The Path to Yoga

When I joined by 8th grade track team at age 14 I was unable to run a mile. I will never forget the physical hell of those first few long runs, but they did something positive to my mind and I was hooked. I ran the hurdles indoor and outdoor track all through high school. I threw in cross country even though I was terrible, literally last each practice, nearly last each race. I ran before school, I ran during the summers, I rarely missed a practice.

Once I hit college I started to play soccer on Intramural and city leagues. I had played a little soccer as a child, but the real appeal to me at this point was the running after the ball aspect. "Running shifts all the gears in my mind,"I told someone once to explain why I always ran even though it sometimes it felt horrible.

After college I got back into solitary road training, even training for a marathon. I completed all of the training and was set to race and my race was cancelled two days in advance. I was devastated and didn't run for about a year. During this time I turned to the gym for comfort.

In addition to running, I have at various times been a lap swimmer, gym rat, aerobics junkie, and even Muay Thai kick boxer. My first experience with yoga came in 1997 when I signed up with a roommate for some sort of Hatha short course. I remember being on weird mats on the floor, dim lights, and hanging out too long in strange postures. "I'll save this yoga stuff for my days in the nursing home," I thought.

When I was in nursing school in 2002 I went with a friend to a Vinyasa flow class. In my first down dog I experienced a moment of mental clarity that reminded me of the epiphany of my first runs. I started to take more Vinyasa flow classes with the same teacher and I asked her for DVD recommendations to get a home practice going. As I started to do some reading about yoga I came across the word "Ashtanga" yoga. I learned that it was a very powerful, very strong form of yoga. As luck would have it an Ashtanga rec course was being offered at UVA for the next semester.

I had to walk both ways in the dark in the winter over a mile to get to the class once a week. It was well worth it though; in the physical challenges of Ashtanga partnered with the precise breath work I felt that I had finally come home. Each movement had a breath assigned. The style of breath was very difficult and required full attention. If running shifted the gears in my mind, yoga changed the oil, topped off the fluids, and rotated the tires.

For me the Ashtanga breathing system supplies a framework that makes home practice easy. All you need is your mat and your breath. At first I got a DVD to have someone to call the poses for me just for backup. After the rec class at the UVA gym, and with my home practice developing, I was ready make the leap to a real live yoga studio and enter the fold.