Finding Home

This is me way up north doing yoga in the middle of a road.  I was taking a walk with my granddaughter who was fourteen at the time.  We were camping in the wilds of Maine where few cars travel.  And we were inspired to do some yoga.  I am now an internationally certified yoga therapist, a 500-hour yoga teacher, yin yoga teacher, restorative yoga teacher, meditation teacher who has no interesting in teaching.  But the first time I did yoga was at an elementary school where I worked twenty-five years ago.  A gentle woman named Lily taught a class to staff.  And,  I felt like I had found home.  This pose with my winter jacket on and curly hair free makes me smile because there is so much snobbery in yoga.  There are specific poses done in specific ways in certain traditions.  But you can and I think should do yoga poses (asanas) anywhere even on a road with hiking boots on.  Maybe oddly because I can be so overly intellectual sometimes, I never took the time through all my training to learn the Sanskrit names for the poses I twist my body into.  The time for study seems now.  This pose is called pyramid pose or Parsvottonasana.  You can see why I never took the time to learn the Sanskrit.  I roll my eyes at how this distances people, including me, from yoga.  The last part there "asana" simply means body posture.  Every yoga pose name will have that at the end.  "Parsva" means side.  "Ut" refers to intense and "tan" means to stretch.  Not an exact interpretation but you can see why it's also called Intense Side Stretch.  Which makes sense.  It's good for the back, hips, and hamstrings and upper body unless you are stupid flexible like I am and I feel nothing in my hamstrings in this pose.  Or my hips.  My hips are flexible and easy going.  My back feels an itty bitty stretch.  But my arms which should be way up over my head in the advanced pose (because I always use that as my measure) aren't gonna move.  That's where I am tight.  I wasn't always but I am now.  Every body who does yoga has places and times where they are tight and places where that can move with ease.  Kind of like life.  Life on the mat reflects my life off.  My husband does his entire yoga routine in a chair and it benefits his body, mind and soul just fine.  I constantly remind myself it's not about what the Gumby yogi on screen in a Zoom yoga class is able to contort.  It's about me going slow and paying attention to my  body.  Which is tough in a class.  Everybody has a different body.  Like, duh.  For me, keeping my shoulders down and core tight are my mantras.  My shoulders travel way up near my ears.  Much of time.  I do a lot of hunched-over activities like writing, typing, ceramics, painting, reading, feeling terrified when I read the morning news.  Stretching my arms too much causes more damage than healing.  That I learned from my physical therapist who taught me how to re-pose my body when I went to her with longstanding shoulder pain.  Most yoga 101 teachers learn nothing about this personalized thing that yoga is, with posing and breathing being a minor part.  But I do see some change coming.  For now, as I ease back into the yoga studio after a long pandemic absence, I will be that odd woman in the back of class who kind of follows what the yoga teacher models.  But I will leave my hiking boots at home.