Coming out of Baptiste Power Hot Yoga tonight completely drenched got me thinking about how I ended up in a yoga studio in the first place. Despite years of obesity I did play sports. All through my childhood including high school, I played softball. I was a catcher. I was up and down in the dirt participating in the game from what I always thought was the greatest vantage point. In my 30's I would train for 8 years in tae kwon do. I even taught that discipline. I wore my third degree black belt with pride as I broke boards and sparred with the best of them. To be fair, being 5 ft 10 did give me a pretty decent reach. Through the last two years I took up high intensity interval training and Spartan racing. Fast moving balls out training, racing in mud, scaling walls. That is my style. So....how is it I find myself in a yoga studio too? Clearly I am not a yoga person.
Let me back up on that a minute. In college, the good people of the University of Iowa did not feel my undergraduate nursing degree would be complete without a PE class. When you go to a Big 10 university there are plenty of PE options. I opted to join three of my favorite sorority sisters in a Hatha Yoga class taught by an older lady that was so serious about her animal poses she had the corresponding animal noises to go along with each one. Her zeal for making said noises Left four giggling sorority girls struggling to keep it together. To this day when we get together we can still pull of a lion in unison. No. This experience did not give me the yoga bug.
As I watched yoga gain popularity, what I thought I understood about it given my badass boardbreaking ways, I thought there is no way I would ever do that. I had visions of lit candles, incense and the whole hippie culture. Perhaps a chant or two I clearly could not understand the point of. That is until I had my arm twisted by a trainer of mine who also taught yoga. Seemed odd. A military vet and MMA fighter. Taught yoga? But he wanted me to go. He had coined that phrase that plays in my head every time I face a new challenge,"you can. You just don't know you can". I owed him a lot at that point and politely agreed to go. Although, I knew nothing about modern yoga.
When I arrived at the studio and laid out the mat and desperately tried to act like I was not completely a fish out of water I noticed it was hot. I mean really HOT. Yes. I had stumbled into hot yoga. As class progressed I found it was not what I expected. There were not hippies. There were no animal noises or weird chants. Just two ex military vets and martial artists challenging my muscles to stretch further, balance longer and focus on the firing of every fiber. There was power through the basic flow. I found this took focus, careful breathing and quiet just like the moment before I would plow my foot through two inches of wood, or catch that pitch and throw it low to second base to catch the runner, or throw the spear in a race. This was no joke. Laser focus, fire up, power through, don't quit. This was a new challenge. The challenge to take my abilities and slow it down and gain absolute measured control. In doing so I found the weak spots. The muscle difference side to side, the tightness that comes from 35 pound crunches and 70 pound deadlifts. By the time I was done I was loose, relaxed, drenched and knowing with 100% certainty I needed this is my life.
Tonight, my yogi used the phrase,"enter into your yoga space". I find that place to be that place I am aware of every little thing going on in my body. Take control and focus. I suppose that is the key to this health journey in the long run. Now if I could just make that dancer pose look more like a dancer and less like a wobbly baby giraffe.....
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