This morning, I went to a Yin Yoga class. There was a time when I was almost religious about my yoga practice. In those years, I tried just about every style, and for a while, it was simply part of who I was. But it’s been a long time since I’ve been truly consistent.
Some of that was easy to explain – work, moving, the general reshuffling of life – but not all of it. To be honest, I had started to feel frustrated. even disappointed in myself. I couldn’t stretch or bend the way I used to, and instead of adjusting to that reality, I backed away from it.
I can remember, in my “yoga heyday,” noticing older women in class. And instead of thinking, how beautiful that she’s still practicing, I would think, poor thing… I am never going to let that happen to me.
It’s a terrible thought. But it was mine.
So rather than sit with what that might mean for me – rather than stay and face the version of myself that felt different, more limited, more aware of time passing – rather than sitting in that discomfort, I opted out. I chose to do something else. Anything else.
I had said in an earlier post that I was going back to the mat and trying to re-embrace yoga in my new life, in my older body. When I looked at the website schedule, the early morning class worked best for me today. I had never done “Yin Yoga” but “how hard could it be?” I said to myself. So I went.
This was something entirely different than I am used to. It is much slower. Much quieter. It’s less about movement, and more about stillness. The “heyday yoga” me would have skipped right over this sort of class, because it wasn’t “enough” of a workout.
In Yin, poses are held for what feels like an unusually long time – three minutes, five minutes, sometimes more. You stay still long enough for the initial stretch to settle into something deeper – and for your mind to start negotiating with you.
At first, it was physical. I could feel a tightness in my hips, and my hamstrings were being pulled.. There was this subtle urge to shift, to adjust, to ease out just a little bit. But then, as I stayed in it, it turned into something else. The instructor encouraged us to let gravity do the work. Not to force anything, not to strive to go deeper, and not to compare our bodies to anyone else’s. She told us Just to settle in and allow the body to open in its own time.
It sounds so simple, and in fact it is elegant in its simplicity. But make no mistake, it is not easy.
Everything in us is wired to move away from discomfort – to fix it, to distract ourselves from it, or to reframe it quickly so we don’t have to feel it for too long. But there, on the mat, there wasn’t much to do. No quick transitions. No flowing sequence to carry me along. Nothing but the gentle invitation to stay. I started to really notice what was happening in the stillness, and how I was breathing. I realized that gravity was softly moving me in ways I am not able to do as gently on my own. I was sitting in it, and it was challenging. But it didn’t hurt.
Somewhere in one of the longer, more challenging poses – right at that point where I was certain I had reached my limit – it struck me: Just over a year ago, I was sitting in a chair, recovering from a total knee replacement. At that time, I truly didn’t know if I would ever move quite the same way again. Certain things felt closed off, or off-limits. Like they belonged to a version of me that might not come back.
But, here I was. Holding the pose. Breathing through it. Doing something I once quietly assumed I might never do again. I surprised myself. Almost immediately, I realized something else just as important – maybe more so. The discomfort I was feeling in that moment wasn’t purely physical. It wasn’t just in my body, it was in my thinking. In the quiet, lingering story I had been telling myself about what I could or couldn’t do, where my limits were, or how my body had changed. Like so many things, that story had stayed with me longer than it needed to.
Because as I stayed in the pose, the discomfort didn’t disappear, but it changed. I felt it soften at the edges. It became less alarming, and it stopped feeling like something I needed to escape.
I started to realize how rarely I give anything in my life that kind of space. Not just physical discomfort, but emotional discomfort too. I think about the uncertainty that exists in every season of life, but particularly this one. The quiet questions I turn over in my own mind, and how I feel a subtle uneasiness that comes with not quite knowing what comes next.
My instinct is almost always the same: move through it quickly. Solve it. Smooth it over. Find the next step and take it.But what if some things aren’t meant to be rushed past? What if, like those poses this morning, they’re meant to be held for a while? Not forced. Not fixed. Just experienced.
Letting time and a little bit of stillness do what effort alone can’t. Maybe this is what I’m beginning to understand in this season – not in some sweeping, dramatic way, but in these tiny, almost unnoticeable shifts. That starting again doesn’t always feel like forward motion. Growth doesn’t always feel expansive. Sometimes, we just need to stay steady in a place that feels uncertain. Sometimes we need to allow something to unfold as it will, without rushing to define it. Something we need to trust that something is working itself out, even when you can’t see the shape of it yet.
Make no mistake, this morning didn’t make me love discomfort, but it did make me a little more willing to sit with it.
And for now, that feels like its own kind of progress.
Red Chair Reflections 