I started taking yoga classes in a New Beginners Ashtanga class at Yoga on High. That was five years ago. I continued with weekly classes for a year and a half. I practice at home now for a variety of reasons. There a plenty of studies to tell you what yoga can be clinically proven to increase, decrease, suppress, or emphasize.
What I present here is a completely unscientific, anecdotal piece about what yoga did for me and why I keep practicing it.
- Yoga made me taller! I stopped growing vertically around age 12–left at a shorty 5 ft 1 in. For 20 plus years, whenever I went to the doctor, no matter what shoes I wore, I measured at 5 ft. 1 in. In 2006, after a year of ashtanga yoga, I went to the doctor for a physical and the nurse said, “5 ft 2 in.” My theory for how I grew an inch has to do with the stretching and strengthening from the poses. The forward bends lengthen muscles in the spine and the twists strengthen those same muscles and additional ones that most of us don’t even know about. These are tiny little muscles called multifidi, rotatores, and intertransversarii, connecting vertebra to vertebra.
- Yoga made me stronger. I didn’t come out ripped, with an excellent six-pack. What happened is that I could feel strength in my body from the ground up. My feet, my hips, my abs, my back, my arms were all stronger. My body was balanced, stretched, and strengthened, making me feel healthier.
- Yoga burned away the need to drink. I don’t know really how to explain this one. I wasn’t a drunk. I drank as much as anyone else on a weekend. I would think I deserved a drink after the week I went through. I would go to yoga class on Saturday or Sunday morning and sweat out the wine from the night before. Then one week I realized I didn’t long for that drink, I didn’t think I deserved that drink. What I felt mostly was that I liked how my body felt when I drank water better.
- Yoga helped me appreciate my life. When I started yoga I was incredibly stressed out by many things. I was dealing with being a new mom, dealing with money issues, dealing with having lived in three cities within a year and a half. Stress was a major component of every single day. Yoga opened up a space in my life, if only brief and once a week, to allow in a bit of grace. I would say that all those hours of yoga were worth that one minute in the car when I felt completely ok with everything about my life.
This is what yoga did for me. Something else might have made this kind of difference in my life, but it didn’t. Yoga did. I think the practice of moving your body in a time-honored healthy way leads to more than physical benefits. It leads to mental and emotional benefits. It’s all connected together. My body is my vehicle for getting through this world. I honored, strengthened, and moved into my body more solidly through yoga.
I don’t need a scientific study to prove to me that it was worth it.
