THANK YOU, YOGA

It’s been a particularly tough winter. Not tough in the way of life threatening illnesses, or loss of job or house, thankfully, but tough in the way that on several early mornings I awoke to sick crying babies, with a migraine of my own, and asked God to get me through the day-which, of course, he did.

So, yesterday, in an attempt to restore my depleted soul, with my wonderful mother watching my toddlers, I ventured into my long lost home, NYC, to attend a yoga class at Virayoga (my very first yoga studio). I owe a lot to Elena Brower, the founder and owner of Virayoga. She not only introduced me to a practice, she introduced me to a way of life.  At twenty-eight I was three years into an unhealthy co-dependent relationship, struggling as an actress, and numbing my pain with alcohol. I had never taken a yoga class, passing it off as weird new age-y non-exercise (remember, this was the 90’s, long before the rise in yoga’s popularity). But a very good friend had started taking class with Elena when she was at a tiny studio on third and 17^th street, and begged me to go.

I walked in with my usual chip resting comfortably on my shoulder, the chip I now know as plain old insecurity. I placed my mat down and watched as the room of people sat cross-legged, or lying down, waiting for class to begin. I remember thinking to myself that I would have to go for a run afterward because there would be no way I would get a work-out from this “resting” class.

Elena entered with the presence that has made her one of todays most admired yoga teachers. She began the class with a reading from a tome on eastern thought, and unfortunately I can’t remember the specifics, but her voice and its message reached inside of me, like a whisper alerting me to how cosmically my life was about to change. As class began, I found myself organically following the poses with intensity. Elena’s honest approach to yoga was the elusive balm, unbeknownst to me, I had been searching for. After an hour and a half of shifting, breathing, and realigning my body and mind, we found our way to shavasana, final resting pose. Elena put on, and this I will never forget, Norah Jones. As I lay there with my body pulsing with an unfamiliar life force, I sobbed. I sobbed silently, releasing so much pain and paradoxically nursing so much joy at what I had found.

That was twelve years ago, and I am still a devout yogi, lapsed since having two babies in two years, but devout non-the-less. Yoga transformed me. After that class, I slowly started to learn how to live from my center. In time, I quit the booze and the man.

This brings me to yesterday, where I was physically and mentally leveled. I was coming off two months of household noro-virus, bronchitis, sinus infections, and pink eye. Which translates to no sleep. I was depleted, and desperately needing a break, but as every mother can attest to, also feeling guilty for leaving my children for the day, especially since that very morning I had lost my center, yelling at them both. Yuck!

I walked through the city, enjoying every freeing moment of it, but I felt torn. I missed New York, I missed my freedom. I wanted it all back, but could never give up what I had now. I found myself in my familiar quagmire of wanting freedom, but needing my family. For those of you familiar with Anusara yoga, you can see the theme emerging.

Virayoga is on Prince and Broadway, and the very smell of the second floor studio brought me back to a precious time in my life, a time when I was single, sober, and living in Manhattan as a graduate student. It was a five-year period of intense introspection, learning, and solitude. It was bliss. Of course, if I am brutally honest, it was also a time of yearning for that true love, for the family, for the days of baking and story telling. Oh, if I could only talk to that silly young woman now.

My yoga teacher yesterday wasn’t Elena, but the class was a true Virayoga class, with the same thoroughness I remember from my first time. It was a slower pace than my Long Island-squeeze-it-in during pre-school class, focusing more on our alignment, and rooting into the earth. As I was about to space out and think of the Dosa I was going to consume after class, I heard my teacher say, by doing our poses correctly we create stability which in turn leads to tremendous freedom. Bam! This was, in essence, all that I was painstakingly grappling over, freedom versus stability. But here she was telling me that there could not be one without the other. In order to enjoy freedom, we must have stability. God spoke to me through yoga, again! The reason I felt incomplete before, when I had all the freedom in the world, was because I didn’t have stability. My feet were not rooted anywhere, my foot was shifting in my warrior pose, so to speak.

Now I have both, maybe less of the freedom, and more of the stability, but slowly I will bring them both into balance. Maybe force myself to take the hour train ride into the city once a week. In addition, more freedom inevitably creates in me a desire for more stability. So, the more I venture out and bathe in my solitude, I yearn more, with a primal instinct, for my family.

Now you can see why yoga is not only a practice. It teaches us how to live in the world, it answers questions to life’s hard ones, and it brings stillness to a chaotic heart. I could go on, but I’d need a lot more than a blog post. Thank you, yoga, and thank you, Elena. Namaste.