Hannah, just breathe…

Going to a studio you haven’t practiced at before is like being the new kid on the first day of school.

Scary, exciting, unnerving, strange, and kinda cool.

Today, I went to Bikram Yoga Boston, which has one studio in Harvard Square and one studio in the Financial District downtown.  I haven’t been to the downtown one yet, but the Cambridge studio definitely lived up to the beautiful pictures and the rave reviews online.  Sparkly, modern, clean.  I was a bit grossed out by the carpets, considering my wonderful, irreplaceable studio in DC (Bikram Yoga Dupont, how I miss you!) didn’t have a carpet floor, but my understanding is that most Bikram studios these days are carpeted. Just gotta get over it, I guess.

And, much like the new student, I came wearing my best yoga clothes, my biggest smile.  I pretended I knew where I was going.  I even said a soft, shy hello to one or two other yogis.  I placed my mat a third of the way back—not the last row, but certainly not the front and center spot.  And I realized, with embarrassed chagrin, that my bright red towel stood out among all the white towels, which the studio provides (which I obviously didn’t know).

You never can get it 100 percent right on your first day, can you? 

Now, for the actual yoga.  Today’s class marked my first Bikram class since June—quite the hiatus from the woman who completed a 30-day Bikram challenge back in February of this year!  But, when I moved to Boston, I wanted everything to be new, and that even included, to my great surprise, my yoga practice. And so I embarked on exploring Bapiste yoga, another form of “hot yoga.”  And I found, after sweating through a first few treacherously hard classes, that I truly enjoyed it.

This was most shocking indeed, considering I had considered myself a strict and loyal Bikram devotee.  Friends and family would even agree:  I was mildly obsessed.  In hindsight, I realize why.

Bikram yoga provided me with structure, discipline, rigidity and consistency during a time when my life consisted of chaos, confusion and disarray.  I found simple, easy, smiles-only friendships at my Bikram studio during a time when I was fighting with friends, both in DC and elsewhere.  And, since Bikram studios are lined wall-to-wall with mirrors, I found myself each night, sometimes bleary-eyed, sometimes bright-eyed, but always there regardless, hopeful, trying, reaching, and striving to feel better, look better, become a better, fuller person.  Corny as it sounds, I found love in my Bikram practice, and like a love-starved child, I lapped it up, always hungry for more.

When I left that studio—in truth, when I left my life in Washington, DC—I was of the “out with the old, in with the new” mentality.  And so I decided to follow my sister to her studio rather than forge out and find my own.

Baptiste yoga classes provided great release, with all those loud sighs and murmurs and those gentle, soothing teachers, and during my first seven weeks of stressful, balled-fist unemployment, release was exactly what I needed.  Nothing in my day-to-day life was consistent, so the inconsistency in posture sequences seemed fitting—”No class is ever the same,” my sister would say, and I would think, “Yes, and no day here is the same either.”  The mirrorless walls even fit, too.  I felt faceless here—no one knew me, no one looked familiar.  

I never thought I’d admit it, but I’ve come to love my Baptiste classes as much as I once loved my Bikram classes, in much the same way I’ve already come to love this new, strange, still-unsettled life of mine.  

And perhaps that’s because I finally get it: yoga is yoga.  And my life is, well, my life.  If there are any certainties, there’s that.

So this afternoon, as I stared at my face, red as apples, as autumn outside my office window, and I felt my tight joints, sharp as pencils, brittle as chalk, I simply breathed, and smiled inwardly, and reminded myself that I was fine, I had done this all before, and I had survived.  Hell, I’d succeeded. 

Yes, the room smelled strange.  And yes, the carpet bothered me.  And yes, the instructor bothered me, too, just a little.  And yes, I exhaled through my mouth a couple of times, which is quite against the rules in a Bikram yoga class.  And yes, I even wished, once or twice, that I was lounging in downward dog or folded in child’s pose, as I would be if I’d chosen to head to the Baptiste studio instead.

But mostly—mostly, I listened, to my heartbeat and my breath, both heavy, both fast then slow then fast again.  I listened to the bass-thumping music rising from the store below.  I listened to the old, familiar monologue of the Bikram instructor, and followed his instructions dutifully, carefully, modestly, trying my best to be a good, strong yogi.

I wanted to prove to him and to the rest of the class—who knew I was a studio newbie since the instructor, in his loud, microphoned voice, announced my name and my newness before we began—that the wonderful teachers at my former studio taught me well, that I was a learned yogi, a diligent student. 

I wanted to prove I had taught myself well.  

And I did.