Baselines
I grew up in the northeast, where summers were stiflingly humid. On the hottest nights, I’d ask my parents if we could keep the air conditioner on. My parents, who immigrated from China and didn’t have air conditioning growing up, scoffed at this idea. They wanted to save money on electricity. “Go take a hot shower,” my mom would say. “The air will feel cooler afterwards.”
In 2010, the summer before my senior year of college, I lived in Boston for an internship. The humidity felt unbearable when I left the lab. When I looked for ways to cope, I thought of my mom’s advice.
That led me to find a Bikram yoga studio that was right on my T line. I had never practiced yoga before, and figured that the sequence taught in the Bikram classes – which is the same every time, no matter what studio you go to – would be a good way for me to learn.. Even better: the room was heated to around 105F and 40% humidity. Classes were 90 minutes. The relatively cooler night air would surely feel balmy in comparison.
I called the studio in advance to ask what I should know. Drink lots of water, they advised. At least two liters the day before, and you’ll want to drink more during and after class. I was familiar with hyponatremia – the condition in which you’ve drank so much water that your kidneys can’t keep up. Was I about to kill my kidneys?
I eased my way up. Soon, drinking five liters a day quickly became the norm. (Fourteen years later, I still need to drink about this much water every day to feel well-hydrated)
In class, I would be folding myself in a Japanese ham sandwich in one moment and in another, trying to embody a dancer – albeit a very sweaty one. Our collective breaths were audible and intentional, almost tantric. Panic occasionally crept in when I feared falling out a pose where I was balancing the entire weight of my body on my toes but I quickly quelled my shallow breaths with the recommend uyagi. After all, I didn’t want to be that newbie who knocked someone else over with my sweaty body. And the goal, anyway, was to keep breathing, no matter how challenging the poses were or how hot it felt.I didn’t know I could coax my subconscious with my breath. By the end of that summer – and my internship – I was hooked.
That was the beginning of my journey with yoga.
In 2012, I began a PhD program in New York City. Conveniently, my apartment was a fifteen minute walk from a yoga studio where dozens of world-class instructors taught. After rent, I had another $2000 every month of my meager stipend to spend. A monthly pass – with a student discount – cost around $200.
My back of the envelope girl-math told me that expense was justifiable. Not only would that be my gym membership, but yoga also felt like it could double as therapy. I was ready to get my money’s worth.
I went to the studio almost every day after class. Sometimes, if I didn’t have evening plans, I’d double up and take two classes.
Every aspect of the practice gave me a dopamine hit: I was arguably addicted to the movements and soothed by the flow of deep breaths that the practice asked of me.
The instructors only coaxed my body deeper into poses. By the time I quit my PhD program 18 months later, I could drop backwards from standing into a backbend on my hands. I was able to stand on my hands, my head. I discovered all the neat ways that my body could fold into itself so perfectly that, with the right alignment, I could balance on my arms in so many different ways.
Instructors and others who have a long relationship to the practice will tell you that yoga isn’t about the poses. It’s about the awareness in your body and mind when you try your hand at one of these poses. It’s about how you link your breath and body in those moments. Ultimately, these poses are tools for cultivating mindfulness. If they help generate awareness on the mat, the theory goes, they can also translate to mindfulness off the mat. That’s the hope, at least.
Yoga isn’t supposed to be about the poses.
And yet.
The poses gave me information. They told me I was making progress. If I was able to balance on one foot with my eyes closed, they told me that my inner proprioception was improving. If my palms were flat on the ground in a standing forward bend, I knew I had become more flexible.
In my fast-paced microcosm at the time, that forward momentum was something I craved. Improving seemed like the only option with continued practice.
**
It’s now been a decade after I left New York. After a big career pivot, two moves across the world in the span of six months, a marriage and a global pandemic later, yoga never went away. But it also hasn’t been a focal point of my life in the same way when I lived in the city.
Since moving to Seattle in 2016, I discovered other forms of movement that brought me joy. I loved bike commuting across the city and learned to eventually work my way up the steep hills. I became obsessed with how powerful rock climbing made me feel. Hiking made me feel equally empowered in realizing that I could get (almost anywhere with a good trail) on my two feet.
Yoga was something I would return to on occasion. It wasn’t a regular practice anymore, but it became a place for me to check in with myself. I knew I needed to stretch, and, wouldn’t going to yoga ‘trick’ me into stretching in the same way biking and hiking tricked me into doing cardio?
