A Yoga Story: 10 years of practice

A Yoga Story

10 years ago I completed a 6 month, 200 hour yoga teacher training at Yoga Tree in San Francisco. This was the heyday of yoga, and my fellow students subleased apartments or stayed with friends, flying in from all over the nation for this training. San Francisco was at this point the yoga mecca for the West. My teachers were published authors, established leaders who spoke and taught globally, and educators. They started Yoga Journal from their living room, pioneered specific fields (prenatal, post-natal, yin yoga) and radically expanded branches of the yoga practice (Jivamukti, Anusara, Vinyasa).?

18 years ago I attended my first yoga class, at a NY Sports Club with my mom in Freehold, New Jersey. My mom swiftly fell asleep and snored during svanasana (the final resting pose) and not even the ringing of the gong to close class could wake her! As a young teen, I felt mortified and exhilarated. I had experienced nothing like this before, and I was hooked.

What inspired my?yoga training?

My first job- post college in Boston, post internship in London- was at UCSF, a giant?medical research institution. I worked?as a Clinical Research Coordinator in the gyn oncology department, supporting two brilliant surgeons. On a day?to day basis, I greeted women coming in, managed their schedules of care, explained logistics, and debriefed them on study protocols. On a month?to month basis, I saw women come in unwell, and leave unwell. I felt helpless to truly assist them, stifled by the snail's pace of medical research, and limited by the constrictions of a hyper-structured,?sterile?environment. I loved working with the social workers, patient?care advocates, genetic counselors, nutritionists and the center for integrative health. The presence?of all of these resources?is astounding, and makes UCSF one of the premier cancer centers in the US.?

In my role, I felt a growing sense of restlessness and inefficacy. The mind boggling redundancy of our hybrid medical record system is the perfect metaphor for this: Everyday, while preparing charts for the next day's clinic, I logged onto the electronic medical record system called Epic, and physically printed out the notes, adding them to the chart. Then I called around to all other doctors that patient had, convincing them to fax me copies of their own medical records. That task required me to fax each provider a different medical release form. Unsurprisingly, patients were often seen with incomplete health histories and inadequate intake time. One saving grace was the nurse practitioners, who were voluntold to take on the most difficult or unrewarding cases.?Our clinic was so overbooked that coordinators would double or triple book time slots to accommodate patients.

This is our healthcare system, with a threefold?per capita increase from 1980-2020, i.e. $2,968 to $12,531 in healthcare spending.?

My stress management practice was traipsing down Divisadero until it became Castro Street, the epicenter of the gay rights movement here in town. Then I bounded up the Yoga Tree stairs, already sweaty, hair in a gloriously messy bun, and moved in a fluid dance, breathing deeply into every tiny cavern of my lungs for many hours. I'd never felt so alive, so good and so beautiful.?

Yoga connected me somehow to my femininity, and throughout my twenties I felt powerful, relishing how I could be both graceful and strong, these qualities etched into me through the rigor and repetition of postures.

I loved that many around me were like me, that even our bodies were similar, carved out curvatures from the same exercises on long repeat. Contrastingly, many people I met in class were singularly quirky, and I enjoyed quickly asking weird questions and hearing the delight in their replies, which often bemused or confused me. I appreciated these people the most, as without yoga, maybe our paths would never have crossed.?

Yoga made me feel unabashed in the way children are, without heightened bodily self-consciousness and full of sensory delight.?

With every inflection point of my forming young adulthood, I spent reflective time on my mat to work the knowledge into my body. I cried silent tears over the news that a loved one would have heart surgery ("What would that mean? Would he die?") and the realization that I could no longer work at UCSF, a job that didn't fit me despite my esteem for their nurses and doctors. I practiced alongside my shock, anger, confusion, grief and injustice and massaged out all of those things. Later on, when I lived in a remote village in Europe, I taught yoga, speaking breath and bodily cues in a foreign language.?

The first thing I did upon quitting my UCSF job was sign up for the yoga teacher training. I left that first job in a fiery blaze, on a pulpit of worker's rights, patient rights, and outrage over leveraging The Great Recession of 2009 to overwork employees and threaten us with furloughs. A moral high horse is a fun one to ride, and here's what I learned since then: I was frustrated by a medical system that didn't place enough emphasis on preventative care, that overtested to oblivion, and that ignored integrative or alternative modes of healing. Most of all I was terrified of sickness and death, and seeing it around me each day drove home its?inevitability. A representative called for an exit interview. I listed my reason for leaving as "everyone around me is dying". I said it was my first existential crisis, and that was after reading Kafka and the like for an entire semester.?

With more composure and self-awareness, gleaned from yoga and meditation, I observe more deeply and think through the ripple effects of my actions. I don't regret quitting, or going out with a bang that day. I received notes and texts saying how impressed and inspired people were by my "Worker's Speech," as if I summoned King George VI. That day marked the beginning of my career maturation. It ignited an understanding of how to a) practice restraint and b) properly compose public speeches.?

Yoga brings a softer touch to health than what I experienced at UCSF. It cultivates a heightened recognition of our physical and mental health, and helps one identify small problems before they become large ones. By being in touch with our bodies, we respect our bodies and can better advocate for them. Yoga has helped millions of people process trauma, overcome addiction, recover from childbirth, sleep better, focus more sharply, and feel at peace with themselves.?

During Covid, Yoga Tree closed after 20 years. Many other beloved neighborhood studios closed, like Bernal Yoga in my neighborhood. Teachers taught over Zoom for donations and many left the city. I chose to devote myself fully to other endeavors- caring for an infant boy, creating custom care packages for medical providers, helping older people get supplies, biking with friends who were isolated or stressed, carefully documenting the unfolding of events around me, working with a photojournalist who published a book about Shelter in Place, etc. At the very beginning I asked myself, "What do you want your Covid legacy to be?" The answer was I wanted to care for others and work hard to support them, figuring the measure of one's character is at the ultimate test in moments like this. I wanted to be proud of my accomplishments, and not to act selfishly, but for the common good.?

With the loss of yoga communities, my teacher shared this quote: "Let what comes come/ Let what goes go/ And find out what remains." She explained that to venerate an exhalation, even the exhales we resist, in full awareness, clears the space for the inhale, the next new beginning. People practice yoga to feel a sense of home. It's not necessarily a physical place, but it's more like coming home to yourself, remembering who you truly are.?

Now, finally, there are new physical spaces to inhabit for?yoga. More accurately the selfsame Yoga Tree is now Haum Yoga (pronounced home, tellingly). Upon my first occasion walking in, we all had to wear masks still. I realized I'd been holding my breath anytime I was around other people for 2 years. 2 years! Moving on my mat again felt like dusting off internal cobwebs. The extreme stiffness within every muscle and tendon was shocking. My body felt foreign, as if I was a chipmunk upon the forest floor with rigor mortis. Moving in this way again, I break up old habits and patterns, let in new blood and oxygen, and re-energize my body for our new world. A rebirth.?