Why I'm Glad I Did Yoga Even When I Was Big

Yoga is magic.  I love yoga. The first yoga I ever did was in my living room in my apartment in Chicago on Clark Street with a video tape. It was the most gorgeous yoga video tape on a beach. I fell in love. I became crunchy.

I started finding more yoga tapes and reading yoga magazines and adding yoga to my step aerobics at Bally's and my guts and butts class at the dive gym down the street.

I secretly thought I was the shit living in the city by myself and walking everywhere and going to the art theaters and walking by the lake and through the zoo every day in the summer. I was my own kind of crunchy.  (I still am!)

When you do yoga, no matter what your size or your flexibility, you become more body aware. You become more present. You walk taller. You breathe better. You want to eat better. You become more aware of very subtle things.

When I was different sizes, I was able to make different modifications to do different poses. I learned to lift my stomach to do twists. I realize now that I'm not much more flexible or open in my hamstrings or my hips at different weights.  I was never very flexible; I always modified for tight hamstrings, but I am much stronger in my warrior poses now.

When I was in Jenny's class at a heavy weight, I breathed through and modified through some strength and balance poses that some of the smaller girls couldn't do.

I worked on crow pose every week and eventually got it. It was harder for me because I was balancing a lot of weight on my arms. I remember getting bruises on the backs of my triceps when I first started. I also remember falling forward onto my forehead, which she said was good because I wasn't afraid to lift my feet off the floor.

I remember trying to get to crow off the blocks from a squat and that seemed easier to me even though it was a harder modification for some people. Today in our yoga class, we did a squat with flat feet, which I can never do, but the teacher showed us how to use 2 blocks under our butts and that can make your feet flat.

Then she said, if we wanted to try and it was available in our practice (a lovely yoga phrasing), we could move forward and try crow. I just put my hands in front of me and I went right into crow and balanced like it was nothing. Inside my head I was smiling like a big goof ball.

I remember going to a yoga conference at a hotel in Itasca with all the big fancy names in yoga. It was such a great learning experience for me. I went to a vinyasa class with Seane Corn. It was no joke. I modified, of course, and I went to child's pose as they tell you to when my breath couldn't match my movement.

When I was in child's pose one of the teachers who was walking around came over to me and did a hands-on adjustment massage on my back. It was like an affirmation to me that I was doing what was respectful for my body instead of trying to compete.

I went to a hip openers for meditation with Rodney Yee. The two things that I remember most from that session was that he said that the purpose of yoga is to prepare your body for meditation. It is to open your body enough to allow it to sit quietly without fidgeting when meditating.

He also said that in some ways beginners have it better in yoga because they don't have to do as much to get to the sensation as someone who is more flexible. So beginners shouldn't be upset that they can't do the advanced poses, they should just be happy that they can reach the sensation when they reach it and do the pose with integrity.

I'm paraphrasing his words, but I like that idea. I've always listened to exercise and yoga teachers about good form. I always want to use good form and not try to force something. Doing yoga and other exercises when I was heavier taught me to modify and not judge. I'd rather have good form and modify than be sloppy.

Doing yoga when I was bigger also allowed me to feel small movements that you don't see. I learned to use props. Now I really use props to my benefit still. I understand how props work and that they are not just for beginners. They are an important part of anyone's practice. Doing yoga at all sizes and fitness levels allowed me to feel what poses were supposed to feel like. Now sometimes what I felt, I can see in a different way.

Triangle pose has always been a challenging pose for me. I've always tried to really feel it. Teachers really stress not bending forward and getting out of the same "plane" in triangle. If you let yourself try to bend too far, you will do that.

As I've lost weight and gotten stronger, I am starting to see in my triangle what I felt in it before. It's a nice feeling. I'm not able to reach or bend any farther down. I'm not any more flexible. I just see what I feel.

Not every pose or everything in yoga is available all the time. But something in yoga is always available!

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