A Personal Retrospective on Yoga — Carry On, from Amanda Kellner Klein

I would like to begin the first dedicated yoga page on this site by laying the foundation for the simple understanding between reader and writer that I have no formal yoga certification. I am not a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, at least, not yet. I certainly have not spent an extended period of time in a popular yogi destination such as Indonesia or India practicing asanas and exploring my inner self… not quite yet.

My qualifications include an often demanding fashion career in New York City with a few hours a week to play with the poses that make my body and mind feel relief from urban pressures, to action the movements that bring on much needed endorphins.

The intention in this piece and those that will follow (yoga is all about setting intentions, right?) is to record my yoga journey, for me to understand it by writing it, and to create something of a yogalogue as my practice continues to grow.

The earliest yoga memory I can conjure up was fifteen years ago, shortly after my family moved to Virginia, when I agreed to do 108 sun salutations with my mom on the pagoda of a picturesque farm in the country. Now I recognize those movements as the Surya Namaskara A from Ashtanga yoga. Then, I just remember enjoying the repeated flow in the warm sunshine. My mom, a practitioner of Kundalini yoga and daily meditation, instilled in me that ability to find peace through yoga and it is a practice I have come back to in various capacities over the years since.

In college, on and off depending on my workload and need for it, I would trudge through the New York streets to St. Marks where Yoga to the People offered donation-based classes. Affordability was paramount and while, in retrospect, the classes were so packed to the gills that we never learned Wild Thing because one would surely smack the person next to them in the gut with their foot, I reveled in the sense of community brought about by a crowded room flowing as one. At YTTP there were so many long-held Chair Poses that today I still grimace in class when I hear utkatasana before dutifully bending my knees and raising my arms. To end class, however, there were inspirational quotations and the knowledge that I could always come here for moments of focus in the chaos of college life.

In February of 2012, I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina for five months to study abroad. I knew no one in the program but took solace in the fact that even if I made no friends, the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed so I would enjoy a complete lack of winter that year; just Argentine summer and fall from February through June. Of course I did make great friends including one who is a favorite fellow yogi still today. On a whim, feeling the essence of South American summer and the air of possibility, I signed up through Argentine Groupon for a package of yoga classes in Buenos Aires. The lessons were taught in Spanish and the studio was outdoors on the patio of a cute apartment building. The constant activities of study abroad had me tired and I remember twice, slightly embarrassingly, falling asleep in shavansana at the end of class. More importantly, though, I had successfully integrated my love for foreign language learning with the practice of yoga. Sometimes, even now, I catch myself nostalgically pronouncing the practice “shoga”, the way I used to say it with an Argentine accent back when I lived there.

Post graduation, I took to running. After completing four half-marathons in three years I was understandably but undeniably burnt out. Later upon moving to the West Village I joined Chelsea Piers Fitness on the recommendation of a friend. While I had fun trying out plyometric classes like Power Hour and Smoked!, I mostly utilized my expensive gym membership to attend Vinyasa Flow classes taught by the resident pro-yogi, Paulo. If money were no object and Chelsea Piers was not so geographically inconvenient, I would love to train with Paulo in perpetuity. His methods are unique; there were classes that began with everyone situated on the mirrored wall, bent in half at the waist, practicing separating shoulder blades down the back. Once I had accomplished a particularly flexible Bow Pose and Paulo stepped into the space between my arms and legs, promptly lifting my entire body off the ground by the arms and swinging me back and forth to demonstrate the strong hold required for the pose. In his class, I learned that an hour and a half is a reasonable length of time in which to do yoga.

Like good things sometimes do, Chelsea Piers eventually soured. As much as I enjoyed the yoga classes, they were offered only a few times a week and frequently held at times that I couldn’t attend. I grew bothered trying diligently each Wednesday to make the 6:30 pm class, knowing that if I didn’t make it that evening, I may not have another opportunity for a full week between my busy schedule and the gym’s class availability. It became glaringly obvious that continuously trying and failing to make it to one of the few classes each week was not helping me to meet my goals; in fact, I was left feeling disappointed on a regular basis.

This summer, I finally allowed myself a change. Slowly I experimented with classes at different studios until I was confident that relinquishing my gym membership would be a better option economically and would actually lead me to exercise and practice yoga more. Another post to come next week about my current state of affairs with yoga practice which needless to say has become important enough to write extensively about.

My hope is that when I look back years from now, after I’ve done my due time living on some ashram in Bali to earn my teaching certification, and once I am spending my days instructing fit Californian yogis on a beach in San Diego (a girl can dream), I will say to myself: look at those glaring inconsistencies and blatant incongruities with “real” yoga that twenty-something me believed in this post. Perhaps I will eventually issue a correction to my past self for this entire piece, amending the verbiage and references to fit into a proper yoga mold. Until then though, I will move forward with my practice deliberately and one step, one pose, one breath at a time.