Learning the Language of Hatha

I had heard about yoga for years but I always thought it was something that a particular type of person did: the type of person who ate bean sprouts and tofu, who wore “vegan” backpacks as they biked to work and who talked so calmly and softly it was like they had lived all their lives in a library reading room. While I had heard nothing but good things about how yoga helped your flexibility, your digestion, your breathing, and your emotional energy, I couldn’t quite picture myself taking a class. I was too loud, for one thing. My legs were strong but stiff. I was usually caught up in a caffeine buzz and found it hard to wind down.

Yoga always interested me, though it’s hard to explain why it did. Maybe I felt that it would help fill something that was missing from my life. Maybe I really didn’t like the way I was living and wanted to take some kind of action that would give enough discipline to make me change. Writing it out now makes me sound confused and even a little lazy, but it’s difficult to change your life or something in it without knowing what it is, how to identify it or even find the words to describe it. All I know is that I would often walk past the doors of yoga centers on the street and study class timetables and teacher profiles. I would walk on without going inside, but words like asana and chiti would stick in my mind, even though I had no idea what they meant, along with visions of lotus flowers and cross-legged figures in meditation poses. Why did the words and images stay with me as I walked on? That is another thing I couldn’t explain if you asked me—then.

My grandma always used to tell me that it takes a crisis to give someone the gumption to solve it. My grandma was, like me, the least likely person to take up yoga and probably just the type of person who should have. She always seemed to me to be angry about something—the weather, the traffic, the food that she would have to pay for at fancy restaurants but didn’t think compared to the meals she could cook at home. Although she was so often angry, grandma was also wise. It was almost as if she predicted that I would get sick with pneumonia just over a year ago and, having spent a long time in bed recovering, be ready at last to take up yoga.

The strain of pneumonia I’d picked up last winter was particularly severe and the fever I’d had during the first few days was high. Though I did everything the doctor told me to do—take my pills, rest and drink plenty of water and juice—I was tired when I finally felt well enough to get out of bed and join the real world. My body felt lighter, though not in a good way. I had dark circles under my eyes and could almost hear my joints creaking as I moved. I would go out with my friends but for the first few times, I would always leave early to go home to bed. During my last check-up with my doctor, she suggested that I should try some “light exercise” to get more energy without using too much of it. I didn’t need any further encouragement. Since I had already done my research, I went straight to my preferred yoga center—the one with the big lotus flower painted over the door—and signed up for a beginner’s hatha yoga class with an instructor who had the very un-yogic name of Anne.

Life caught up with me in the days between signing up for the class and taking it. I was feeling like I had got back to normal (whatever that is), or at least, feeling better. Maybe, I thought to myself, I don’t need to do this yoga class after all.

I needed it: but it wasn’t until after my first class that night that I realized how much I did.

“Namaste,” was the first word Anne said to me, as she pressed her palms together in prayer and lowered her head slightly while closing her eyes. I had heard the word before and seen the gesture, but this was the first time anyone had ever addressed me in this way. That one word, spoken in a friendly way but absolutely unknown to me, filled me with doubt. This must-have shown on my face, since Anne gave me a reassuring smile and repeated the gesture.

“Namaste,” she said again, and added, “literally translated as “I bow to you.” It’s just another way of welcoming you to my class. Now, you try it.”

The salutation Namaste is, I later learned, about the recognition of soul in the person you are greeting and in yoga class, it is repeated between teacher and student to indicate their connection, free from time and ego. The first time I greeted Anne, though, I just mimicked what she had done, pressed my hands together, bobbed my head down without closing my eyes, and mumbled the word. She smiled at me as if I were full of grace and turned to her next student.

The yoga studio was roomy and softly-lit, with a warm wooden floor laid with ten blue yoga mats, a pile of colored cushions in a corner and no music playing at all. I had already taken off my shoes and stowed my bag before entering the studio, so I sat on the nearest mat and discreetly took in the other yoga students. It was my second lesson of the night to learn that the people around me didn’t seem to fit into the type I had always expected. There were three men, two who looked of college-student age, and another who was in his 50s, with a black beard sprinkled with white hairs, a noisy way of breathing and quite a large belly. The rest of the students were women in a range of ages from 20 to 60. The younger women seemed uncertain, like me, in their baggy T-shirts, while the older women looked calmer and more assured. One woman, who wore glasses and who may or may not have been the librarian of my imagination, was already stretching on her mat. Anne herself was in her 50s, with fading blonde hair she wore in a long braid. She wore a tight purple T-shirt, black leggings and a tiny red velvet skirt that flared out over her thighs. She was prepared, as she said, to work. When the remaining students arrived, the first yoga class of my life began.

“Hatha yoga,” Anne explained, “focuses on the physical aspects of spiritual life through the repetition of asanas and breathing techniques.”

What were asanas? I wanted to raise my hand to ask this question like I was back in school, but this seemed to be a time for listening rather than talking. Instead, I found myself wiping my palm on the back of my sweatpants.

“Yoga is not competitive,” Anne went on. I realized then that she didn’t talk softly at all, but with energy and firmness. “Hatha yoga is about decreasing “noise” and reactions in the mind and increasing acceptance and mindfulness. In my class, I will teach you to observe how your body works and listen to what it is telling you. Being aware of your body while releasing your mind is the only way you will progress in yoga. Leave your judgment of others, and above all, your judgment of yourself, at the door. Be kind to yourself. We are all of us only learning.”

