Namaste

People do yoga for many different reasons: excellent sunset Instagram photos on the beach, increased flexibility in bed, or to be a complete twat who wears Lululemon exclusively and carries a yoga mat everywhere, even if he/she doesn’t have a class that day. No. I started doing yoga to improve my balance and posture–nothing else. I typed “Yoga Studios in Harlem” into Google and, naturally, Harlem Yoga Studio was the first to come up. And despite my previous history with yoga and my preconceived notions about the exercise, I love it there.

My previous encounters with yoga have been the following:

1. I remember going to yoga (with bouncy balls in the studio) with my sister and mom when I was maybe eleven years old. I remember being forced to breathe in a certain way, and I hated it.
2. While on my gap year in Thailand, I did an hour long class of yoga on the second floor of a rickety and dusty studio with a single standing fan. It was hot as well as filled with mosquitoes and people who seemed to think that they had to do yoga to have the real Chiang Mai experience. All I can say is that in 2009 in Chiang Mai, everyone who had 100 Baht to spare was doing yoga. This included me.
3. My freshman year of college at NYU, I went to Yoga to the People on St. Mark’s Place. This yoga joint was incredibly popular, especially among college students because it was by donation only. I couldn’t keep up with the class, was dripping in sweat (it was early September and there was barely any space to move–a side effect of such economic classes), and the instructor singled me out for doing a pose incorrectly. (At least there was individualised attention?) This place is/was also way too pretentious for being free.
4. I studied abroad in Bali in Spring 2012–yes, the same place for “Love” Elizabeth Gilbert goes to (I should add that Gilbert’s book is riddled with so many mistakes about Indonesia I don’t know what her editor and Penguin Books were thinking). Anyways, my group of study abroad students and I partook in yoga classes during our orientation week (supposedly the “real deal”), but this yoga was more like repeated stretching in a gym class–no “Namastes” here. My butt also got wet because we were in the grass and I either did’t have a mat or we didn’t use them, I forget.
5. Right before I graduated NYU and went to Cambodia, I went to a yoga studio in Greenwich Village. The instructors were boring and completely unengaging, but I bought a Groupon for five classes so I saw it through.
6. On Asor, I taught two of my eighth grade students (Zora and Shaina) how to do a sun salutation, and I am proud to say I was able to show them while remaining culturally-appropriate in my lava-lava. While in Hawaii on vacation from Asor, I downloaded several yoga videos with good intentions of exercise (although shovelling gravel and pulling water up from the well is pretty good exercise), but did yoga only once, for about ten minutes.

Well, that is actually more experience with yoga than I thought, but I have never really enjoyed it. I never really looked forward eagerly to a yoga class, it’s always been sort of, “ugh, well now I have my yoga class I guess 🙄.” Yoga was always burdensome, and I also did not want to seem like the aforementioned pretentious twats (because I, too, love Lululemon’s bras).

But in a Vogue magazine my friend Sam sent me in July 2015, there was article about a woman who was working on her balance–that is, equilibrium, not micro-managing. (I also have to mention that the majority of news I ever got in Ulithi was from magazines sent to me by friends and family). She started doing yoga and seeing posture specialists all over the country, sleeping with a special pillow, etc. etc. etc., and soon was one full inch taller. I was inspired (hey, inspired enough that in Hawaii when I had internet next I downloaded all those videos!), especially as bad posture and balance seem to plague tall women everywhere.

I started doing yoga in New York with an incredible instructor named Dublín. He has a thick Castilian accent, and a punching personality. Most yoga instructors I find take themselves too seriously–he doesn’t. The classes are completely unpretentious, and, at least from what I have gathered, he does yoga for his body and others’ bodies, not for show. He also keeps an eye on his students, especially me because last time when we were in plank he stuck his foot under my knees so I wouldn’t put them down and say “oh, I can’t do it….”…..because I can, I just get tired (and…lazy 😳😔).

“EStabilize the ESpine so it is EStraight!” he tells the class, while also giving hilarious anecdotes and explaining everything that are doing or are going to do step-by-step (or should I say: EStep-by-EStep…paso a paso).

But my first class I was freaking out. I was wearing tight yoga pants with a mesh shirt, on my roommate Charlotte’s yoga mat. Warrior pose was a struggle, but with downward dog my shoulder, hand, and leg spacing was completely off. So naturally, Dublín came over to correct me and move my hips back.

“HUHHHHHH,” I breathed in sharply and gasped (to myself). A man just touched me!!! IN PUBLIC!! That was the first time that had happened since being in Micronesia, where it is not okay (maybe it is if it’s an emergency) for a man to touch a woman in public. My eyes widened, and I shuddered in my upper body ever so slightly: I couldn’t believe it. He corrected me briefly, but it was long enough to leave in a state of shock. “Ah!!! I am back in the U.S.! Where this is okay!!”

But I got over this pretty quickly, and have continued going. And I am proud to say that at my last physical, for the first time in eight something years, I am officially 6 foot 1, not the 6 foot and a half I used to round up or round down (depending on who’s asking). 6 foot 1! I even asked the nurse to double check.