What Yoga Taught Me About Horses

I started taking yoga classes back in my early twenties. Bikram yoga was all the rage among friends of our family and I signed up for a class online. My first Bikram class was 90 minutes of pure torture - both mental and physical, but mostly mental.

As someone who overworks and sets exceedingly high expectations for herself, it didn't take long for me to get hooked and keep coming back to the mat for the challenge. After each class, I would hit a peak mental and physical high that would have me buzzing on endorphins, limber and ready to tackle any physical challenge.

As the workouts progressed, I started to notice how my diet effected each studio session. If I drank within 24 hours of a class, I felt like garbage and suffered every second in that sweatbox. But if I ate right, ate light and nourished my body - I performed impeccably as that class seemingly zoomed by. Yoga is about bringing together the mind, body, and spirit in a delicate balance. A lot like riding a horse.

In my younger years, I never did many workouts or did much to stay in shape. I had two parents who never owned a gym membership. No one in my family was modeling good health behaviors, so it wasn't until a neighbor of mine, Avery, who would later go on to join the Coast Guard, first introduced me to how to workout at at a gym. I trained alongside her as she prepared for bootcamp - sometimes doing 2- or 3-a-days - determined to be as physically fit as possible for her challenge ahead. She had two older siblings who were both in the military, so she set a high bar for herself. I had once gone to talk to the Coast Guard about joining as I pondered whether college made sense for me or not. Education came easy to me, and I was bored with life in the suburbs and I felt hopeless not being able to afford the one thing I loved to do that was physically active - riding. Ultimately, they turned me away because of my lack of physical fitness and told me to come back when I lost twenty pounds. Who knows where I'd be now if I went that route.

My life can easily be compartmentalized into two segments:

life before yoga

and

life after yoga.

Life before yoga was rigid. It was full of unhealthy behaviors and coping mechanisms that led to weight gain, depression, anxiety, and an overall dissatisfaction with my life. Bikram yoga brought me the mental focus and discipline I needed, but ultimately proved to be too expensive and too strenuous as I got older.

Enter: WeYogis. WeYogis is a yoga studio that changed my life. Hip Hop Yoga was my favorite class, jamming out to beats while doing flows that felt more like dance than yoga. The studio I went to used to have only thin vinyl stickers on the downtown windows, so you were visible - at least in part - to onlookers on the street. The lights were always dimmed and there were no mirrors - which helped to not create the sense of comparison that Bikram yoga tended to instill and clearly, in some women, led to an obsession with their appearance. It's amazing how animalistic humans can become in a hot room, surrounded by mirrors, all trying to silent avoid the struggle of social comparison.

At WeYogis, sometimes, candles were lit to create a mood that, to this day, I like to ritualize in my in-home practice. WeYogis was a safe space where you were allowed to be whatever you wanted to be - a place void of mirrors - and you were challenged to think differently about your day, yourself, and your life.

I had to learn that fluidity in movement only comes with practice and repetition. In my younger years, I used to admire dancers and assume they were simply born with something I wasn't. It took practicing yoga for me to realize that that level of grace is earned. Dancers don't just dance - they stretch, they eat strict diets, they do alternate workouts (like yoga) and they dance.

Speed, agility, accuracy - these things are drilled, not born.

In equestrian sports, your job of being a fit, sharp, agile rider is only half of it. The other half is properly communicating - with your body - what the 1,200 pound animal beneath you is supposed to do. You can't properly communicate if your muscles don't fire exactly when you need them to, which is something I have been working on as I find myself back jumping in the 2-foot range consistently. The fall that I describe in this post left me with one side of my body lacking in responsiveness - something that would take years of yoga, barre classes, endless hours of schooling on hippotherapy horses, Theraplating, and Magna Waving to restore me to a somewhat normal state. As I rider, I have to be aware that my weaker side is often a quarter to half-second late to command what I need, so I have to find other ways to compensate with my other aids.

Yoga is what has helped me seek and find a sense of equilibrium. The "come as you are" attitude was something I always felt was missing at modern gyms. And my favorite part - at the very end when you're sweaty, and tired, yet a whole new level of limber when you enter into Savasana is, quite possibly, as close to heaven as humans will ever get while remaining on earth.

Yoga is a constant reminder of what a gift it is to be alive, to be present, and to be able-bodied. As with most things in this world, it is easy to become ungrateful for things as mundane as mobility.

As I look around just my own world - both digital and physical - I can't help but to feel like we're surrounded by messages of not being enough. Not thin enough, not rich enough, not tall enough, not muscular enough. I have personally struggled with what it is to feel "enough" in this world, but the journey of yoga has helped me to realize that I was always enough. There is something beautiful about a practice that tells you that everything you need is right here on your mat. At the end of any yoga class, you will often hear the instructor finish with "Namaste", which means (roughly translated):

"The light in me recognizes the light in you."

Yoga has helped me find the light in me. Have you found yours?