Give a flower to the homeless man in your heart
How I'm trying to get back to yoga strong this year
One of my intentions for 2024 is to become yoga strong. I liken it to a nicer, health-oriented goal that doesn’t focus on numbers (see scales, clothing labels) or food (see me refusing to give up the idea of a sweet treat). To me, there is no real definition of yoga strong — it’s more of a feeling of being grounded, balanced, and at peace. It’s a feeling I carried with me during the height of my practice and one that I’m craving a return to. Back in the day, I went to class 4-5 times a week, didn’t have back pain, and could sit in meditation for an extended amount of time. Physically, my forward folds were deep and my arm balances were strong. Mentally, I was present, less reactive, and more inquisitive.
Before I lose you to being too woo-woo, I was also a super annoying yogi. I picked up drinking tea, turned advanced poses into party tricks, and 100% judged any form of yoga that didn’t seem “real” to me (looking at you, goat yoga and CorePower). I went as far as a bored white girl in San Francisco could go by forking over a hefty load of cash to the studio I frequented to become a certified yoga teacher. I actually loved that whole process — I met a ton of friends and the only negative to the experience was that I finished training in early 2020, right before yoga studios were one of the first places to shut down. As I try to reconnect with my practice, I’m sharing a few of the experiences that built that connection in the first place. “Om” we go…sorry.
My first exposure to yoga occurred at a rowing camp at the University of Michigan in the summer of 2007. My friend Megan and I were tired of not getting good seats in good boats and thought that a week of intensive rowing would give us everything we needed to have a better season once autumn rolled around. We had heard success stories from our older teammates about this approach and were ready to do it ourselves. Part of the motivation was that our small team rarely had enough rowers to fill two boats, so anyone who wasn’t in the good boat had to stay on land and do stupid shit like go on runs and time our burpees for two hours. As it happened, letting 50+ high school rowers loose in the University of Michigan boathouse produced a similar issue of odd numbers and therefore dry land practice. Luckily for us, the U of M rowers/camp counselors had a much more useful circuit of exercises that made the time fly by. One of the circuits focused on the Sun Salutation, a quick warmup of forward folds and upward/downward dogs that guaranteed a more mindful stretch than we were used to. We were encouraged to match one breath to one movement and apply that same logic to the boat, inhaling as we slid forward and exhaling to pull the oar through the water. That lesson connected some neurons in my brain that stayed with me long past my next two years of rowing, bouncing between the good boat and dry land.
Being a high school athlete meant that I only worked out in season. There wasn’t ever a need (or desire, let’s be real) to hit the gym if it wasn’t for the reason of rowing a boat. I filled my time with other extracurriculars, work, and just enjoying having 15-20 hours of every week back to myself. Gym culture wasn’t something I participated in until I went to college, and even then it was more of a social gathering than an opportunity to exercise. On one of these early attempts at socialization, my newly founded group of friends and I decided to take a yoga class together. We trekked down the hill to the athletic complex, already dreading the climb back up said hill, and found ourselves in a dance studio with mirrors and barres. The teacher was a welcoming townie who quickly morphed into a yoga drill sergeant. It felt like she was trying to start the semester with the hardest class possible to weed out the casual drop-ins from the practiced yogis who would stick around. At one point during a forward fold, she instructed us to hook our pointer and index fingers around our toes to deepen the fold. I heard a guffaw and then a crash from someone next to me and looked over to see my soon-to-be-best-friend shaking with laughter on her mat. Laura couldn’t handle the absurdity of touching our dirty (despite always wearing shower shoes) feet and it sent her over the edge. She sat out the rest of the class and went through a passionate and hilarious monologue about the casualness of such an outlandish cue as we huffed up the hill afterward. I tried to go back to that class a few more times, but couldn’t touch my toes without thinking of Laura and losing all of the focus I had meditated on so intensely to obtain.
Eventually, I figured out how to go to the gym in college. While yoga wasn’t my cup of tea, I found that running made me feel strong. I tried to remember this as I overheard my conventionally already fit peers talking about needing to “work off” whatever they had done over the weekend. I trained for a 5k with some friends and learned that I felt the most accomplished, best version of myself after completing a physical task. A few girls in my sorority were big runners, completing various half-marathons throughout the year. When I asked what they did on their non-running days, they all responded with yoga. Specifically, the class I didn’t have the composure to return to. I kept this in mind as we packed up our dorms at the end of the year and headed home for the summer.
A few days into summer break, likely after a lecture from my parents about finding a job, I decided to give yoga another go. I bought a two-week pass to a local studio to learn some stretches to help with my constantly tight hips. Having not spent a ton of time in the yoga world, I expected to walk into a class of a bunch of lululemon-clad Barbies doing handstands left and right without breaking a sweat. What I witnessed instead was a steady stream of both men and women of all ages, in all sorts of non-yoga clothing, laying out their mats. I was intrigued from the standpoint of inclusiveness, thinking that the weird class from college might not be the gold standard of yoga.
