Confessions from a Retired Yogi

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear."
- Tao Te Ching

For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice.

It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am certain I told the desk staff that I would never return.

Famous last words.

Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class and then show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standard fashion trend.  My friends got used to my class times and willingly worked around them -- some of them even joined me for class, too.  Everything about my life changed the more deeply I waded into this mysterious world of yoga.

I became invested in the practice for a few key reasons.  First, it benefitted my chaotic brain.  I was used to being the busiest girl in town with a job that required me to multitask, not just for myself but for everyone on my team, all while I was trying to keep my social calendar straight.  Yoga slowed all of that down -- it canceled out the noise and helped me see things much more clearly.  It was one hour or seventy-five minutes or ninety minutes where I had nowhere else to go and nowhere else to be then here now.  That was revolutionary for me.  I embraced what I was learning through the Up Dog Down Dog No Dogma value set of this random studio my friend picked out of the blue.  I was drawing metaphors from the challenge of learning new poses or understanding the pathways to achieve the full depths of poses I was at the beginning stages of figuring out.  I was learning the expansive limits of my physical body which then lead to the awesome discovery of the expansive limits of my creative being.  I fell in love with the deep, hypnotic style of breath that asked me only to do this on the inhale and that on the exhale.  I was intrigued by the other students, some of whom I got to know as we routinely set up our mats in "our spots" in the room for a similar lineup of classes.  

I was fully sold on yoga from a very early moment in my practice.  I craved it.  I couldn't wait for it to be Yoga O'Clock.  I would stroll into the studio and feel comforted by the fact that the individual at the desk always remembered my name and that the teachers always seemed genuinely happy I was there.

What was this magical place?

After almost exactly four years of obsessive attendance at the studio, the stars aligned for me to take on a more direct role that lead me to managing the new studio location when it opened in November 2012.  I worked almost every single day that studio was open and was the last person to leave when the space closed in April 2019 after our lease expired.  

I lived and breathed and was this yoga studio for those seven-plus years, especially.

Yoga, for me, was a gentle and necessary teacher.  I call out the practice itself because the studio that earned my loyalty had a specific style.  All of our teachers taught it, all of them trained by the studio owner who innovated it.  While, yes, some teachers shone a little brighter than others, there was almost no teacher I strictly avoided -- they all offered the practice I was looking for.

All in all, I took 2,375 "on the record" classes at the studio (meaning not counting the "off the record" classes I took, like teacher-in-training auditions and the like -- and not counting the handful of classes I took at other yoga studios).  That means that at minimum, I was on my mat about 57% of the +4,150 days the encompassed my Yoga Era.

That's a lot of yoga.

Prior to me getting into the practice, I was never a sports-girl.  Not team, not individual.  I had, at best, an extremely casual relationship with the gym.  I just wasn't that into working out or fitness or anything related.  Back in 2008 when I first tried yoga, even without gym rat status, my body was already in the best shape of my life -- small waist, flat stomach, all of that -- and yoga made my body look even better.  I liked that vanity portion of the experience.  In 2008, I was getting ready to get over an emotional affair I'd been having for two or three years with a musician who seemed to love me as much as I loved him but simply couldn't get out of his own way to date me.  He also happened to be into yoga and so we bonded over that.  He also couldn't seem to get over how yoga altered the shape of my body, something I know he found pretty appealing before yoga came into my life but only seemed to amplify after I got into the practice.  But, nevertheless, he opted to get engaged to another woman and marry her and in my heartbreak, I leaned even more into yoga.

I didn't know that the practice could be so healing.  I wasn't as knowledgeable about how doing a breath-reliant practice like yoga could inform how my body was responding to stimulus or how deep inhalations and exhalations could provide a calming reset for an emotionally stressed person like myself.  

But I figured it out.

I had no idea that was just a warmup for much harder emotional days that were coming.  I had no idea how much this little trial run of healing my heartbreak through time on my mat would become a saving grace in darker days ahead.

