Why I Rarely Practice Yoga Even Though I Say I Love It
By: Jenny Bravo
Tags: Women, Mental Health, Health, Yoga, Self

I was first introduced to yoga through my grandfather. He started practicing in his sixties, did his yoga teacher training, and would show up in my living room to show off his headstand.

I took hold of my own yoga practice after college. I was waist-deep in an eating disorder that was raging in my life, and I moved home to live with my parents. I needed happy. I needed movement. I found home yoga.

There on the carpet living room floor, my mother and I would show up night after night to stretch and balance and hold still. It hurt. I felt my body opening up. I felt myself making space.

Yoga brings that space in your physical body which in turn opens up your emotional body. You cannot run when you find yourself on the mat. It’s not just a stretch that waits for you there. It’s all of the mess and the muck and the hard and the soft that you have been running like hell from.

I love yoga. I know how good it is for me. And yet… I talk about yoga more than I practice it.

I struggle to practice because I am scared of the emotions it brings.

It’s hard for me to walk into the sea of my emotions. Isn’t it hard for everyone? The water is rough out there. It is not all sunshine and rainbows and happy. Feeling things is a bitch.

When I find myself on the mat, I find myself walking into that water. I never know what emotions are waiting there for me. There was a time when I had a very old memory come up for me on the mat and I cried. Hard. It’s like a look-back into my life.

That’s hard for a Tuesday night. It’s hard to come home from work, tired, mind all busy and tangled, and step onto a mat that brings up feelings. I don’t want to feel, sometimes. I want to check out.

Which is exactly why I need that freaking mat.

I think that I need to practice daily in order to be called a yogi.

During eating disorder recovery, I did away with the “good” and “bad” binary in terms of food. Somehow I cannot rid these words from my life. I still think I’m being “good” when I drink a lot of water, work out every single day, produce content, hustle, hustle. I’m “bad” when I want to sleep until noon.

When I feel that I’m “bad,” I find it hard to step into activities that I associate with the “good.” Yoga is one of those. In my head, if I am not practicing yoga every day, then I must be a bad yogi. It’s bullshit.

Life is hard. Life is not able to be stuffed into a bottle like a ship. Routines won’t save us. I can practice yoga today and not tomorrow. It’s okay. I can still love yoga.

I have a hard time making it onto the mat because of self-limiting beliefs.

If yoga were mine and mine alone, it would look like many different things. Sometimes, I may just sit there and breathe. Sometimes, I may do a yoga/dance hybrid. Sometimes, I want more of the firey practice that makes me want to jump off the mat like it’s on fire.

But yoga is not mine and mine alone. Yoga is skinny tan women doing complicated poses on rocks on Instagram. Yoga is a class full of people who have eyes to look around and judge and stare. Yoga is a club that not everyone is always invited to.

Yoga is different for everyone. I forget about this. I forget that the yoga I create in my own home can be the yoga I create out in the world. I can sit on the mat all class, if I need to. Let the eyes judge me. Let them see me in my power. Sitting. Breathing.

I want to be the person that embraces herself in her body on that mat. It is not easy. It requires a vulnerability that I do not always want to express. But I can find it. I can get on that mat. Maybe not every day. But it’s always available to me. And that is a gift.