Sometime between September 2009 and December 2009, I developed yet another addiction: Bikram Yoga. Before this, I hadn’t really done yoga. In fact, I guess I thought of it as a little wishy-washy, touchy-feely questionable “practice” that had white upper-middle class suburban housewives sitting comfortably in some weird body contortion chanting Om Shanti shanti shanti feigning depth to what were in reality their substance-less lives while the rest of us sweated it out in the real world of gritty grimy gyms. How could yoga of all things, practiced by the preciously petite, possibly be an option for my still plus 200-pound black self? Seriously! How?
Well, if I was going to become a weight-loss scientist, I figured I ought to experiment (besides, every time I came across an impossible move in my abs and glutes gym class, the instructor attributed it to either yoga or Pilates). A yoga studio in downtown Palo Alto (and there are quite a few) had a special first month deal. A low base price and then all the yoga you can ingest for a month (before they hiked the price back up filtering out any possible diversity). This particular studio specialized in bikram yoga, which is 90 minutes of 26 postures, oh and it happens in a room heated to about 40 degrees Celsius, 105 Fahrenheit… just the kind of crazy that intrigued me.
Yoga was real. I sweat like I had never sweat before, holding postures that awoke muscles that had lain dormant for decades. My muscles would ache for days after… the good kind of bad pain. Bikram yoga inspired discipline: you mustn’t eat three hours beforehand… you have to drink A LOT of water (because you dehydrate profusely)… and because you aren’t meant to breathe through your mouth, for 90 minutes of rigorous strength-training wherein I was lifting a 200-pound weight… that is my 200-pound self … I could only think about breathing. There would be thirty or more of us, mostly women, and yes, as it turned out, I was the only black body for miles. We stared at ourselves in large studio mirrors, but had no mind-space to think insecure thoughts; we could only think about one thing and one thing only: breath. Breathing. Mouth-closed, deep breathing. Deep. At the end of the 90 minutes––drained, when we could finally breath through our mouths, we were led in a collective sigh. The very first day I did bikram yoga, during the final sigh, tears accompanied the exhale. It confused me. I hadn’t been aware of any sad reflections or actually any thoughts at all. I had been so focused on doing the exercises, but somehow my body had gone through something a little overwhelming. When I could finally breathe again, the release was frighteningly intense... I was crying.
While yoga didn’t necessarily help the number on the scale go down, the rigorous strength training radically altered the shape of my body, tightened things up. I dropped several pants sizes, toned my body and began to build the physical and emotional strength it encouraged. One yoga teacher said: “honor where you are today, respect the journey your body has taken to get you to this place.” And I heard him. Slowly, I became less frustrated with my body for being unwieldy and cumbersome. I began to be thankful for the baby steps it was willing to take––steps that led me to the studio each and every day of that special discount month.
Nice :) I heart Bikram too. Now I have a car i could go with you from time to time in Palo Alto! Let me know...Virginia
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Virginia! And Congrats on the car!
ReplyDeleteI meant to add: Bikram can't be done at home, but other forms of yoga can. When i spent a month in Uganda, I used a yoga tape my Mum had that was collecting dust somewhere in our house, and it was just as rigorous, and about forty million times as cheap.
For any Kenyan-based followers, google the Africa Yoga Project. Yoga can be free, or even cheap, and when the means allow, definitely worth a little investment.