Yoga in the Dark

I haven’t been to a yoga class in a while, so when I learned about a two-hour session taking place on Saturday in the dark, I said: Sure, I’ll go. Alyssa, a former co-worker of mine who is beautiful and strong and enthusiastic about encouraging people to just shut up and love themselves, was giving it. After some hemming and hawing, I told her I’d pop in.

There were a few of us who made the journey, one who was recovering from a cold, another working crazy hours at three different jobs, and another drowning in wedding plans.

Alyssa closed the shades and asked us to face away from the windows. She talked about the tendency of our egos to get in the way of things, in yoga and in life. How we move forward based on what’s happening around us, and how we want to look in the eyes of our friends and family. But in the darkness, with only our bodies and the small candles scattered across the room, we had the chance to let go of all of that stuff, and to just focus on how we felt in that quiet, empty room.

From all of the movements we did, I think the one I’ll remember most was pigeon pose. It's a hip opener. It requires you to face the floor, bring one knee forward toward your wrist, face your shin diagonally so your heel faces your frontal hip bone, and reach your hands out to the floor and down. Or something like that. (This is where the internet comes in handy.) My hips, which are turned in due the way my bones are aligned, don’t do this very easily. They never have. But this time they did their best. We stayed there for what felt like ten minutes. As the time passed on I could feel the stretching sensation expanding to new muscles and crevices in my hips and legs. Bit my bit my body accepted the position and then embraced it.

The experience reminded me of the time I sat in a sweat lodge with a community near Mt. Hood in Oregon for an hour or so, feeling hot steam in every pore of my skin; and of the morning I meditated with a group of Chaco-wearing fifty year olds in an home down the street from where I lived, sitting cross-legged long enough to make my spine sore. These are the forms of prayer that stick with me the most, each a reminder of the capacity I have to hold on, no matter how uncomfortable the position, and let it surprise me.

Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with this little blog, which at the moment I’m too self-conscious to share with anyone. I’m following an urge to take my thoughts from a journal full of illegible handwriting to another place, and too keep coming back, even when I worry that I may not have anything valuable to say.

Maybe the act of staying is what we are called to do in our lives—to stay in the place we are, with the people around us, and the feelings welling up in our stomachs, and to never, ever, wish it away.