“So, I’m your depression. I’m that lost 'what the heck is the meaning of life' feeling we’ve been talking about."

A long, hesitant pause. “Okay.”

“Okay. So imagine there is a big hole between us - a big, endless void. And we’re on either side of it, in a tug of war.” I tug my end of the small rope I had handed to her earlier, when she signed on to try something a little different in therapy today. “It’s been going on as long as you can remember. This sadness pulls you in like a magnet. It’s pulling and pulling.” I keep gently tugging on the rope. “You’re exhausted, of course. Who wouldn’t be? So here you are, and you are tugging back, trying to gain the upper ground.” 

​You are sitting in the therapy chair. You have had this debilitating anxiety over presenting to your team at work for months. It is just getting worse. Every time it’s your turn to present, your heart races, you stumble through it, and find yourself having a panic attack later in the bathroom. It’s starting to impair your work performance and your boss has expressed concern over how anxious you seem around the office. You’ve had enough, and that’s why you are here. So your therapist is having you close your eyes and imagine yourself in the room, presenting to them. She’s teaching you some breathing exercises to try before you present, and some grounding exercises to do during it.
 
Then she says, now try all these things at work. But when it’s your turn to present again, you choke again, even after all that effort and planning. Your mind goes blank, and you can’t remember any of the skills you learned in therapy. What gives?

Often I hear someone say to me: “I want to try yoga. I have friends who do yoga and they recommended I try it. But I don’t know where to start.” It saddens me when I hear that someone hoping to benefit from yoga comes out of their first class either shell-shocked or bored to tears, and as a result never goes back. A lot of negative first experiences with yoga have much more to do with goodness of fit than anything else. Like psychotherapy, there are some common factors to what makes a yoga class high in quality (i.e. compassionate and educated teacher), but also like therapy, the diversity of approaches and techniques is immense.
 
If you are interested in starting a yoga practice, first ask yourself what you are hoping to get from yoga, and go from there.
 
Today I’ll be reviewing a few of the major forms of yoga. I will do my best to be as objective as possible, but want to acknowledge at the outset that I am myself a certified yoga instructor in the vinyasa school, and so this is the form of yoga I am most familiar with. However, I’ve practiced as a student in many forms of yoga, and can speak from personal experience about the benefits and challenges of each school. For the purposes of this post, I will not be going into great detail about the philosophies and theories behind each school of yoga, but rather focus on the lived experience of attending a class, so you can find the form of yoga most likely to fit your needs and have a successful first experience on the mat.

What would you do if your hand touched a hot stove?
 
That is not a trick question. We all pull away. It’s biologically engrained into us that we should avoid pain. And this is not a bad thing! Avoiding pain is a matter of survival. If you did not pull instinctively away from the hot stove, I think we can all agree you would be in a whole world of trouble.
 
Here’s the thing. We pull away from the hot stoves in our mind the same way. Our brain is efficient and wants to avoid pain; it doesn’t differentiate between emotional pain and physical pain. What is your inner hot stove? The looming deadline. The memory of a traumatic event that revisits you when you least expect it. The plane or spider or whatever else sends shivers down your spine or sends your heartbeat through the roof. The interesting person we keep running into that we fear will reject us if we approach them. To our primal sense of survival, it’s all a hot stove.