I hate yoga. I thought that I liked it in 2024, because I was going to yoga sculpt. Which is yoga, but a lot more fitness-y; it’s fast, with a lot of weight training and cardio to break it all up. The yoga I particularly dislike is vinyasa flows, which is what I have gone to so far in 2025. Vinyasa is where you have these poses and stretches that you do over and over again, and I go to hot classes, so you are sweating profusely the whole time. It is so challenging to me. I feel like I am the least patient, least flexible, least strong person in the room, and that is coming from an ex-dancer.
I feel like I am falling all over the place during a vinyasa flow, I am constantly having to restart the poses, struggling to keep my leg up or to hold a position the way I am supposed to. It’s hard to hold a position when you can hardly even get into a position. Meanwhile, the sixty year olds around me are elegantly holding their legs in the air, holding poses like statues, and able to keep up with the flows while I am laying in my favorite pose (corpse, iykyk) trying to work up the courage to start the pattern again.
I hate how long it can take at the end to get out of class, how we lay and breathe through everything, being constantly reminded to keep in tune with our breath. I frequently find myself asking if I am even breathing during yoga, intentional breath is not one of my strong suits, because when I think about it it starts to get all funky and weird. It confronts the business of my mind and the self-made schedule of my day. We probably laid in the room together at the end of class for no less than five minutes today, no one moving. I actually forgot where I was for a few moments.
The yoga instructor encourages us that yoga is as much about the flowing between the poses as it is the poses themselves. That it is about what we do when we fail and have to start over, that is as important as our successes. It is mentally exhausting in this way, especially for a beginner, to repeatedly try something, and feel like you are failing or that it is too hard for you. But of course that is the tension where there is the most growth. To simply try again, and to keep trying even when it doesn’t feel like you are improving.
So I will keep attending yoga, because I hate it. Because it confronts the business of my mind, the fixed mindset in me, and forces me to slow way down to each breath. Because it shows me how to find strength in nothing but the air in my lungs and my will. Because it allows me an opportunity to practice balancing on my head and my hands (seriously how fun to have a space to try all these random contortions as an adult with other adults). Because it feels playful, and sort of silly, but it is secretly really good for your body and mind, and who couldn’t use a better mind-body connection. I will keep attending because it humbles me, and I need that daily.
Maybe I will someday love yoga, but for now, hating it and doing it anyways is fine with me. I think it’s what I need.
have you tried pilates? i’ve been curious to try it but fear my experience would mirror yours with yoga or worse - like falling off the machine.