BOW POSEI am incredibly bad at yoga. I am surprisingly bad.
And I’m sort of past the point of trying to get
better at it.
All of the things I’m bad at come together in
yoga. I am uncoordinated. I have terrible balance.
I have never been flexible. I can’t touch my toes.
I am bad at following directions for anything
physical. If the teacher says, “Today we’re going
to do Gilded Unicorn Pose!” and then demon-
strates how to do it, I’m the one standing around
afterward watching everybody else because I
can’t remember the steps. I cannot count the
ways in which I’ve been adjusted because I’m not
doing something right.
When I walked into my first class fifteen years
ago, you would have looked at me, a fit young
woman, and thought, “Sure, she can do yoga.” I
assumed I would eventually be good at it. And at
my peak, I was going to class four or five times a
week, still under the impression that I was going
to get better.
Now I have a full-time job, and children, and I
can’t get to yoga more than a few times a month.
I’m not in good shape, and I’m exhausted. I can’t
do some poses I used to be able to get into.
But I’ve been surprised to realize that when
you scrape away the ambition and superficial fit-
ness element, you see yoga’s true value in what
remains. Yoga makes me so happy. I’m no longer
impatient about it. I enjoy it more than I enjoy
practically any other activity.
I still can’t touch my toes. My hands get past
my knees, but not to my feet. I was talking to a
teacher the other day about this, and he said,
“That is so amazing! You’re in the practice.” It felt
good to hear—that when I try to touch my toes,
I’m in the moment, in the struggle. There’s some-
thing profound happening there that wouldn’t
happen if I could do it with no effort.
There has to be something to that. Otherwise
why would I keep bothering to practice an activity
that by any other measure I stink at?