When I Was Broken, Yoga Healed Me. How Will It Heal You?

Being bad at yoga turned out to be good in a most unexpected way.

By Claire Dederer September 16, 2016

 

I walked into the yoga studio, a place where I’d spent hundreds of hours, and felt an unaccustomed nervousness. This place had once been as central to my life as my bed or my desk. I performed my ritual of aligning my mat with the floorboards and smiled at the teacher. But I felt like a beginner, and frankly it sucked. And that was nothing compared to what happened once class started. For the next 90 minutes, I failed at everything, even the most basic poses. Again and again, I dropped to my mat and just sort of sat there. It was humiliating. I’d been a front-row betty! Now I couldn’t even manage a downward-facing dog.

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For years, I’d had a whatever-works-for-you attitude about yoga. I knew plenty of people who didn’t like yoga—they usually had also never tried yoga. These people expressed contempt for the way it had been overrun by Lululemon ladies. Mixed into the scorn was anxiety: People who’ve never tried yoga are pretty sure they’ll be terrible at it. I know whereof I speak. Ever since 2010, when I published a memoir titled Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, people have told me—unsolicited—all their feelings about yoga. My thinking was: Fine. I do my thing, you do yours. As long as you’re paying retail for my book. 

Related: 10 Things A Yoga Teacher Learns About You Within The First 5 Minutes Of Class

That all changed in the most unexpected way. One night during my book tour, I was hurrying downstairs to print a boarding pass. I lost my footing and fell to the bottom of the steep wooden staircase. My husband found me there, passed out, my shoulder dislocated from its socket. My rehab involved lots of physical therapy with those giant neon-colored rubber bands. I tried that for half a year, but my shoulder didn’t seem to get any better, so I decided to go back to yoga. I had forgotten how it felt to enter a studio like a seventh-grader arriving at a school dance (in full Lycra). 

Despite that initial failure, I kept returning to yoga, out of stubbornness as much as anything. The physical mechanics of the poses filled my brain: Did this hurt? Could I manage that? I was present the way you need to be present when you’re rock climbing: If you’re not present, you’re gonna fall. 

After several months of this, something thrilling happened. I gingerly lifted my left arm over my head during a sun salutation one day. It was nothing, but everything. My arm had not traveled that route, to that place, for months. Performing that simple motion, which I had done thousands of times pre-injury, brought a kind of exhilaration. 

Related: 5 Gentle Yoga Poses To Set Your Tight Shoulders Free

In the months that followed, yoga helped fix me. I was worse at it than I’d been pre-injury, but I was also better. Because, even though I was constantly slightly petrified—or perhaps because I was—I had attained that elusive quality: presence.

Now I’m an evangelist. I believe there are only two universal truths: (1) No one should get a face tattoo (unless they’re Maori) and (2) everyone should try yoga. You might hate it. But you also might fix something that’s broken.