By the time I got to 2014 and everything in my life fell apart, my one reliable oasis became the studio.  While my entire social network transformed and I lost many key relationships when the most key relationship of them all came to an end, the thing that kept me upright was my commitment to getting on my mat.  By then, I was working full time at the studio and nothing could have made it easier for me to ensure I'd practice.  After I left that key relationship -- also with a musician -- at the end of 2014, my grief kicked in and I lost myself in all respects except for my identity as a yogi.  I went about the work of figuring out who I was in the ruins of what had been my entire life with time on my mat as my foundation.  I focused on my breath and embraced mantras like practice makes practice and let go of the notions that I needed to be perfect or doing things like anyone else.  My body morphed again as I indulged in junk food, my numbing mechanism of choice.  I always laugh when people say they stopped drinking and lost a bunch of weight -- it wasn't like that for me after I departed my relationship with an alcoholic.  The less I drank, the more I seemed to eat and my body went from yoga-machine firm to softer and rounder.  I barely noticed.  I was too focused on one day at at time -- one minute at a time, really -- and what each inhale and exhale could deliver.  

Losing The Alcoholic Musician from my life -- leaving our shared world behind -- that part wasn't hard.  Staying away was.  Choosing a different path forward was.  Embracing my humanness and vulnerability to reinvent myself out of the ashes was.

The key ingredient for being able to do any of those things was yoga.  Not just the practice -- the community I formed at the studio was also critical to my reinvention -- but the practice was the foundation of that time in my life.

Get on your mat get on your mat get on your mat.

Every single day: get on your mat.

The early mindset I'd had not to treat my yoga practice like a body-sculpting fitness regiment but, instead, a mindfulness, centering, grounding, emotional-health regiment became my greatest ally in my quest to heal.  Those early years after leaving The Alcoholic Musician -- 2014, 2015, into 2016 -- were completely locked in on how movement-with-breath reminded me to be me.  That all there is is this moment, nothing more, nothing less.  

Yoga saved me.

Or: I saved me by surrendering to my yoga practice.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Right.

As I continued to work through my grief after leaving that relationship and my entire way of life behind in order to evolve as a person, I felt such immense gratitude for the practice.  I learned so much about my own strength, too.  I became so skilled at my practice and understood my limitations so well that I could modify almost any pose to be able to get my maximum output from it.  I loved yoga so much.  It had all but become my new identity.

And then I moved to Ohio in July 2019 -- that's when I stopped doing yoga.

When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear.

Sometimes I joke that I retired from the practice.  In the four years I've lived in Cleveland, I've maybe done yoga a dozen times. Maybe.  Always in my apartment, usually to a recording.  I went to a couple of Zoom classes lead by my former teachers.  But the reality is that I no longer crave yoga.  I no longer wanted to be doing yoga.  If anything, my body rejects the notion of me being a yogi, almost as if I hadn't been on my mat 5-7 days a week for the previous seven years, especially.  It never even occurred to me to do yoga -- it's like I forgot about it.  My brain let go of all the Sanskrit it had learned over the years and words that had once rolled effortlessly off my tongue became lost in the recesses of my brain.  I didn't need them anymore.  I had taught myself how to achieve the calm and grounded person that yoga had once shepherded.  I could do it on my own.  So I did.

Old yoga friends, especially, were confounded by my abrupt shift away from my practice.  "You don't miss it?" they'd ask.  I could honestly answer no -- I don't miss it.  By the time I was getting close to the end of my tenure at the studio, I was constantly getting injured -- hamstring, hip, and, dear lord, shoulder -- so I had already eased off my practice a bit before I moved.  My body no longer felt suited for yoga -- it seemed strange that I had ever thought it made sense for me to flow through a vinyasa, and my muscle memory was lost.  

I would never call yoga training wheels, but that's the closest descriptor I can think of to explain this hard pivot away from the practice.  Yoga came into my life exactly when I needed it -- and it exited my life exactly when I had learned what I needed to from it.  That's not to say it won't return to my life down the road.  But for right now?  I am not called to it.  

I still live by my yoga mantra "I am / here now," though, every single day.

I never forget what doing the practice taught my body or my mind or how it helped me reframe my emotional well-being.  I remain grateful for the teachings of yoga -- and I remain grateful for the many friends I made along my yogic path.  But I am also very content to consider myself a retired yogi, too.  

Maybe someday the teacher will reappear.  I'd certainly never count it out.  

Originally written July 14, 2023.