When the kid was little, one of our favorite books to read together was The Peace Book by Todd Parr. I recommend it if you’ve got little ones – or hell, even if you don’t. It’s full of delightful sweetness. But I’ll never forget one time when we got to this page and suddenly her little brain just LIT UP as she pointed to these two figures and said, “he loves his dog, and his dog loves him! Love, LOVE!”

These are the best moments of parenthood, when you see these major life lessons come to life in their perfectly chirpy joyful voices. You realize suddenly that they’re GETTING IT – you’re helping to shape them into what will become their best selves someday. It’s thrilling, frankly. Magical.

But I was reminded of this again today in yoga training. We were taking turns practice teaching each other sections of the 90-ish minute sequence we’ve been learning (Baptiste’s “Journey into Power”), and I was given the section on “opening” – half pigeon, double pigeon, and frog pose. And some down-dogs in between. This is toward the end of the sequence, when we’ve been through a lot of strenuous “tapas” (heat, not the appetizer) and are ready to move into cooling down and releasing. These poses open the hips, and often pathways to deep emotions. We linger for several deep breaths in each, and our teacher had suggested I share a story as the class moved into them. “You’ll be great at this,” she said. No pressure or anything!

As my classmates began teaching the initial sun salutations that begin the sequence, I went down a little spiral about this. Stage fright is real, friends. What story would I tell? What wisdom do I have to share, as I’m sweating to keep up with all the chatarungas (and there are so, so many chatarungas. gah.)

But then it hit me: it’s “opening.” Just leave it open. Words will come.

And when it was my turn to get up there, I looked out at all these beautiful souls who are honestly some of the bravest, kindest humans I’ve ever had the privilege to know, just poised in down-dog waiting for ME. And I was overcome with love for them. And the words came, of course. I don’t know if I did it perfectly, because who cares – it’s practice. But as they bowed to the floor in half pigeon, I could almost physically feel their release sweeping towards me. Their internal spaces opening. And their love, echoing back.

Love, love.

We think that when we get up on a stage or at the head of a classroom, or when we sit down to read a book to a child, that we are providing a one-sided service to a passive audience that merely receives it. The pressure comes from wanting to do it right, be the expert, give them their money’s worth. But we forget that it’s an exchange. They are giving back just as much as we are – we’re merely opening that channel that we’re both experiencing, co-creating, together.

It’s still magical.

In general, the yoga poses I’m “best” at (meaning, they come more easily to my body, knowing that every body is different here and that beyond healthy alignment and things there is no one “right” way to do any of them really) are the balancing ones – eagle, airplane, half moon, tree, etc. Tree especially makes me feel like a magical fairy moon goddess, not gonna lie. When I get to these in the middle of the long sequence we’re learning in training, it feels like a moment to recenter, remember my presence, come back home to myself again. Which really every pose should be, but well, you know.. it’s a continual journey.

And yet.. I’m continually reminded in these that I feel a little more wobbly on my right side than my left. Which happens of course – just like every body is different, every side to every body is a little different too. But today in practice I realized something about why this might be especially true for me.

When I was 19, I twisted my ankle and fell while dancing at a night club. Being me at 19, I got right up and kept dancing, and later walked half a mile to my car, drove home, went to bed, and was completely surprised to find my foot had swollen to twice its normal size by the next morning. Come to find out by a doctor who was shaking his head in wonder that I wasn’t howling in pain, I had a major break in the fifth metatarsal bone of my right foot – the part that connects to the pinky toe. I was in a cast all summer long – only the hottest summer in the history of the world until the one during which I was pregnant a decade later – and it eventually healed. But like the cartoon witch that I am, I still feel it sometimes when the weather changes.

And then I got a herniated disc in my spine (I think it’s my L5?) thanks to birthing and later carrying that kid of mine on my hip in all sorts of misaligned ways. And huh… that’s on my right side too. When I could no longer stand all the way up and the sciatica was too painful to ignore, I finally visited a chiropractor, who shook her head at me like that foot doc and said that my x-ray looked like the spine of an elderly person. I was in my early 30s at the time. Much therapy later, I’ve now reached the point where if I remain moderately physically active, it’s pretty much dormant anymore. It’s actually kind of like my body’s “tell” – if I feel it, I’ve been too sedentary lately – which actually I’ve come to view as a blessing of sorts. But yoga has been a powerful ally for me in this, and one of the many reasons I’ve been drawn to teaching – and hiking, and dancing and playing and basically living like a person much younger than I actually am. Maybe not in night clubs so much these days though.

But I was also in a minor car accident a few years ago – just a little fender bender that wasn’t even worth reporting at the time, but I’m pretty sure I had some whiplash from it that I never got checked out (by this point you may notice a pattern of medical avoidance and trauma-induced disembodiment – more things that yoga has helped me slowly learn to undo.) So for a while there, I had some pretty severe stiffness and pain on the side of my neck. Guess which side. Combined with my disc issue, it was like this direct line of weakness and glaring PROBLEM I’D LIKE TO IGNORE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH from basically my right ear all the way down to my pinky toe. Eventually though, with a lot of heat therapy and massage and more and more movement, it’s pretty much gone away.

