Learning to Love Yoga (in spite of myself)

About a month ago I started taking Hatha yoga classes at my local gym. It was one of those "I should try this because it's supposed to be good for me" decisions. The kind that impel you towards nonfat Greek yogurt and steel cut oats.

I am not a complete yoga novice. I had tried another class a couple of years ago, and it was pretty much a disaster. I could do very few of the poses without feeling extremely uncomfortable, and holding them was excruciating. I looked around at all the far more flexible bodies around me performing these poses with ease, and I felt completely humiliated.

My next experience of yoga came through a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) training program I had signed up for. Despite the off-putting name, MBSR was developed to help people with chronic pain for whom no other treatments were working. I came to it at a time of extreme stress in my workplace and discovered that MSBR combined both meditation and yoga movements like the child's pose and the cat/cow stretches, positions that have become standard parts of many exercise classes. The meditation appealed more than the yoga though so I didn't actually practice these poses all that much.

But then after a long period of working hard on cardio routines and gaining strength through weight-lifting, I realized that something was missing. I was stronger than ever, but my flexibility and balance were decreasing with age, and exercise always seemed to take priority over finding time for meditation or even finding five minutes to do nothing at all.

So I tried the class and was immediately struck by the instructor, who is tall, slender and incredibly flexible. "Oh no," I thought. "Here comes the humiliation." But she turned out to be the kind of person who was just as interested in the mental aspects of yoga as the physical ones. She also encouraged us to "do less" instead of pushing ourselves to our physical limits.

Still the first few classes were hard. The instructor would tell us to focus on our breath, and all I could think about was my wobbly legs and straining muscles. I wasn't feeling any energy source from below. I was wondering how much longer I could stay in one attitude without falling over.

By the third class, I had started to gain my balance and was beginning to enjoy the different poses. The instructor always had props for us to use to make it easier on wrists or knees, and I could get beyond the discomfort to gain some inkling of what she was talking about.

The best part of the class, though, was the five minutes or so of meditation near the end of class. With my muscles warm and my body relaxed, I could ignore the internal chatter of my brain and just focus on the breath -- in and out-- just observing it, not trying to deepen or control it. When she instructed us to "surface," that was exactly what it felt like, coming out of one form of consciousness and back to the everyday world.

I was listening to an interview with William Broad, a yoga practitioner for over forty years, and author of The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards. He observed that while many people try to practice an active, intense form of yoga, yoga doesn't really accelerate your heart rate the way many other activities like biking, running, and swimming do. Instead, he said that "yoga has this remarkable quality to relax you, to de-stress you. That means that if you're prone to hypertension, that lowers. There are all these wonderful cardio effects that come from the other end of the spectrum: the relaxation of the heart, rather than the pumping-up phenomena you get from aerobic sports."

I was glad to have this physiological explanation since I often find it difficult to explain (especially to my husband and sons), why I find the practice of meditation, and now of yoga, such a source of well-being.

I see their skepticism and that look they get on their faces when they're thinking "Oh God, mom's really gone off the deep end this time." But at their age, I would have been equally skeptical of anything that sounded so touchy-feely or that smacked of New Age mysticism.

I'm still a novice when it comes to the theory of yoga and skill skeptical of claims about chakras (centers of energy) and shakti (sacred force). What I do know is that my practice of yoga is proving to be a perfect counterbalance to all the mental and physical activity that makes up most of my daily experience. Through yoga I let go of all mundane stresses of modern life and reach something different and quite rare: relaxation, stillness, and peace.