Members of the 30 Day Yoga Challenge Group Chat,
Got to be honest: when I declared that I would redo the challenge and invited you to join, I was a little bit [redacted]. The intention was there—to let someone else tell me what to do—but life came at me, hard.
There was the client, with their deliverables (the difficulty of moving from employee to contractor is that I’m far more obligated to keep my word); there was life. Maggie’s senior year is pummeling us like a hurricane of angst and frustration and anticipation.
I don’t know if I’m a good parent, but if there’s a lesson I hope Maggie has learned from me, it’s that you can feel two things at once. You can both want to be a “boyfriend girlie” and not want to be; you can be both excited for the end of high school and dreading the unknown of what happens next. You can also want to do yoga every day for thirty days and at the same time, not want to.
I came at my 30 Day Yoga Challenge with the intention of seeing it through—I sensed through the sequences that the end goal of the challenge was both to increase squat depth and perhaps get into bakasana. I love bakasana but in my work of sitting and letting the ball of my cranial neurons fire, I’ve let the muscles that pull my legs in get weak.
So one day, I didn’t do the practice. And then another. I know you saw; Mikkelina a paragon of discipline with her early morning posts, my responses in the evenings, and then one day no response. Then another.
To resume the practice, I got creative with it. Every yoga class for beginners will tell you that the Sanskrit word for yoga also means to “yoke” or “join”; the next cliche of beginner yoga for white people is that we are “yoking” movement to breath in our practice.
In trying to yoke my intention back to action, I stopped using [redacted]’s practice. Letting a lithe brunette with a throaty giggle who had leveraged her win of the genetic lottery into an income stream suddenly felt like a betrayal to my body.
A confession: I am not flexible. I have never been flexible. What drew me to yoga was the call to stay with the moments of rigidity in my body or my life and that if I stuck with the breath, the moment would pass. In time, I’d get a little unstuck and feel ease.
Around this time, my thinking had gotten stuck on the number twelve (maybe it was all the [redacted]). In trying to get paid, I found myself struggling to determine at what threshold of minutes do I bill for and then where do minutes come from—what can we do in a minute that could be so valuable that we need to measure it? Does it match with any natural rhythm of the body? And then I realized that sixty is a high number you can count on your hands without reusing digits—you count the phalanges of fingers on one hand, touching with your thumb to get to twelve, and then you uncurl on your other hand each of your fingers, including your thumb—five cycles of twelve gets you to sixty.
This exploration of time and the body got me to twelve and I decided to focus my practice around twelve: twelve days of “yoking” myself into a moment with breath.
You saw the first one: I did a yin yoga practice—long holds with micro-adjustments— from an app. Then the next day I did all the poses from the practice that I had wanted to spend more time in.
Day 3 I explored spinal movement and external and internal rotation of the legs.
Day 4 I did seven minutes of hip flexor stretches.
Day 5 I did cat-cow in a mirror and then explored my hips while laying on my back.
Day 6 I laid in the sun, listening to my husband talk to me about our garden.
Day 7 I moved as slowly as a could, thinking about qi gong and if I should actually be learning that.
Day 8 I danced alone in my house, and wrote myself notes that I have yet to read.
Day 9 I felt sore in my core, so I just sat on my couch, breathing and feeling my core.
Day 10 I decided to lay my torso over my counter and stretch my low back until Maggie came and asked me what I was doing.
Day 11 my shoulder was sore, so I just laid on the floor and used a strap to stretch my legs.
Day 12 I came back to those yin poses from Day 2, to see if they felt different.
When I stopped with that, I needed to unyoke myself from the practice.
So I did.
This month, without fanfare, I did another 30 day yoga challenge. And rather than try to push into some achievement, I decided that I would do the same sequence of poses for 12 minutes, yin-style and be in the sensations. I would repeat this for as many days as I wanted, but hopefully I would do it 30 times in a month with 31 days.
This, Yoga Challenge Group Chat members, was what I needed.
Yin yoga is a challenging practice for my fellow Americans: it’s not going to “tone” you, or increase your cardiovascular fitness through a million sun salutations moving through chatturanga push ups. Though similar to restorative yoga, it is not restful; you are in no danger of falling asleep.
A good yin yoga practice is about stillness in the body while chasing sensations. It’s about exploring gravity’s effect and feeling your nerves fire in unexpected ways. There can be sparking, electric feelings, nerves sending chemicals in the gaps between them for the first time in years; or tugging, crystalline popping as the small fibers of fascia and muscle that were adhered to each other finally become unstuck. It is an experience of the body on the microlevel, challenging if you view every unexpected sensation as a flag for danger.
In some ways, yin yoga mirrors the equanimity that I want to approach the second half of my life with: when so little in my life is new on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis, I’ll find the novelty that kept me moving through the first half in these small moments, these microtears of tissue that will stimulate an immune response, rejuvenating those same tissues. It is a practice that I feel ambivalent about: I can hate the sensations that I’m experiencing, but I choose to stay with it because the next day I feel safeguarded against the indignities of aging.
Honestly, it feels like knowing that I’m in the top quintile of my age group for retirement savings or that my credit score is in the 90th percentile. A difficult achievement that I have yet to realize the gains from, but that I’m sticking with, out of hope for it paying off.
I hope Maggie can learn this from ambivalence. I also hope that our generation, Yoga Challenge Members, can deliver her a world in which being ambivalent about the future but persistent in optimism for a positive outcome bears out, no matter what kind of girlie you end up settling on.
That has been where I’ve been putting my body, along with lifting weights, riding my bike around town, and a brisk walk or two a week. I feel, having done it 25 times in the last 30 days, more in possession of myself, that I can feel myself more. Also, I cut out the [redacted] for now, after Haitch got frustrated with me for wanting to talk about the number twelve.
Meridianally unblocked,
AE