I just finished reading Claire Dederer’s book Poser, My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses.  I picked it up after I read a review of it, because it looked like it fit.  And it does.  Like Dederer, I’m the daughter of a single hippie mother. Like Dederer, I have children, I’ve been married ten years, I’m a writer, and I do yoga.  Though I am relatively new to yoga — I’ve really only been doing it for a year.

I started yoga at first because I one night I was reading to my children, and after I finished the book, I tried to sit up — and, well, I could barely sit up, and I realized how weak some of my core muscles had become.  Also, I enjoy running sometimes, but I had grown tired of pounding my body around in Austin’s exquisite summer heat.  Also, I was feeling bad about my posture, I wanted to open up and get stronger.

Yoga is not for everyone, but it gives me something that I never had before.  For whatever reason, and I know I have written about this before, I grew up being uncomfortable in my body.  Feeling awkward, not at home.  Sometimes I think it must have happened at birth — I was injured when I was born and I spent the first several weeks alone without my mother in the hospital.  Maybe that gave me a sort of insecurity in my body  – not being touched enough during those early weeks.  Or maybe not.  Maybe there are other reasons, maybe it is just one of my challenges.  Yoga helps me feel at home in my body.  Yes stronger, leaner, straighter, and feeling more beautiful too, but it also gives me that feeling of being at home, comfortable.

As someone who as always searched for a home, (I think we all search for that, really — a physical home for ourselves and our families, an emotional home in the hearts of those we love) I didn’t realize that in one sense, finding a home in myself was the first step.

Also, another good thing about yoga for me:  I am able to release my cares and worries and troubles and questions during my yoga class.  Maybe it’s something about the breathing, or maybe it’s a concentration thing — upside down in a head stand, it’s hard to think of anything but that one fact of being upside down in a head stand.  So during yoga class I just breathe deeply and move in ways that feel both delicious and wonderful, and also hurt too, in a way  – that good, stretching kind of hurt-so-good.  Through all that, I can just let go of everything else.

And yoga, first in a physical way, but absolutely also in an emotional way too, has taught me to be patient with myself, and to forgive myself and to let go of my fears too.  This all sounds very deep and philosophical, but the simple truth is, yoga makes me feel good inside and out, all over.  If you had told me two years ago that yoga would be a catalyst for me, I would have laughed.  I have skepticism in me.  Maybe that’s one reason it took me so long to try it out.

I’m reminded of this quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, because somehow it speaks a little to what I have learned in the year I have been doing yoga:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live along some distant day into the answer. ~Letters to a Young Poet