Wow, 2020. You’re really going to send us rain on top of everything else today? Every day this week has felt like a month, and it seems crazy that we closed our studios less than a week ago, on Saturday.
As much as I write about barre and make fun of how much I hate barre, I rarely talk about yoga – and that’s because I actually love yoga so much that it’s a little sacred to me, and it would feel disingenuous to satirize it insincerely. That being said, I have a feeling that today is going to be our hardest day yet of this, so maybe it warrants a little seriousness.
I owe almost everything to yoga. I discovered yoga during law school, which was… an interesting time in my life. Without going into details, let’s just say I was a rough draft of a person when I first met Callie and took her yoga class for the first time. Class one with Callie felt great – by class two, I was hooked. Before that first class, all I knew about yoga was, I kid you not, “Yoga Flame!” and “Yoga Fire” from this character in Street Fighter:
I’m also pretty sure I had yoga mixed up with tai chi. So I was pleasantly surprised when Callie’s yoga class turned out to be a series of thoughtful, breath-connected feel-good stretches. There wasn’t any chanting in weird languages or spiritual stuff, although she did tell us all to set an intention at the beginning of the class, and to connect with a sense of gratitude at the end of class. It was exactly what that rough draft needed at the time to evolve into more of a functioning human being.
Some eleven years later, Callie and I are married, life is as good as it’s ever been, and we have the three best dogs in the world, along with a fourth dog that is also a bit of a rough draft.
Everything that means so much to me today started with Callie, and with yoga.
And now it’s 2020, and I can’t think of a better time for people to discover the magic of yoga.
Maybe you’ve already taken Maddy’s class – she’s one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever met, and every class of hers feels like a gift. We’re so lucky to have her. You can see her classes here.
This morning, I was really excited to take Elise’s yoga class. She’s been teaching my favorite yoga class of the past two years, but it’s been harder and harder for me to get to her class as life got busier. Nothing can replace the live yoga experience for me, but live streamed yoga is better than none!
And it truly was a valuable and timely class. If you didn’t take it, you can always catch a replay here, but the thing I’d like to pass on here is that Elise reminded us, while we are certainly facing more uncertainty now than usual, we’re actually always dealing with uncertainty every day, and we never know what tomorrow will bring, whether that’s now, or pre-coronavirus. So, we’re actually all built to deal with uncertainty, even when it may seem overwhelming and at the forefront of your mind in an extreme way, and yoga, barre, movement, whatever you may do for exercise, is a great tool for helping get our minds off of that overwhelming uncertainty for a moment.
So if you’ve only been doing barre, or you’ve never tried yoga, give it a shot!
the barre bro 