Why I Come to My Mat—the Story of an Aspiring Yogini

I came upon yoga almost accidentally - while shopping in Best Buy one day about three years ago, I happened upon the Denise Austin Fat Burning Yoga Workout, and decided "Why the hell not?" I had tried yoga once before, and liked it, but couldn't bring myself to commit to it. The tape I tried was too slow for me to stay interested in. The Denise Austin, however, offered three distinct benefits—it was cheap (something like $10), it was much faster paced (it's basically a mix of yoga and aerobics, if you can wrap your mind around that), and it helped me lose 20 pounds in about 2 months. From there on, I was hooked.

Before I get too much deeper into the story of my life on the yoga mat, I suppose there should be a bit of backstory. In my life, I've had two primary, plaguing issues: weight and depression. Both stem from a family and general home life growing up that was, let's just say, Less than Ideal. I turned to food for comfort, and though my tastes since childhood have been overwhelmingly healthy, healthy food was rarely available in my house; thus I gained weight precipitously throughout elementary and middle school, until the point in my sophomore year in high school when I realized that I weight 215 pounds and was almost a size 20.

Something clicked that year. In gym class, they offered weight training and I took it. I liked it, and signed up for walking the next quarter. I liked that, and decided to keep doing it over the summer. I also decided to become a vegetarian. I lived on beans and rice (we were not well-off, my mother and me), and woke up at 7 am every morning, walked for an hour, then came home and went back to bed. As a result, the summer I turned sixteen, I went from 215 to 165 by the time I went back to school. I continued to walk, and went down to somewhere between 150-155 by the end of that semester, and maintained it for the next several years. My first job, as a canvasser for Clean Water Action, required me to walk for four hours a day, which helped me maintain.

Then I started college. Then I left Clean Water Action to work jobs that would accomodate my school schedule. Then I living on my own, working too much, and (occasionally) getting into Really Bad Relationships. And suddenly, by 27, at the tail end of the third in a string of Really Bad Relationships and in the midst of working 3 jobs and going to school (you heard that right), I realized that I had gotten over 200 again.

I joined the YMCA and started working out every day before school. I got canned from one job, collected unemployment and left the other two to work for a printshop, insisting that I had to leave at 3:30 on the dot. I'd walk up to the local Y, work out for 45 minutes, shower, and walk to school. I went back to mostly vegetarian (I still eat fish), and lost 40 pounds within about 3 months. It was at this point that I moved to Cranston, and somewhere in the middle of 2002, I discovered that yoga tape.

Although I liked the workouts I'd been doing, they were never really addressing the stress part. I'd work out some agression (Tae Bo was actually very bad for me on that front - now I was mad, but could throw a punch really well), get some good cardio, but it never really dealt with the problem - I do too much for too many people and don't set aside enough time for myself. It's something I struggle with to this day.

After school was over and my Y membership expired, I started doing the Denise Austin video in my apartment for a few months. I came home from work and immediately got into my clothes and started doing yoga. And I noticed something. I was stronger. I was more flexible. And most of all, even though I was still busy, I was CALM. I could work a full-time job at a print shop, come home and do yoga, and work 3-4 hours on freelance projects without feeling like I was going to shoot myself. I was more productive than I'd been in years—and thanks to my yoga practice, the damage caused by a certain Really Bad Relationship wasn't erased, but it was severely minimized, and I got over it quicker than I have most of my relationships.

Denise Austin Yoga led to Gaiam Yoga, and I noticed that I liked this even better - it felt less like an aerobics class and more like a moving meditation. Slowly, I started getting into stuff that was a bit more intense - moving from Hatha (which is slow and deliberate and focuses on holding the poses, sometimes for insane amounts of time) to Vinyasa (which is more flowing, and often higher energy). I've begun to explore JivaMukti (my favorite style of yoga so far, which combines a moderately advanced vinyasa with a strong spiritual component), and I've started looking at yoga more as a spiritual practice. All in all, it would not be exaggerating to say that yoga was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Over the last year or so, however, I've been slipping again. Within the past 18 months, I've ended two relationships I'd fair convinced myself might be The One, moved from Cranston, RI to Somerville, MA, gained and lost a friend or two, worked 50+ hours a week as an independent designer and now work 60+ hours a week as an independent designer trying to grow her own studio. And despite the fact that I know it's the best thing for me, I still find myself putting other things ahead of my yoga practice. I stay up late because of the latest Gather crap, or the latest self-promotion crap. I stay up late because I've been so unfocused I can't work. I run from meeting to meeting, client to client, and end up so burnt out I end up watching TV into the wee hours. When morning comes, I can't bring myself to come to my mat. This week, I went four days without yoga. By the end of it, I was stressed out, burned out, and crying hysterically over the refusal of my Building Manager to actually try to understand and resolve my issue, instead of treating me like I insulted his father just by bringing it up. I literally have been unable to breathe properly.

Tonight, even though it was 10:30, and even though I kept stalling, and I kept saying it was too late and I should go to bed, I came to my mat. And somewhere in the flow of poses, my chest opened up and I could breathe again. It didn't matter that certain people were exhibiting a complete refusal to believe they could be wrong, it didn't matter that today and tomorrow are probably going to be the ultimate Busy Days from Hell, and that I'm starting it off by getting to bed at sometime past midnight - all that mattered was this moment, on my mat, and the fact that I can apparently now hold Down Dog for a little over 3 minutes and I can get into Boat perfectly for the first time, like, EVER. And I can still do Reverse Bow. For those of you who don't do yoga, trust me - that's an achievement.