One quick note here; it’s driving me nuts to write this without acknowledging my extremely myopic view of yoga at the time. I thought all of those things before I trained to become a yoga teacher and without the knowledge of the way the West has destroyed what yoga is. It’s not about youthful thin white people wearing tight clothes, it’s not about Instagramming your peak poses, and it’s not about being the best yogi in the room. It is about practicing virtues for your community and yourself to be able to sit in meditation long enough to find enlightenment.
Anyway, this class grabbed my attention in a way that my prior experience had not. The teacher was a local mom with a calming voice who told us to do what felt best for us in our bodies. She gave examples of how this could manifest, including letting our bellies fully expand or just laying down and napping for the whole hour. It felt like I was hearing all these things for the first time — there was permission to let things go. And I loved it. When my two-week trial expired, I signed up for a pass for the summer and started becoming a regular. There was a particular crowd of students in their sixties who delighted me to watch before class. They were the ones shuffling into the studio in their tube socks, gardening shorts, and oversized t-shirts. They had an enviable rapport with all of the teachers, core strength like you wouldn’t believe, and said whatever was on their minds, including a woman named Bev, who I overheard after class asking the teacher if she had seen the new Aflac commercial. “It’s all about YOGA! And at the end of the commercial, the duck is snoring during Savasana!” Her peers cackled at the easy joke and I found myself doing the same — it tickled me to know Bev was in on the joke and even throwing around Sanskrit words in her daily life.
For the next 4-5 years, I searched for a yoga home that matched the vibes of my first local studio. I had some stipulations, mostly regarding clientele. If an old dude wearing tube socks wouldn’t feel welcome at a studio, neither would I. You would think moving to California would make this an easy feat, and you would be wrong. Too many of the niche studios were too packed with followers of teachers with Buddha complexes, waitlists were more competitive than SoulCycle, and why were all of the good yoga classes constantly coinciding with my hard academic classes in grad school? It was a rocky start, but one that began to solidify my practice. I started picking up on yoga philosophy, became more comfortable on my mat, and lingered around after class instead of sprinting to the door.
After a weekend of moving from one apartment in SF to another, my body (and bank account) were drained. I continued the search for a yoga home in my new neighborhood and found a studio to try. Having become a pro at the whole two-week trial thing by now, I timed it out so I would get to experience as many different classes as possible before moving to the next studio. My first class took place on a Saturday morning. When I arrived, I realized it checked all of my boxes; it fit the clientele and the smell of palo santo did a fairly decent job of masking the smell of well-worn yoga mats. The desk in the lobby was a wonky piece of wood likely sourced from Tropical Trends, the merch section was full of custom genie pants, and every sign was handmade.
As the teacher began to lead the class, he explained he was subbing for the regular teacher who had a last-minute change of plans. This threw the tiniest of wrenches in the schedule I had meticulously built the week before — how would I test every teacher if there were schedule changes like this? I tried to push away that disappointment to clear my mind and focus on the class I was sitting in, rather than the class I was supposed to be in. In what is not a surprise at all, I enjoyed the hell out of that class. It wasn’t like any class I had taken before — the music had actual lyrics, the teacher knew everyone’s names, and he told stories that had nothing to do with yoga to get us through long-held lunges. As we caught our breaths at the end of a 75-minute practice that felt more like 20 minutes, the strange uniqueness of this place finally revealed itself. Right before Savasana, the teacher told a winding tale about finding a homeless man sleeping on his driveway that morning. He let the guy rest in the sun, but not before cutting a few flowers from his garden and laying them down as a nice surprise for when he woke up. I thought nothing of that and took the best 7-minute rest of my life — note: never stay at a yoga studio that only gives you a rushed Savasana, it defies the whole point. As we lazily rose to a seated position, the teacher left us with a softly spoken pep talk to give some flowers to the homeless man inside all of our hearts. That sentiment checked even more of my boxes as it was slightly unhinged, made me think, and delighted me.
That studio was my second home for the next two and a half years. I went to class before the sun came up, sitting through brutal holds of Utkatasana, and returned later at night to zen out and listen to passages of The Women Who Run with the Wolves. I chanted the Gayatri Mantra, heard the word “yoni” too many times, and practiced Ujjayi breathing until I became lightheaded. I stretched and flexed my own physical and mental boundaries, and finally felt ready to take the plunge into becoming a certified yoga teacher. But most importantly, irrespective of the teachers, the philosophy, or the guys in tube socks, I felt yoga strong.