And yet…. in my mind, deeply rooted in my subconscious and emotional body memory, it’s all still there. Physical ailments may heal, even scars can gradually fade, but we carry them with us. When I lean into my right foot, even in my beloved Tree pose, there is still some small voice inside me that whispers, “be careful, this is your bad side.” In these poses where we switch from one side to the other, we’re told to lead with our right first – so that means I’m leading from a place of perceived weakness and inability. Disempowerment. No wonder I wobble. And yes, every wobble is information, and a sign that your body is working. But it suddenly occurs to me what a big reminder this is that true healing is not simply physical – you gotta heal the sciatica within, too.

Working on it.

Sometimes you have a yoga class that just feels great. You leave it feeling strong and empowered and full of lightness and grace, able to go anywhere and do anything!

And then you have one like I had today. Led by a male instructor through the magic of the zooms, to which I was 5 minutes late because I totally lost track of time, making me edgy from the very beginning, it included pose after challenging pose that I just could not make my stiff skipped-a-day-for-new-year’s body do, and he suggested no modifications but just kept pushing: “go a little deeper here, two more breaths..” etc. And frankly, (CW here: ladyparts) I’m riding the crimson tide right now and it’s a fierce one, and being late to class, I hadn’t taken the time to be uh, adequately prepared for this. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, or the panic-inducing moment when you’ve realized too late how much it matters, be grateful. All I’m saying is, I was glad I was doing this from home on my skanky practice mat.

And then dude suggested Wheel Pose. My nemesis. There is something about Wheel that really triggers me. It’s not that I’m against opening way up like that – I love the chest opening poses like Bridge and Fish and Up Dog. As a person with lower spinal issues (thanks difficult childbirth!) they’re some of my favorites to really stretch into. And I can even do Flip Dog or Reverse Tabletop without too much strain. But my strength – for now, and I will say it’s become really solid lately – is primarily rooted in my lower body, and bending my arms backwards to lift myself up from the ground like that feels completely wrong and unnatural to me – to the point of triggering a visceral fight-or-flight response so strong, I’ve often had to fight back tears and the urge to run from the room when at the studio, hoping others mistake it for sweat and Ujjayi breathing. The necessity of wearing masks these days helps.

But today it was all too much. This fucking dude, who will NEVER know what it’s like to try to contort yourself like that while bleeding out your whatever, who the fuck does he think he is, traumatizing me like this?!?!? THE GODDAMN FUCKING ASSHOLE PATRIARCHY, THAT’S FUCKING WHO. WHOM? I DON’T KNOW, FUCK OFF!

Yeah, it was like that. And not just the rage, but the tears from frustration and disempowerment, the running up against a brick wall that seems to exist only for you and nobody else, over and over and over again your whole goddamn life. LIKE WHY? SERIOUSLY, FUCKING WHY?!?

And I knew none of this was this individual man’s fault, that I was totally projecting my own experience of being in my hormonal woman’s body in this patriarchal world of ours onto this random and perfectly lovely human and that it was totally unfair. I didn’t even need to tell myself, “ok honey, take a breath and let’s be mindful about this.” I was completely already there as it was happening. And I also knew that it’s actually yoga that taught me how to do this kind of mindfulness, and that I’m deeply grateful for that. Not to mention a long list of privileges I enjoy just to be doing this class in this moment on this planet at this particular time in history. And I was holding all of that at the same time, while attempting to do his crazy hop from Down Dog to Rock and Roll and Happy Baby and still, you know what? My baby was NOT FUCKING HAPPY. It was a Dead Bug, ok???

And then it hit me. I could give myself permission to stop struggling with all of this. Nobody was watching me but my dog. This is the beauty of the livestreams, folks – you can leave your camera and microphone off. Yeah, I probably could have done this in the studio too, but I’d still be self-conscious about it: I went into Child’s Pose and just…

l e t.
m y s e l f.
f e e l.
i t.

All of it.

I cried. And just… stayed with it. Honored it. Kept crying. Kept raging. And then I imagined being in the studio and having the instructor come over and ask if I was ok and finding the ability to tell him, “I’m triggered, and I’m not sure why, but I’m investigating it, and I need some space to do that, please.” And having him respect that – because honestly, I’m sure he would. And what that would then feel like. And I just stayed there with that, still in Child’s Pose, all the way through Savasana.

And I didn’t get up in time for the final “om,” but I bowed a deep namaste to my own hard work. Because it’s never really about flexibility, or building strong muscles, though those are happy side effects. It’s not even about being able to do that goddamn Wheel.

The truth is, sometimes you have a yoga class that feels like shit. And actually, those are the best classes of all.