bend your damn knees: a memoir

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who started a yoga journey. Young and naive, she had many lofty goals: she wanted to balance on her head, and she wanted to put my foot behind her head, and she wanted to do the splits. 

Day after day, she went to her royal yoga classes, and day after day, she walked around with sore hamstrings. "It's because I'm going to yoga," she said. "It's because I'm getting more flexible," she said. 

She folded and lunged and downward dogged without care, each day hearing the instructor telling the class that they could find child's pose, bend their knees, take a break, if they wanted, and each day selectively ignoring those invitations. 

And she loved yoga, and she felt strong and healthy, and so she went to yoga teacher training, which was a most arduous journey. She was sore and tired, and she loved it, but by the end, she was hitting a wall. She needed to be still after a month of 12-hour days. And so she came home to her castle and she rested. She kept up her practice, but she no longer had a student gym membership, so it was mostly at home in the palace. She rested and rested for four months. 

And then the time came to start a graduate school program, and - at last! - she regained my student gym membership. What's more, now she was a teacher! 

She soon realized, teaching two classes in two days each week, each class fully practiced beforehand, that her hamstrings would not sustain this schedule. And alas, she began to bend her knees. 

Several things happened upon this evolution: 1) She walked around without hamstring pain all day, every day, class or no class. 2) Her hamstrings became more flexible (?!?!?). Of course this sounds ridiculous, but alas it is true. One day she decided she wanted to work towards doing the splits, thinking she should stretch her hamstrings out more often. After about 45 minutes of stretching, after a full month of no hip stretching, she surprised herself by sliding right down into the splits. And 3) She started to give herself permission to make other modifications that were right for her body, just because she felt like it. It turns out, she learned, that if you swap out a chaturanga for a child's pose, the world indeed does not perish. 

From that fateful day forward, the princess bent her goddamn knees every goddamn class she taught, and she lived happily ever after.

The end. 

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Spoiler alert: the princess was me. I'm the princess. (Thank you for putting up with me - I always thought my memoir would be a fairytale, and it turns out I was right).

And the moral of the story? Despite all of that nonsense, I'm serious! For you, maybe it's not your hamstrings - maybe it's something else. Everybody's built a little bit differently, and I think we owe it to ourselves to pay attention to how we feel after we work out or stretch. If you have body parts that seem to become aggravated easily, maybe they just need something different from what you're currently giving them. You might need to stretch your hamstrings every day to keep them loose. I need to leave them alone almost every day for that to happen. Whatever the muscle group, please keep in mind that overstretching is very much a thing.

I think a lot of people feel the need to show off or prove themselves in a yoga class. And of course it's okay (and good!) to push your body - yoga is, among other things, a workout. But it's also okay to take it easy. You can take it easy for part or all of a class, and for any reason at all. Maybe you're not feeling well, or you have an injury - fine. But 'I'm just not feeling this chaturanga right now' is an equally valid reason. You have nothing to prove.

I've begun to start my classes by saying that what you bring to today's practice is what to bring to today's practice. It will be different than those around you, and it will be different from what you brought yesterday and what you will bring tomorrow. I think it's important to bring attention to what really matters: as long as you are breathing and moving, you are doing yoga. Whether your knees are straight or bent has no bearing on the quality of your yoga practice, because it has no bearing on how present you are with your mind and your breath. Bend or straighten your knees based on what is honouring your body in the moment, not based on what boosts your ego.

Sometimes your body just needs a damn break. Give it one.

Namaste.