I thought I was enjoying yoga, then I saw my face in the mirror
I so dislike working out that I’m suspicious of people who claim to like it. Ditto cold weather, kombucha tea and Tuesdays, this last owing to the fact that I, as a child, had to take piano lessons on Tuesdays, and I’m still not over it.
Even though I hate it, I do work out, partly because I know it’s good for me, but mainly because I am vain. Over the years, I’ve subjected myself to a variety of routines in an attempt to sculpt my unruly body. In high school and college I suffered through aerobics, which I detested. In my 20s through 40s, I primarily focused on walking and running on a treadmill, which I found mindnumbingly dull, but detested less than aerobics. Later there would be high-intensity interval training (loathed); something called “functional fitness” (appreciated the descriptive name but also loathed); weight training (liked in theory, and had it not involved knees would have loved); Pilates (disliked and didn’t understand — was I actually moving?); and yoga (did not hate, sometimes even — dare I say it? — kind of liked).
When COVID hit, my husband and I quit the gym and made ourselves lurch through a variety of workout routines at home. Without any equipment, we had to get creative; our most memorable exercises included doing crunches with a dog siting on my chest and deadlifting art books. But after a few months, we quit that too. What did vanity matter when the whole country was shut down? For all anyone knew, we had ceased showering (in my defense, I prefer to say I “reduced” my showering) and had grown nails so long we’d rebranded them chopsticks.
But then the worst of COVID subsided, and we were free to get back to working out in a gym (cue crying), so we signed up and got paired with a personal trainer. After one session, in which the trainer simply described what his workout routine might look like for me and never asked me to do anything resembling “a movement,” I canceled my membership, citing that age-old excuse, “I can’t even.”
But my husband kept going to his workouts, and not even just for vanity, but for something he called “increased strength.” If you’ve never been committed to a bad plan of action (or to the lack of a good plan of action) while someone close to you, say, your spouse, quietly commits himself to heroism, then you know the kind of pain it caused me to watch him go work out twice a week (including on the dreaded Tuesdays, no less).
And then, like an old friend popping up on Facebook — someone who you always kind of liked but never really thought you’d see again, which was fine with you because you had other friends you liked a lot more, like wine — yoga popped into my head. Placid, gentle, it’s-your-practice, take-this-onehour-not-to-hate-yourself yoga. Because I was flexible, yoga had always been fairly easy for me. Plus, as I recalled, in yoga you spent a good deal of time on your back, long seconds ticking away while you forgot to breathe and instead used the time to come up with the perfect rejoinder to something maddening your sister said or to plan out your wardrobe for the entire upcoming week; either way, the time was not wasted being “mindful.”
Best of all, with yoga, at no point were you required to throw a weighted ball up a wall and catch it in squat, thereby using your knees, or to “ski” on a ski machine as fast as you were humanly able while watching your calorie burn tick up in sloth-like slow motion. Yoga was something I could actually do that I would not despise, and that, if my Apple watch is to be trusted, still counted as exercise.
So I headed back over to the gym and re-signed up. Did I peruse all the available workout classes and options for moving my body that were available to me? I did, but only in the interest of thinking about everything I was not going to require myself to do. What I would do was yoga, and only yoga. Who was the hero now?
I am proud to report that I have held true to my commitment for several months, even though the yoga of present is nothing like the yoga of past. Whether it has changed since its inception 5,000 years ago (which is around the time I last did it) or my body has crystallized into its current positions of standing, sitting and holding a wine glass and isn’t capable of anything more, I can’t say. But I was doing yoga last week and still marveling that I did not hate it, when I accidentally caught sight of myself in the mirror. I don’t know what your yoga face looks like, but at that moment, mine looked less like someone finding her joyful inner harmony and more like someone cleaning toilets in a gulag.
And it wasn’t even Tuesday.
Dana Shavin is an awardwinning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the author of a memoir, “The Body Tourist,” and “Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs,” a collection of her most popular columns spanning 20 years. Find more at Danashavin.com, follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes or email her at danaliseshavin@ gmail.com.