I Tried Yoga, Quit Yoga, and Kept Coming Back: My Very Imperfect Yoga Journey

I am probably the last person who should be held up as an example of a perfect yoga practice.

I tried yoga. I hated yoga. I tried it again. I quit. I became obsessed with hot yoga, trained to teach it, stopped practicing for years, came back, stopped again, and eventually realized that maybe the stopping and starting wasn’t evidence that I was bad at yoga.

Maybe that was my yoga practice.

I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that if I couldn’t do something consistently, I wasn’t really doing it. Yoga has spent the better part of twenty years teaching me otherwise.

The First Time I Tried Yoga, I Hated It

In my early twenties, I ‘tried’ a yoga class. Mainly because I wanted that lean yoga bod. I wasn’t yet ailing from achy bones and joints yet and a hangover was pretty much non-existent in those early years, so early Saturday morning classes were no biggie.

But, I didn’t like it. Blasphomy, I know. I always left there feeling queasy and with a dull headache (it couldn’t possibly have been from the 8 beers and bottle of wine I had 7 hours before). So I ditched it. Plus, I wasn’t ‘good’ at it so no more yoga for me.

Fast forward to my thirties after my love/hate relationship with running started. I trained for and completed a 10k, half-marathon and marathon in under a year before my thirtieth birthday and then 10 months later had my first baby. If there was ever a body that needed the healing nature of yoga, it was this one.

I ‘tried’ yoga again. We lived in a small town in northern Wisconsin at the time and while I wanted nothing more to embrace the hippie dippy vibe of this class, I just couldn’t do it…again. The instructor bugged me and I left with another headache after we did 15 minutes of “eye yoga” which consisted of rolling our eyes. I’m already so good at that.

After a move back to our hometown, I returned to my traditional fitness classes; cycling, BodyPump, running, lifting heavy things, etc., even going through instructor training to teach said classes. Then my second baby came. I taught and attended BodyPump classes all the way up until my 38th week, because I thought that made me a badass. It didn’t.

Then My Body Started Asking for Something Different

For the next eighteen months I suffered through sciatica, piriformis syndrome, (which was bad enough to warrant sleeping on a tennis ball most nights), groin pain and all around mother-of-two under three fatigue.

In the meantime, I had taken a new job at the gym I was working at in our Wellness Studios as the “front desk girl”. It was such a different vibe from the hustle and bustle of the main gym where the weight room, fitness classes and pools were located. My little reception desk was directly across from a massage and aromatherapy spa so the smell in that place was amazing. The place has 5 studios for yoga, hot yoga, pilates, barre and tai chi.

Much. Different. Vibe.

In my never-ending quest to lose weight (all of it, but the baby weight first), my director said, “try some hot yoga. That weight will just slip right off.” Wait, what? I had never heard of yoga as a method for weight loss. In the volumes of articles and books and posts I consumed since I packed on the pounds, yoga had never been mentioned as the solution to my weight problem.

(Um, I know why now.)

But, the mere mention of this from someone who clearly knew what she was talking about; she was in her late forties and could pass for a 20-something, who was I to argue?

So, I bought myself an expensive mat, a new big-girl yoga outfit, a shiny water bottle and dragged my fat ass to my first hot yoga class.

Hot Yoga Was the First Thing That Stuck

While I think I might have gone in and out of consciousness more than once during that sixty minutes, the last 5 were enough to get me to come back. Again and again and again.

After about 6 months, and still the same weight I was when I started, that director offered me a free ticket in to Level 1: YogaFit Foundations training. A yoga instructor? Me? No way.

I mean I love to teach, but I felt like an imposter; I don’t have a “yogi” bod, I don’t meditate in my shrine every day and I love to eat meat. Plus, I had only been “practicing” (if that’s what you could call it; more like trying not to die for 55 minutes followed by 5 minutes of bliss) for less than a year.

But it was free and someone I respected offered this opportunity to me so not wanting to be ungrateful, I went for it.

I finished Level 1 with no major incident, continued through Anatomy and Alignment within a few months.

And then I stopped.

For the next 5+ years I practiced/didn’t practice; determined to make a habit out of it only to let insecurities and imposter syndrome get the best of me.

Plus, drinking a box of shitty wine every few days wasn’t doing me any favors. Yes a box. And yes, every few days.

What Yoga Eventually Taught Me About Consistency

In January 2019, I decided to take alcohol out of my life for 90 days. That 90-day alcohol-free experiment ended up changing far more than my drinking.I committed to my practice every single day for those 90 days. I’d never felt better in my life.

There’s an entire story behind this 90 days, but to make a long story short, 90 days was not enough. I recommitted to my practice and finished Level 2 in October 2019, Level 3 in July 2020 and will attend Level 4 in August.

While teaching fills my desire to share my knowledge of yoga with the rest of the world, the education deepens the commitment to my own practice and self-discovery.

Much better than an empty glass of pinot grigio.

A little update, six years later

Yoga never became the perfectly consistent daily practice I once thought it needed to be.

And strangely, I think that’s one of the most useful things it taught me.

There have been seasons when I’ve practiced constantly and seasons when I’ve barely rolled out a mat. I’ve walked, lifted weights, run, rested, started again and changed what taking care of my body looks like more times than I can count.

I used to think all that stopping and starting meant I lacked discipline.

Now I think I’m simply a person who lives in seasons.

Yoga was one of the first places I learned that coming back counts.

Maybe more than never leaving in the first place.