Energy, Balance, Creativity, and Clarity
My Return to Hot Yoga and My True North after the Covid Pandemic and Lock Down
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My last hot yoga session occurred in March of 2020. I had attended at chain yoga studio on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago for three months four days a week before Covid-19 hit the U.S. I practiced hot yoga to build my core and strengthen my balance that multiple sclerosis had snatched from me. Until March 202p, I not only lost weight but my balance started to improve and my core became stronger.
Months into the lockdown, all I achieved physically and mentally started to disintegrate. By March 2020, I could go more into archer pose and cross one leg over the other during the standing poses. My literary art was also building and by March 2020, my novel reached 145 pages.
Without hot yoga, my mental health and cognitive health suffered along with my physical health and art. I found myself overwhelmed, angry, heavy, and hosting a sluggishness that transformed into creative and emotional paralysis.
While my workplace like other workplaces thought we all could continue life as usual as hundreds of thousands were dying around us, that was just the bell hooks-termed “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” system maintaining its toxic and inhumane approach to earn profits. This trauma neo-liberalism ignored affected everyone regardless if we had survived Covid, lost a loved one or several loved ones to it, or worked from home isolated from one another. Though I am introvert and had no problem staying or working from home, human beings need social interaction. My hot yoga practice served as my social interaction.
At hot yoga, I had found a new community and had decided that after a several years of practice, I would pursue my own yoga teaching training. In addition to continuing my writing practice, I envisioned myself also teaching yoga. Teaching in corporate and neo-liberal higher education as an adjunct/part-time instructor (every school calls what I do something different) since 1999 has demoralized and defeated me. It still does.
While I worked with Kelly Carlin during the pandemic and took her two classes about finding (in my case re-finding) my true north and putting my true north into practice (this newsletter came into existence because of my praxis), it didn’t provide me the physical tools for galvanizing and stimulating my prana—human's vital life force energy that would knocked off my frustration, insecurity and depression.
Since I have M.S., extreme hot and cold temperatures negatively affect my body. I only did regular yoga because I feared hot yoga would trigger an exacerbation and worsen my existing problems. Not until a yoga instructor explained to me a sessio 's sauna-like temperature is regulated, and I could step out any time I needed to did I try a hot yoga session.
It was love at first downward dog
Instead of the heat compromising my health, its benefits cleansed me along with improving my mood, flexibility, strength and bone health.
When I started this newsletter, I wrote a post about how movement improves our health, mindset, creativity and art. When I did hot yoga before Covid, my stagnant energy coarsed through my body and my creativity. The post-Covid years made me accept how my stagnant unhealthiness went beyond my physical body. I didn't like how I felt.
Last week, I signed up for introductory sessions at Be Yoga in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. On the way to my first Saturday session, I felt conscious of my body and fearful of what to expect after having been away from any form of exercise for several years. I knew the balance and strength I had gained before March 2020 was gone and that I would face difficulty during the first session. With yoga, we are to set an intention and not push ourselves beyond our capabilities, but I have always had difficulty being gentle with myself. I indeed suffer from Eldest Daughter Syndrome, and my Type A perfectionist personality is a greater obstacle to my hot yoga practice than my poor balance and inflexibility.
My first session turned out to be nothing to fear. While a majority of my classmates surrounding me were in town to attend the National Yoga Championships and showed the most incredible poses, my instructor Cat was not judgmental but gentle, soothing, nurturing and encouraging. I shared with Cat and the other instructors via email before my first session that I lived with M.S. and was years out of practice. Cat, her studio partner Michael and a guest instructor eased my fears. They all made me feel welcome and that I belonged.
During this initial session, I became tired immediately and that exhaustion resulted from me just trying to maintain my balance. I knew not to compare myself to my fellow yogis, but I felt demoralized that the movements they did where ones I could once do before M.S.. Because there were many experienced and capable yogis in the studio, I feared falling into one or two of them.
As my session continued, I eased into my practice. By the end, I gained a sense of accomplishment — a sense I had not felt since March 2020. Though I had a long way to recapture what I had before Covid, I felt I had arrived home and safe when I returned on Sunday.
My session this past Wednesday went well. Though the standing poses, especially the archer pose, continued to escape me, I not only found my body readjusting but my sense of calm and ease returning. I had felt that same calm and ease during my trip to Ireland. My mind's clarity in my mind and the prana moving through my body were visceral. In the final shavasana, energy tingled and rushed up my arms, chest and face. After I returned home and took my bath, I fell alseep right away and stayed asleep through the night. I often wake four hours after falling asleep and struggle to return to slumber.
My Thursday night session did not go as well as Wednesday's. My balance did improve a little, but I still carried my day’s anger, stress and frustration into my practice. They did affect it, and I was disappointed in myself. Again I ignored judging myself and not accepting where I was at that night. My next session is tomorrow, and my set intention for Sunday morning is not only for building balance but releasing judgment.
It has only been a week, but I’ve also noticed my creativity adjusting. Work on my novel has felt congested for months. I realize I am placing the same problems on my literary art like I placed on my yoga this past Thursday. After my Thursday night practice, I decided to focus on finishing revisions on two short stories and take a break from my novel. I decided to then submit those two short stories to literary journals and magazines. Working again in a smaller fiction genre and sending my stories out to journals will make still engaged with fiction. I know I will return to my novel with a fresh perspective while those short stories circulate to readers and editors for publication consideration.
The physical and mental morose I have experienced since March 2020 did carry into my novel. My self confidence had dropped along with my ability to balance my creative focus and praxis while I complete work and family responsibilities. Work-life balance doesn’t exist, but yoga allows me to devote an hour and a half to myself where I strengthen my body along with my mind, spirituality and creativity.
Join the salon! Share your thoughts in the comments. Some questions to consider and help you get started.
1.) Do you practice yoga? If so, what kind and what do you bring away from your practice?
2.) If you don’t practice yoga, would you be interested in a trying a session? What would you hope to gain from it?
3.) Do you practice another physical activity? If so what is it? What benefits do you gain from it?
4.) If you practice yoga or another physical activity, do you see it positively impacting or infusing your art, writing or another discipline? That discipline doesn’t have to be arts related.
5.) Would you ever be interested in trying or practicing hot yoga?
6.) Do you use a physical or artistic practice? What do you find helps one or both?