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Seven years ago, I had given birth to my daughter via C-section. I was looking for a way to ease back into physical activity and get rid of the pooch I had developed. During a diaper run to Walmart, I stopped by the fitness aisle and was surprised to find a 30-min workout DVD for new moms. As my new baby slept the next morning, I got down on the living room floor and began what was, to me, an extremely difficult 10-minute core routine. I knew my core was in bad shape and I almost gave up—but the DVD kept playing, and the next routine was a yoga flow. I had never done yoga before. I pictured a skinny woman with ridiculous flexibility chanting while standing on her head. But instead, a normal woman greeted her viewers and walked us through proper pose alignment, breathing, and mostly fun. I hesitantly and clumsily followed along. I felt so good after those 10 minutes—so grounded, and strong, and awake—that I knew I had found my thing. I started falling in love with yoga.
At first, my focus was on proper alignment and just keeping up with instructors. But then I started to find a rhythm and started to memorize poses and flows. Now I was free to turn on some music and just go with it. This is where yoga changed for me. It went from just a way to physically recover from childbirth to a way to connect with my Creator. Time on the mat was time with Jesus—time to turn on worship music or just enjoy the quiet and his presence while expressing my love for him.
When I got sick from mold, yoga became a sanctuary. With panic attacks, all I could do was focus on my next breath, and so yoga became a place where I learned to breathe through life’s difficulties. When I got ready to have a VBAC with my son, I firmly believe that learning to breathe through each moment was one thing that got me through 4 and a half hours of pushing!
A few days after that first yoga DVD lesson, I bought my first mat. And then a week later, some yoga pants. Then I picked out some yoga fitness books at the library. I looked for other yoga videos online. I did yoga most mornings and some evenings. Sometimes with my baby right next to me. As she got older, she wanted her own mat and we went to a few yoga kids’ meetings at the library. We did yoga on the balcony of one home and on the green grass at another home. I joined a group of women that did yoga at a coffee shop. My husband started joining me when I did yoga in the evening. He even got his own mat!Now my just-walking son tumbles around on the mats with my daughter and me. Sometimes we play fast music and work out some wiggles. Sometimes we praise Jesus with slower movements. My daughter loves to try to come up with her own poses and names. She gets to see strong women of every size and color and physical ability doing yoga. She sees mommy trying new poses and then falling into a heap of giggles. Yoga is a place of bonding for us, a place of healing, a place of learning to roll with the punches and rise stronger than before. It’s teaching us humility and how to listen to others and to ourselves.
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