Last year for my twenty-sixth birthday I gifted myself a pass to this insanely hot yoga class that I had frequented often years ago when I lived at home and had no job (best summer ever). The class was meaningfully hot, fuelled by artificial heat lamps in all four corners of the room radiating warm, thick air, dry and wet at the same time, adding to the heaviness of the oxygen so that each pose could be deliberately met with a challenge: a sweaty downpour to trivialize clamping onto skin (slippery when wet). It was a class where inhaling felt like swallowing hot coals and exhaling felt like vapour leaving an exhaust pipe. And for some reason, and this might just be a testament to the ethos behind Bikram yoga, all of this combined culminated in a perfect release of endorphins that I had never felt before, and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
So last year when I bought myself a pass I wanted to jump back into that sense of release that I had so deeply experienced the first time. But when classtime came I had left too late and biked in a hurry, arriving heaving and red from decreased oxygen levels and couldn’t catch my breath before entering the hot, humid chamber. I was shoved into class, already stressed out from being late for something that I hadn’t done in over a year. Halfway through the class I gave up and ran out to the changing rooms, hyperventilating next to the front desk where the receptionist sat on her phone waiting for the next wave of classgoers to seep in. Outside the room I heard the muffled sound of the teacher queueing each pose, the blood pumping back into my head, and noticed how cold the floor felt on my knees and forehead as I curl into a ball, acquiescing.
I didn’t know what I wanted this entry to mean when I first started writing but looking back now I see how obvious it is: holding onto the past and idolizing how good things were at a certain time in my life, while in the moment they were actually extremely challenging. I relinquished my first yoga class in the same way, but for some reason that thought didn’t occur to me because I was too caught up on the fact that it had been great, once.
I’m too occupied by the past and I need to understand that someday I’ll look back at this very moment and say, I miss this, even when I fought so hard to enjoy it.
So this year for my twenty-seventh birthday I gifted myself a trip to Japan, and the city streets were so hot that every time I stepped outside it felt like walking back into that yoga class, the one that made me nervous about revisiting what once was—except this time, in this new country of origin, fuelled with friends and no glass door exit, it felt almost easier on the heart.
Thank you for reading.
