Sweat droplets decorated the mat beneath my feet, now supported, not by my living room carpet but the firm wood floor of my yoga studio and second home of the past five years. After years of practicing (and teaching) yoga mat to mat with my fellow yogis, the shift to a home practice during the pandemic was challenging. Ironically, eight months since I stopped visiting my studio as a student (and now, fully vaccinated), I found it equally challenging to compel myself to go back.
In my home practice I had developed a comfort level with failure that enabled me to try new poses and risk falling flat on my face (because as every serious yogi know, it happens!). My feet adapted to the softer (read: less stable) surface of the carpet pile beneath my mat and my balance reached new heights. Without a set of blocks to support a pose like Balancing Half Moon I tightened my core and focused on my breath instead becaming stronger in turn. But when it occurred to me following my second dose of Pfiezer that I could once again safely practice in the company of other vaccinated students I began to wonder, would the strength I had built over months of my private practice translate to the heated, high energy environment of the studio I once loved?
Last Tuesday I decided to find out.
“After months of working independently it is both thrilling and terrifying to share that work with others. ”
The heat hit me like a July morning: all encompassing and yet, welcome. My muscles, long acclimated to the cooler temperatures of my apartment felt supple and sinuous. I may tell myself that I had forgotten just what I was missing outside the studio, but my body remembered.
I felt stronger than ever. I had returned to my mat, not as the same person who took her last Down Dog in that 99 degree studio last July, but a better, stronger, more confident person. The sequence of course, was different than those which I had practiced ad nauseam from the comfort of my living room, but the poses were familiar.
And, my practice wasn’t perfect. But with yoga (and as I believe, the creation of art) that’s not the point. The point is that you simply showed up whether to roll out your mat or arrange your paint palette and paper; that’s how progress happens. Hitting my mat again in the company of others was not unlike first sharing a first draft of my current children’s book project with my critique group. After months of working independently it is both thrilling and terrifying to share that work with others.
We are all perhaps, a little out practice being in the company of others sharing sharing a space, even sweat(!) but it’s that which makes the process of yoga and visual storytelling so much richer.
Art, like yoga, I believe is meant to be shared. So as I walk the familiar route down the hill from my neighborhood to my art studio my aching muscles just remind me that I could never have pushed myself quite so hard working alone.