Poses in yoga gave me information.
And the information I got every time I took a class was: my body had changed. My shoulders had gotten stronger from climbing; that made handstands easier to hold. My wrists became less flexible, so I couldn’t do poses like wheel. My legs couldn’t tick-tock into an inversion anymore; my hamstrings were too tight from biking everywhere.
Two points make a line, and if I were to directly compare myself to when I was practicing yoga daily, I had mostly regressed. A teacher of mine told me that having some resistance – in the form of tight muscles and limited mobility due to strength – is something to practice with. It makes things interesting.
Since that perspective suited my worldview, I accepted it.
When I returned to a more frequently yoga practice this month, though, I noticed something new.
I had a hard time straightening my right leg at all.
The problem had to do with my right knee, a juncture on my body that holds the memoir of the last six years of my life. In 2018, I twice-backpacked and then through-hiked a notoriously difficult trail in Washington state three times in the span of three months. Since then, I’ve noticed a certain soreness in my right knee after doing hikes with a steep descent. Sports medicine doctors gaslit me into thinking that my quads were too tight, and I just needed to stretch.
I was 28 at the time of this acute injury – not yet married and navigating the marketplace every year to pick the least terrible healthcare option. I know I needed an MRI, but things didn’t feel that bad, really, and I really didn’t have the money then to pay for an MRI that would likely be out of pocket.
Since then, I have continued to backpack and hike every season. In the last two years, I completed – and trained for – a through-hike of Washington State along the Pacific Crest Trail. My knee, which I kept taped up nearly all the time, seemed to do just fine.
Last October, though, I was out hiking by myself when I suddenly felt a sharp, radiating pain in my right knee. I sat down, took off my pack, moved my knee around, stretched briefly, and coaxed it into cooperating for the next 7 miles (it did). I went foraging the next day, too, without much consequence.
But when I got home, and in the weeks that followed, the pain persisted while I was just sitting around.
Finally, thanks to being on my husband’s health insurance with good coverage, I got an MRI – and some answers. Scans showed that the cartilage which protected my kneecap was wearing away.I had patellofemoral arthralgia in my right knee. In other words: knee arthritis. The sports medicine doctor told me that one of the lesions was classified as ‘grade 4’ – the worst of all the possible grades. “That didn’t happen overnight,” she said.
In my now-regular yoga practice, my right knee was limiting me. I definitely couldn’t straighten my right leg in downward facing dog, let alone any of the balancing poses that required standing on one leg. It felt like a huge regression – and it had come on all at once.
Baselines shift.
One baseline gives rise to another.
I know this through my work as a science journalist. In 1995, fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term ‘shifting baselines syndrome’ to describe the decline in fisheries he observed throughout his lifetime. Now, it’s widely used to describe changes in ecology and climate. Whatever we’re observing in a given moment is this ‘new normal.’ And that’s the new baseline we continue to use to measure all subsequent changes against in our lifetimes.
Bearing witness to this constant shifting of baselines comes with a certain type of grief of losing what once was — it’s a perpetual topic of conversation among climate journalists and scientists who track changes in our environment for a living.
In that yoga class, it was impossible for me to not feel frustrated about being unable to execute on what was such a simple thing in my yoga practice: holding my right leg straight. How long would it be like this? It’s equally challenging to think about whether or not my knee – with injection and physical therapy – will ever return to a state where I could hike as much as I used to. I cried and cried during savasana that class, and my tears followed me on the drive home.
At this stage of my yoga practice, I would consider myself ‘advanced,’ not because I can get into complicated poses and arm balances, but because I can control and steady my breath and mind when things get challenging. I keep props handy and reach for my blocks and bolsters nearby because I now know when to ask for help when certain parts of my body need support so the rest can ease into a pose. (I never used to do this!) I know when to skip a bind, a chaturanga. I know when to ignore an instructor’s cue completely because it doesn’t work for me in a given moment. An advanced practice is about awareness, radical acceptance, and staying calm.
Yoga isn’t about the poses. And yet, for the longest time, where I was in a given pose served as a baseline.
Poses are supposed to be what they are.
But the very human tendency of ascribing judgment and value to them and what we can or can’t do invariably causes grief.
Maybe the answer here isn’t to fight our natural tendencies, but to be aware of it – similar to what the practice of yoga asks of us. Because using these these poses as a baseline can steal away the real joy of just being, breathing, flowing.