The Wrong Class

I really did it this time. I had spent yesterday in solitude practicing yoga poses by Satchidananda Saraswati himself, founder of the ashram where I was doing a five-day yoga retreat. Finally, I was learning the RIGHT poses. Not just believing what some DC hack said. Yet here I was with the worst neck and back ache of my life.

But no time to dwell on pain. I was almost late for early morning group yoga. Because yoga was good for me...right? And I had spent the entire past year--really, my entire life--doing what was good and right for mind and body, like any self-respecting, well-educated, almost-40 single person in the DMV area.

 

Intermittent fasting? Check. Plant-based diet? Check. Mindfulness meditation? Just weeks ago I had completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat with no eye contact and no dinners–not even writing, reading nor exercise–allowed. Triple check! No reason I should miss this yoga class.

I stormed into the studio and set my mat on the floor with hardly a breath to spare.

“Lay your palms up in front of you with elbows bent,” the teacher started, “Now touch your shoulders with your fingertips. Up, down, up, down.... Nice and slow....” 

What geriatric class had I gotten into? I rolled up my mat and tried to sneak out. But my exit was blocked by a row of people blissfully touching their shoulders with their fingertips. A sign by the door announced a switch in classroom assignments. In my haste to get in, I had missed it. And by now it was too late to try and find the REAL yoga class I was supposed to be in. 

I unrolled my mat again and accepted my fate for the next hour. 

“Now flex your feet so your soles touch each other. Now open them like a book. Open, close, open, close.... More slowly please....” 

I couldn’t believe this class for lazy weaklings. How did this even count as yoga? 

“Now arch your back….“ Ouch. This one wasn’t so easy. I told the teacher I was hurting from doing all the yoga poses right the day before. She was sympathetic. “Sometimes when we do too much of a good thing, we hurt ourselves.” Another ouch, this time from my pride.

“Do you have exercises to help with pain?” 

“No,” she replied, “Your body hurts when you move, because if you DO  move, you’ll hurt it more. It’s protecting itself from YOU.” I winced.

“So what should I do?” 

“Nothing. My body hurt every day for 20 years until I became kinder to myself. Everyone said I had to do more strength workouts. Turns out all my body needed was to hang loose….” 

Tears started streaming down my face. First in trickles, then a waterfall. A year’s--no, a lifetime’s--worth of exhaustion from always trying to do what was good and right, each year feeling increasingly miserable.

 

In my rush for what was “right", I had come to the wrong class. Thank God the wrong class was exactly what I needed. This is the story of how I turned 40 free from body aches and self-imposed misery.

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I don't post everything I create/ publish, but want to start doing it more (at least the draft versions of unpublished work, as I used to). I wrote this essay for a local writing contest in January 2022, based on an experience I had at the end of 2018. It sounds more staccato than my usual writing (at least to me) because of the 500-word limit -- in fact, I had to edit this a bit for clarity just now and it is currently at 523 words 😅

Because of this arbitrary restriction, I feel like it doesn't quite capture the depth and magic of my experience. For example, I wasn't able to say that when I woke up that morning with the terrible neck and back ache, I said a prayer of surrender, trusting that even the pain was something I was supposed to experience. And what a lesson that physical pain led me to! A metaphor for how I had been living my life till that point.

I also wasn't able to tell the story of how a couple hours after this "geriatric" yoga class (which by the way I had been avoiding that entire retreat because I thought it was ridiculously easy and therefore useless) , I attended a laughter yoga class (with a lot of skepticism), and that after THAT class, my terrible neck and back ache was COMPLETELY gone. Which further reinforced my lesson from the first class that to "fix" the pain, I simply had to relax and do nothing. Then my body no longer needed to protect me from me. This has been one of my core approaches to life since then: listening to my body, trusting its wisdom, and as always, trusting that every experience leads to deeper enlightenment and growth.

*Pic taken at Flower Child, one of my favorite restaurants in DC 🥰