Downward Facing Tears

4 minute read

I have always hated yoga. Friends would look at me strangely when I said it. What’s there to hate? It’s relaxing and stretchy and calming. Nope, none of those things are for me. If I’m going to work out, I want it to be sweaty, exhausting, possibly even rage-filled, I would say. I wore my yoga hatred like a badge of honour. It was up there with having never seen Titanic – I know how it ends and I just don’t care about Leo that much – and not liking Abba.

It’s not like I haven’t tried, I’ve given it a go. There was a six-week Ashtanga course that I had to force myself to finish, then someone told me that Vinyasa flow might be better for me, nope. The only one I really warmed to was Hot Yoga because there was a lot of sweat and I could push myself further than usual, but I gave that one up when I described the strange man that was beside me every week and my tabloid-journalist boyfriend told me it was a Dublin crime lord and I should stop going!

In yoga’s defence, I have a somewhat patchy relationship with exercise. I was a busy child with many, many dance classes that kept me fit and relatively stretchy and I lived off that muscle memory right into my 20s. I tried running but found it dull, a personal trainer kept me going until it nearly bankrupted me and I have a weird thing with swimming lengths where I always think I’m going to emerge at the end of the pool, everyone else will have left and I’ll be murdered – we’re dealing with an overactive imagination here and possibly too many episodes of Luther.

I’ve been a member of five different gyms over the years and always start out well but let both the intention and actual going peter out within months. The plastic bar code tag for a gym I hadn’t been to in nine years just fell off my keys recently so clearly I have no problem being committed to pretending I exercise, just with exercising itself!

But I’m back on the bandwagon and am on week seven of an exercise plan. It’s through a fitness app on my TV and it started with a few weeks of a post-natal course. My daughter is 15 months so a plan aimed at mums with a baby lying beside them on the floor might be a bit of a stretch, but I think starting slow and gentle may actually be helping me stick with it. I’m usually a jump right into something that might dislocate my knee type of person, and this is helping keep my very soft abs and pandemic brain focussed.

There are a few different elements to the programme. Pilates, which I love, though these are mat classes and I usually prefer the rack-like torture of a reformer machine. Then there’s very gentle strength training and finally the yoga. I half considered skipping those bits but decided, quite unlike me, to stick with the plan in its entirety.

I didn’t hate the first yoga class, though my very weak wrists barely held me up during downward facing dog and when three days later I realised I was gently crying as a perky Australian instructor told me to release everything while in something called a hip opening pigeon pose, I finally realised why I’ve always hated yoga.

I don’t think that releasing my hips was making me cry but taking 30 minutes to stretch my body, release stress and guilt and whatever else I was clinging onto was allowing the tears to flow.

It turns out that in twenty years of hating yoga, it may have been the thing I needed all along. I’ve always lived my life at full pelt. There have been incredibly stressful jobs, a relationship breakdown that meant I lost my home, miscarriages, work travel, deadlines, the loss of friendships, accidents, scary situations and more. Throw two caesarean births in 20 months and a pandemic into the mix and really, is there any wonder that a pleasant woman asking me to release everything and take time to feel my body made me weep?

I didn’t hate yoga, I was just fighting against it. While everyone loved savasana, I was terrified of lying on the floor with nothing but my thoughts. A quiet room, slow stretches and an hour to think was my own personal hell. I wanted to wear boxing gloves and pound things or do burpees so many times my brain switched off completely. I absolutely did not want to be left alone with nothing but my tight hamstrings and my suppressed memories.

Now, on week seven I’ve done 15 yoga classes, 14 as part of my plan and one voluntarily last weekend. We live in unprecedented times but in my house, and my mind and my body, it’s not the pandemic I describe like that but my new appreciation for yoga. It won’t fix me, not that I’d really describe myself as broken, more like a well-lived woman in her 40s, but it’s teaching me to be quiet, to stretch, to listen, to take 40 minutes to myself, and remember how I got to where I am.

I won’t be going on a yoga retreat or doing headstands on Instagram any time soon, but I think that I’ll keep it up for a while. There may be something to this yoga lark. Who knew?

Jennifer Stevens, May 2021