Yoga, I love you.

An ode to my #1 wellness practice

While on Marco Island last month, I took my first beach yoga class. As we flowed through vinyasas in the gentle morning sun, heels sinking into the stand during each down dog, dolphins leapt through the surf and a rainbow arched across the clear blue sky.

I realized three surprising things during that hour-long class.

1. Florida is not terrible

2. I’m better at yoga now, fast approaching 40, than when I was half this age—despite all that my poor body has been through

3. I’ve been doing yoga for 25 years!!!

Beach yoga > regular yoga

I say “doing” yoga because it only recently became a true “practice.” By practice, I mean something approached a certain way, for a certain reason, with regularity. I simply don’t feel right if I skip yoga for more than a day. And while my practice is ever-evolving, it has a meaningful structure.

Before going to Florida in December, a pulled inner groin had bothered me for over three months. Every day on Marco Island, I walked 13,000 steps barefoot on the shore and slowly rode a beach cruiser through town for 5 miles. The sun, warm breeze, and mental relaxation combined with deepening and elongating my daily yoga practice, and I let go of that spot of tension in my left leg. It just melted away, becoming a mere shadow of its former self.

Do you practice yoga? I don’t mean: “do you take the occasional vinyasa or Bikram class on ClassPass?,” or “do you ever watch yoga classes on the Alo app?” These are not bad things to do; I do them, too. But they’re not what I mean when I ask, do you have a yoga practice?

I’ve taken yoga classes since I was a junior in high school. It started with one VHS yoga video. I still remember the soothing desert backdrop, sand blowing over dunes that sat baking in the sun. I did that one hatha-based class over and over. In college, I took a few classes through the school gym. After graduating, I discovered online yoga and Pilates. I went through a serious Bikram/hot yoga phase while running my first hair salon. Then, to help me recover from a hamstring injury that Bikram worsened, I went through a serious Pilates phase. When I was 34 and struggling to confront my new epilepsy diagnosis, I again turned to yoga. That time, I stumbled on led Ashtanga and Mysore classes.

Finding Ashtanga at that oh-so-vulnerable junction changed my relationship to yoga forever. Ashtanga is a classical and very challenging style of yoga. It emphasizes daily practice of a set sequence of hatha-based postures (called series). To give you an idea of how difficult Ashtanga is: I’ve practiced for years and still do a modified version of the primary series. There are actually six series, so I’ve barely scratched the surface. Learning and practicing the poses in a set order helps build progress, though, in a way that’s impossible when you jump from one vinyasa class to another at random.

My first Ashtanga instructor would probably be shocked to know how much he changed my life. I attended classes with him a couple times per week around my work schedule that first year battling my seizure disorder. Then, throughout the pandemic, I joined him for virtual classes. Off and on for the next few years, I tuned in from afar. When I stopped working after my sudden cardiac arrest last year, and money was tight, I continued practicing on my own.

I’ll never forget the big wins that have come with slow, steady practice over time and through health setbacks. Recently, in a single-leg forward fold, I found my forehead able to reach my knees for the first time. There is also the memorable day in 2022 when my heels surprised me by hitting the sticky mat behind me during a down dog. Achieving that kind of length in my chronically tight hamstrings and calves was something I couldn’t have imagined at age 20. I was so excited that I sent an email to my favorite Ashtanga teacher, entitled “My heels touched the ground!” He sent me a sweet reply email and sounded genuinely thrilled.

Through so many of the twists and turns in my health, career, and personal life…through a pandemic, moves, and breakups…yoga has been this 100% pure and positive force. And teachers like Keith have been some of the few people in my life telling me that what I do is fabulous. That it is enough. “Good teaching,” I can hear Keith say in my head when I modify a pose wisely to avoid injury, self-adjusting to keep my body in balance.

Restorative practice

I’ve lost touch with yoga a few times, and each time makes my recovered practice sweeter. After I got my wrist surgeries for carpal tunnel in 2015, I had to spend years on my forearms in planks and dolphin pose because the missing band of tissue made me too weak to bear the weight of a full down dog. Last year, S-ICD surgery made me sore and unable to reach my left arm over my head for weeks. It was months before I could put weight on my left arm. I cried and cried about this, feeling cheated to lose my beloved practice at a time when, emotionally, I needed it most. But through my tears, I worked first 5 and then 10 minutes per day, learning how to slow down and find new, more accessible forms of yoga—such as yin—so that I could build back strength and heal. “The hardest practice is sometimes the one we do in our heads,” Keith once told his class. He was explaining that skipping an athletic “jump back” in the primary series, and instead simply envisioning doing the posture correctly, could be just as valuable as going through the physical motions. I’ve found that he’s right. Holding ourselves back when needed can be the most challenging asana of them all.

I held myself back from Ashtanga completely for a few months last year. I practiced the long, silent holds of yin. Eventually, I became able to put weight on my left arm for a second, then two seconds. Gradually, the muscles and ligaments on my left side grew longer, until they could stretch all the way over the lump under my armpit that is twice the size of a normal defibrillator, as long as my iPhone, and twice as thick. Now, even though I’m fundamentally lopsided, I can stand tall, touch both toes, and breathe deeply without chest pain.

Yoga practice has come to mean a steady choreography with healthy modifications for every different day, and it’s something I can take with me wherever I go in life. Even if I sometimes do most of my practice in my mind, I continue to explore my body bit by bit and work my way back to movement when I can.

My yoga practice remains one of the only places I feel as connected and whole and enough as I did during the 24 minutes I clinically died. Yoga balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, clearing away stress and allowing me to more effectively experience consciousness to its full, colorful extremes. Life and death. Calm and vibrancy. Light and dark. Folding and stretching. Toil and rest. My yoga practice makes room for all of this, and most importantly, it helps me learn to make room for all of me.

I’m currently working towards my RYT 200 teacher certification through an online nonprofit program. I hope to attend an in-person Ashtanga teacher training course eventually, and to resurrect my old Pilates teacher certification. My goal is to be a yoga teacher for beginners living with chronic illness—those who need to be shown, as I was by Keith, that we are already enough and that yoga’s role is to meet us wherever we are. “One day, two days…” Keith likes to say when his students struggle with a pose. This is why it’s called a practice. You keep showing up for one day, two days, four years, and then somewhere down the road—your heels suddenly find the sand. Your wrists can bear weight again. You’re on a beach in Florida surrounded by dolphins and rainbows, miraculously alive and once again, moving freely.

I talk a lot about the hardest parts of life in this newsletter. But that moment in Florida is also true.

So I keep showing up. And I practice, practice.