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Wednesday, September 20, 2017 // The Statement
Empath in the wild: struggling to justify my path to peace
A
s someone who’s dealt with and continues
to deal with disordered eating, most
mainstream forms of exercise have come
to be at odds with my mental and physical
health. All the numbers and measurements of
gym equipment, and fluorescent-lit rooms with
mirrored walls are like an obstacle course for my self-
confidence. Most of the time, quantifying anything in
relation to my body — whether it’s weight, mileage on
a run, or intensity level on an elliptical — facilitates
harmful thought patterns that have taken me years of
introspective work to break.
My yoga practice began when I realized I could
not keep running outside and going to the gym while
maintaining my physical and mental health. I used
to be big into running, but paired with an eating
disorder, I damaged my bone density. Now, high-
impact exercise leads to stress fractures in my legs
and feet. And gyms are hazardous to my peace of
mind. After years of struggling with all these factors,
by 2015, during the spring of my freshman year, I
stopped working out because I felt I had no good
options.
A few months later, I felt incredibly lethargic in my
body and needed a solution.
That’s when a friend showed me “Yoga with
Adriene,” a YouTube channel that changed my life.
Adriene’s videos walked me through the intricacies
of basic yoga poses, and soon, I was able to follow
along with her flow videos, all in the comfort of my
own home. I did this all summer and into the fall of
my sophomore year.
Adriene’s videos were slow-paced and heavily
focused on self-acceptance and personal well-being.
She emphasizes adjusting poses according to one’s
own physical needs, not pushing yourself too hard
and remembering it’s a practice. You’ll get where you
want to be eventually. Adriene calls most poses by
their sanskrit names, and she mentions elements of
Hinduism in her videos — something about the third
eye I don’t quite understand, but about which I’ve
been curious to learn more. She says “Namaste” at the
end of every video, but I never said it along with her
— again, I don’t really know what that word means
outside of being a general greeting and a way to wish
someone well. I know that much, but I don’t know
why people say it when they’re finished doing yoga,
specifically. Although I knew my yoga practice might
be a form of cultural appropriation, I didn’t feel I was
doing much harm because I did her videos alone in
my house. It felt like I was the only person involved.
But after a while I found myself wanting more than
Adriene’s videos could offer me. I was pretty sure I
was doing the poses correctly, but I wanted someone
who knew more than me to tell me for sure. I decided
to explore some free trial classes at different studios
in Ann Arbor and encountered a whole new level of
appropriation, a whole new kind of Americanized
yoga compared to what Adriene taught.
Now, I’m very aware of my identity as a white
affluent American suburban girl who now pays
money to do Americanized yoga about three times per
week. I know very little about the origins of yoga in
the ancient Indian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism
and Jainism, so I feel uneasy about the ways I may
be appropriating a culture that isn’t mine — patching
together pieces of it to benefit myself. But the stakes
are high for me when it comes to physical exercise.
Because of the way society has taught me to view
my body, and because conventional forms of exercise
have become hazardous to my health, I’ve turned to a
practice I struggle with internally.
At the yoga studios I went to in Ann Arbor, I found a
community of people with whom I shared some basic
understandings about physical, mental, and spiritual
well-being. Most people I met seemed to value
meditation, a relatively slow-paced approach to life,
and a generally healthy lifestyle. However, the classes
were too fast-paced for me and too many things we
did were quantified by the instructors. I didn’t have
time in class to really feel my way into poses, and I
hated counting breaths and straight up doing sit-ups
in class. I did yoga to get away from the gym, but in
some ways, I felt the yoga studios around here were
the same thing — just with oil diffusers and better
lighting.
To maintain my practice in a way that feels good
for me — that is slower and incorporates less counting
— I supplement my time in the studio with yoga I
do on my own, in my apartment. And even though
I get frustrated with my studio, when compared to
running or going to the gym, going to class provides
for me a respite from measurements and frees me
from assessing my self-worth accordingly.
And it’s not just about the eating disorder and body
image stuff. Like a lot of students here, I’m really busy
with schoolwork, extracurricular activities, my social
life, and keeping in touch with my family back home.
When everyday obligations build tension in me, I can
smooth it out with yoga. Instead of running or going
to the gym, where my anxieties are just replicated
in the act of measuring my body and ramping up my
heart rate, doing yoga is my foundation of inner peace.
I see the people, a lot of whom are students, in my
yoga classes and I wonder if they feel the same. As
students at the University, they likely have a lot of
school work, maybe have a job, and are involved in
at least one student org of some kind. Like so many
undergrads on campus, they likely feel immense
pressure to be “successful” in all of these endeavors.
Maybe yoga, for them, too, is a way to find release,
and I hope that they, too, feel just as uneasy about this
Americanized version of what’s, for many people, a
deeply religious, spiritual practice.
When I see people say “Namaste” at the end of class,
bowing their heads “to the light that is in each of us,”
I don’t know what any of them are thinking. I know
that together all of us in the studio have just worked
really hard to relax our bodies and ease our minds.
The expressions on the faces that surround me show
a kind of making peace with what has passed before
class, and a kind of making peace with what’s to lie
ahead, outside the safe walls of the studio.
Still, I don’t say “Namaste” at the end of class. It
doesn’t feel quite right. And I don’t wear shirts that
say things like “spiritual gangster,” a phrase that’s
problematic on multiple levels. Can I say my yoga
practice is justified because of the personal stakes
at hand? I don’t know. I also, unfortunately, don’t
personally know a lot of people who practice yoga as a
religious practice to know how my own practice may
be affecting others negatively. While I’m in college
with so many things going on, I don’t know how
I’ll find a form of exercise that balances my mental
health, physical health, and my personal standards of
social responsibility. I guess for now my best option
is to remain thoughtful about my habits, to keep
questioning them, and to keep looking for better
solutions.
BY REGAN DETWILER, COLUMNIST
statement
THE MICHIGAN DAILY | SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
ILLUSTRATION BY REGAN DETWILER