….I hated it with the fire of a thousand suns. Mainly because that was how hot the room was.
My first, official, in a studio, with a live person leading you yoga class was in Kansas. I went to a Bikram yoga studio, back in 2006.
I was at the University of Kansas on a rowing scholarship. My days consisted mainly of training, studying, eating, sleeping and repeating until exhausted. It had started to take a bit of a stressful toll. One of the swimmers, a friend and fellow student athlete convinced me to come with her and try out this new, fang-dangled yoga thing. Being naturally bendy I thought, why not give it a go? It’s just stretching, it can’t be that hard — said the version of me that had never done yoga.
The room was hot beyond all reckoning. It was like walking into a sadistic sauna that smelled like sweat, seasoned with tears of regret. The teacher was rather intense, and seemed to be angry at life and us. She made us hold postures for what felt like an obscene amount of time. She didn’t really make eye contact and felt it was necessary to yell, even though we were only a few feet away from her. A waterfall of sweat was stinging my eyes, streaming down my body, and forming a Lake Erie sized puddle around my feet. My head was throbbing from dehydration, but I pushed my way through with athletic determination. All the physical discomfort aside, the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about were the carpeted floors. Who was their interior decorator?? This was not healthy!
Halfway through class, by the mercy of God, the teacher had us lay down. But I was incapable of relaxing. All I kept thinking of was the bacterial cesspool underneath my body. With the amount of sweating that took place in this room, I thought it quite realistic to assume the next strain of the ebola virus was forming in the carpet fibers. After the second round of postures, she made us lie down again! I held my breath so I wouldn’t inhale the ickiness emanating from the floor, essentially ruining my first experience of sivasana.
The class ended — I burst into the hallway, into the beautiful embrace of cold air and away from the rug of death. My friend came up behind me and cheerfully said, “Wasn’t that great!?” It’s a good thing she’s a really awesome person, because that class could have effectively ended our friendship. This style of yoga just wasn’t for me. But my friend seemed to really connect with it.
It was about a month before I decided to give yoga a try again. This time, in a totally different scenario.
The gym at the University was offering lunch time yoga classes in a non-heated, wood-for-floors studio. This seemed much more sane and sanitary.
Confession: I totally loved my second yoga class.
I was about to meet the first yoga teacher I would make a genuine connection with. After practicing for a decade, I now realize teachers like this are few and far between. The one’s that move your body, but also manage to touch your heart and soul.
A young man with a beaming smile strolled into the room. His name was Mat. Mat the yoga teacher. To this day I revel in the poetic irony of a name like Mat coupled with the occupation of yoga teacher. He was infectiously happy, and just so darn excited to be there!
Normally super happy people make me nervous. I feel like they might be trying to hide or compensate for something. But Mat was different. He was happy from the inside out; not just surface, but “soul happy”. He started to guide us through poses my body had never experienced, stretching us in ways I’d never been stretched before. Such simple movements that I assumed to be easy, were so incredibly challenging. The athlete in me loved this!
Mat had us lie on the ground, lift our arms and legs in the air with just our belly touching the floor and then exclaimed, “you’re a bird, you’re a plane, you’re superman!” Normally this type of hyper-happiness isn’t my jam, but his genuinely joyful nature allowed him to get away with ridiculous stuff like that.
What I really enjoyed was the playfulness of it all. It had been years since I played in my body. I had been treating it like this machine created to accomplish things, to win at any cost. I had pushed my body so hard, it needed shoulder surgery by the time I was 18. I had worked to the physical extreme in a sport I ultimately loved, but was ultimately hurting myself.
Mat was showing me how to have fun again. How to question the way my body felt in certain positions. I’d never been asked to do this. It had been so long since I was asked to use positive, silly, imagery while I moved my body. To question pain, instead of just accept it as the norm. As a rower, my days were filled with being told to move my body through intense amounts of pain. I was told to use my mind to push past and ignore that knife like searing feeling in my thighs and lungs. It didn’t matter if it was blinding pain, you closed your eyes and soldiered through. This made me incredibly strong, and created a level of determination that I am still grateful for, and use to this day. But I was losing touch with my body. I had rowed it into submission, but not into health.
In this second yoga class, the tables were suddenly turned. Instead of being told to distress and subdue my body, I was being shown how to caress and listen to it, while still challenging it in new and different ways.
And then came my second ever sivasana.
Holy mother of awesome!! Where had this been all my life!? I left that room fuzzy brained and knock kneed, not really sure what the heck happened, but knowing I wanted more of whatever the heck this was.
The reason I feel it necessary to confess my initial, not so great experience, is to encourage anyone who is new to yoga to keep trying. The first style I tried wasn’t for me. Thankfully, I took “the little engine that could” approach and decided to try, try again. I am forever grateful I found a style of yoga (hatha yoga, inspired by the ashtanga series, I would later learn) and a yoga teacher, with the best name ever, that met my needs. This discovery set me on a road that effectively changed and saved my life. I would even go on to try hatha and vinyasa yoga in a hot room, and enjoy it!
There are so many types of yoga for a reason. We are multifaceted creatures with many different needs, and there is a style of yoga out there that might just be exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a good stretch, a strengthening class, a meditative approach, a spiritual awakening, it’s out there!
Keep trying until you find it. It may take some searching, but once you come across it, once you find that teacher, and that form of movement that meets what you need in that moment, you’ll feel like a bird, maybe a plane, maybe even superman.
(This post is dedicated to “Mat the Yoga Teacher from Kansas”. Wherever you may be, I hope your plane is still flying high <3 )
