A Year of Yoga

2012 has come and gone, and we are almost a month into 2013. Looking back, I would say that 2012 was the most difficult, challenging and formative year of my entire life. I could write about so many things: applying to graduate school, graduating with my BA degree, leaving a community I loved, moving to a new city, starting a graduate program, starting my first "real" job, living alone for the first time, my parents getting divorced, my best friend moving to South Korea, or learning to redefine myself and my understandings of things like faith, family, identity, and purpose. While each of these things are important and worthy of analysis, I instead choose to write about what helped me cope, deal, grapple, and embrace all of these experiences: My Yoga practice.

Yoga was long something I was interested in, but I disregarded it because I was involved in so many other forms of exercise. I was also weary of what appeared to me to be the "new age" culture that sometimes coincided with the lifestyle. Quite frankly, all the hippie lingo and pseudoscience disgusted me. That being said, however, I had a lot of empty excuses for doing something that I knew would be good for me. It was not until a very dear friend surprised me with the graduation gift of an expensive Yoga mat that I knew I could no longer avoid the inevitable. I drove to my first class the rainy morning of May 14th, just two days after my graduation. I felt stressed and emotionally raw, but I can still remember being on my Yoga mat feeling like my mind was cleared and my body was strengthened from what appeared to just be 90 minutes of strenuous exercise. It was a high.

But, as I committed to a serious practice from that day forward, I realized that while Yoga certainly does lift my spirits in ways no other exercise has, it also has its torturous moments. Even if only for one hour, it forces me to do things that all go against my very stubborn nature: be completely emotionally/mentally present, be patient with my body, suspend my skepticism and cynicism, concentrate on the process rather than the destination, push through fatigue and bad days, abandon the notion of perfection, stop multi-tasking, stop comparing myself to others, and be in my body rather than my brain. In this sense, Yoga has given me physical strength and flexibility, but it has also "exercised" my mind in significant ways too. I feel like a healthier, happier, and more peaceful person.

If it all sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. I'm probably still in some kind of exercise "honey moon" phase. But, there's no denying that Yoga came into my life the year I needed it the most. When I look at 2012, I see many challenging experiences that at moments were excruciating. I also see a warm, sun-lit studio, teachers who said "Don't forget to breathe," a Yoga mat, and a body that--like my heart/mind--was eager to learn, to grow, to take new shapes, to cope with challenges, and to stretch; to stretch in that great, exhaustive, expansive way that tears down even as it cures, that causes discomfort even while it somehow offers great relief.