Anne sent a warm smile around the room. When her smile washed over me I felt the coldness inside me thaw. Then Anne instructed us to lie face-down on our mats and move into savasana. The coldness flooded back. Although I understood what Anne had told us about releasing our minds, all I could think was that my feeling was one of fear. I was afraid of doing yoga, of starting something new, of confronting that unknown problem in my life. Most of all, I was afraid I didn’t understand anything Anne was saying and was doing a terrible job of following her words and her movements.

This feeling lasted through savasana, the corpse pose, which is supposed to be about relaxing and following your breathing. The feeling continued through sukhasana, in which you straighten your spine and focus on keeping your mind still; through surya namaskar, the sun salutation; through attempts at the halasana, the setu bandhasana, the salabhasana, the matsyasana, the paschimothanasana, the bhujangasana and up until the final savasana. The words themselves made no sense to me at all; the postures they stood for were as difficult to grasp. I couldn’t understand how Anne could form her mouth around these complicated-sounding terms and have them flow out of her with as much ease as her breath, just as I couldn’t understand how she could bend her tall frame into the pose of the plough, the bridge, the locust, and the fish. At some points I was able to let go of my mind, so great was my concentration upon the postures. Then, by turns, I would get frustrated by the way my body wouldn’t quite work the way I wanted it to, wouldn’t bend that way or wouldn’t allow me to get my head into this particular position. When I should have been concentrating on Anne’s instructions, breathing deeply into my diaphragm and trying to relax into the asana as I did so, I would pause in whatever I was attempting to watch Anne as she demonstrated.

By the end of the class, my body was invigorated, bullied as it had been into unaccustomed stretches and angles, but my mind was far from being at peace. As the people in the class lay in the corpse pose once more, I tried to follow Anne’s words as she led us through a meditation. I attempted to slow down my breathing and empty my mind as she had instructed; but the harder I tried to do as she said, the harder it became.

Is it just me? I wondered. Was I the only one who was finding the words so difficult to understand, and the movements they communicated so hard to follow? Was it something that my eyes or my ears couldn’t translate to my brain and to my body? I wanted to look up and study my classmates as if watching them stretched out on their mats would give me any indication as to what was going on in their minds.

I wanted to do as Anne was narrating: I wanted to fly with my arms outstretched through a sunlit valley, come to a stop and drink cool water from a river, and fill my heart with forgiveness and compassion. Yet all I could do was the question of why it was I couldn’t turn Anne’s words into words both my body and my mind could understand.

I had, as I have mentioned, no way of knowing what my classmates were thinking as we lay together as corpses. It seemed strange to me then that I was experiencing such a moment in the middle of a room full of strangers. It turned out that Anne had a greater insight. As she finished her meditation story and told us how it lowered her blood pressure, she raised her voice to its regular pitch and addressed us as a group.

“Thank you all for attending the class today. Taking the first step is a great achievement and one you should all feel proud of. In yoga terminology, which has its origins in Hindi, hatha means “force” or “overcoming will”. Overcoming your will doesn’t have to mean rebellion and it doesn’t have to be violent. It can be something as simple as wanting the best for you and doing something as gentle as yoga to achieve it. To someone who’s just completed their first class, yoga may mean “force”—and maybe you’ll go home tonight and feel pain in your bodies and frustration in your minds. But I want to remind you that everything is temporary. Understanding will come with practice and time and the benefits will become clearer and clearer. You will feel them before you see them. I hope you will join me next week.”

At that moment, in a room full of people, I felt as if Anne was addressing me. She had probably been watching me throughout the class, see how my body had struggled with the postures, had seen my head swivel around again and again to watch her demonstrations, and probably saw the looks of bewilderment that crossed my face as she introduced every new posture. Somehow I had communicated this to her and now she was assuring me that she understood and that it would get better—not just yoga, but my own understanding. As I passed Anne that night on my way out of the studio, I said my farewell Namaste without needing to be prompted, and as I did, it felt a little easier. My body, though sore, felt lighter—and this time in a good way. After the mental effort of the class, my mind felt as if it had been rinsed clean. It took a while for me to enroll in the class again, but when I did, I felt as though Anne would be talking in a language I was at least familiar with, even if I did not understand. Next time, I thought, I would get better.

I have been practicing hatha yoga regularly since that first terrifying class. I attend a class at least every week, sometimes twice and sometimes, when I am feeling high levels of stress, I go more often than that. At those times, I rush to my class in order to breathe and release my mind from the people and tasks that are causing my anxiety. At other times, I have to force myself to go at all, to lie down and breathe deeply when I would rather be spending time with friends, running in the park or watching a movie. I have grown to learn that the practice of yoga is never static and is always linked to whatever is going on internally. The list of variables that can make a difference to each class has shown me the connection between my mind and my body—just another lesson I have learned through yoga, and one I try to apply to those around me without judgment.

By practicing yoga, I have become a healthier person, one who is on the way, I believe, to identifying the elements in my life I used to feel we're missing. I certainly don’t feel anymore that yoga is reserved for a certain group of people. My level of anger, which I thought I had inherited from my grandma, has decreased and made me regret that she didn’t live long enough to join Anne’s class with me and feel a sense of serenity grow inside her day by day. My body has changed too: it has grown stronger and more flexible and more controlled in movement. I felt this physical change, as Anne predicted I would before I saw it. Even though the changes are now apparent visually, I still register the change the most from the inside. Yet unlike Anne, I have always thought that my decision to return to her class after my first was my biggest achievement, one that was prompted by my realization that the fear of not understanding does not suggest that we are misunderstood in turn. The language of hatha yoga, spoken and silent, has become a new way of communicating for me, and one that I am glad to have mastered.