge pose doesn’t feel or look the way it used to. I don’t have to be pissed at myself for not doing stuff externally.
Today’s yin instructor often says, “if you’re feeling something, you’re doing something.” Feeling is a very internal process. I don’t have to go deep into a dragonfly pose for my practice to have been effective. I don’t need to calculate the impact of half frog pose for it to be meaningful to my sciatica. My inner critic would have had me quit mid-practice today. Instead, I remembered that I was working on something just as important as organizing my spices: I was recalibrating my feelings about myself. I was taking a journey through my body solely to experience and observe myself. My inner critic hates that shit; the more I know me, the less I rely on her to navigate the world. The less I rely on her, the more I can just be. The more I can feel. the more I can do.
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* can I do yoga outside ever again?