Back To Yoga

After something like four months with no regular exercise except walking around and the occasional dance party, I’ve started going to yoga again, three times in the last four weeks. I know the studio and they know me, and it’s all pretty straightforward, going to class again, even though I haven’t gone very much this year. It’s still familiar there: follow your breath all the way down into the forward bend. Soften your knees. Reach up out of your hips. Extend into your fingertips. My yoga mat had stayed right in its usual storage place in the classroom the whole time I was gone.

I basically remember how to do everything but it feels a bit harder than this time last year, or even when I was still doing circus. For one thing, my leg injury, though pretty much healed, still gives me a bit of trouble for reasons I don’t understand at all, because hamstring tears are supposed to sort themselves out eventually and it’s been months and I’ve been to physio and I’ve had some acupuncture and I can do basically whatever I want to do. So it’s not pain, exactly. It just doesn’t feel the same, or I’m aware of it in a different way than I used to be, and it’s hard to focus on the posture I’m attempting to attempt when I’m worried my leg will hurt.

It’s just a little disheartening to feel so out of shape, to not be able to wrap my arms around my knees the way I used to even a couple of months ago. I know that I can get stronger and more flexible again—at least, I think I know I can—but part of me wonders if I’m just declining in general, physically, even though I happen to be the daughter of someone who learned to do a headstand when she was fifty and fifteen years later continues to do heaps of yoga herself with a bionic knee.

I still feel weak. I feel guilty for not being stronger, when I know runners and dancers and circus freaks who train roughly eighteen hours a day. I take my body’s abilities for granted and know I’m lucky and privileged to live in a body that functions well, to be able to access things like yoga class that helps it function even better. I still felt stupid for falling out of my balance or for having had to take child’s pose instead of an extra vinyasa tonight, and of course I’m mad at me for even thinking about this at all in this way. I don’t know if that ever stops, if that ever will stop.

What hasn’t changed, what I used to love (and still miss) about dance and immediately recognized when I started yoga, is the way I get to stop living just from the neck up, for at least an hour and a half a week. My knees and ankles creak, I breathe into my heart space, I incline my head to lengthen my neck, I press down through my hands and feet, and the spinning in my head pauses briefly. I drop my tailbone, I open my chest, I roll my shoulders down my back and give it all a rest, just a rest.