Show Up In Your Yoga And It Will Show Up In You

I found yoga about four years ago. Some of my friends had been practicing for over 20 years and trying to enlist me, but I just never thought yoga was for me. Citing a lack of both time and patience, I put off exploring yoga for many years. "When I have the time,” I would always tell them. 

As life so often has a way of doing with its ironic sense of humor, the time was delivered. I found myself with a strong need and burning desire to find a sense of peace, concentration, and union of mind and body in my life.  Life happens! We pick it up and carry on. In many of the conversations I'd had with my yogi friends, they promised "You'll find inner peace, focus, confidence.  Yoga will make you a stronger person, both mentally and physically."  Well, I was ready to see for myself.

With time now on my side, I sought out the closest yoga studio I could find because I'd have to walk. My first class was at a yoga & massage studio exactly 107 steps from where I was living. "Perfect!" I thought. "Here goes!"

The class was supposed to be a coed class, however, I was disappointed to find that I was the only male there. Despite it being my first time in a yoga class and being surrounded by 20 women, I told myself , "OK, You can do this."  After a couple of breathing exercises and a few asanas and savasanas, the instructor puts us on our backs, heels to buttocks, knees in the air, and legs spread.  “Ok, this is where we are,” she says. “If you don't feel comfortable exposing your special place, you can use the blanket on the floor next to you to cover it up and find your comfort.”   On the way out, I did confirm with the instructor that this was a typical coed class.  Well needless to say, I didn't find my comfort or yoga home.

Although I realized I wouldn't find another yoga studio within walking distance, I continued my search . A few days later when out with a friend, we happened by the local Bikram Hot Yoga Studio. I was intrigued. In all my conversations with yogi friends, I didn't ever remember anyone mentioning hot yoga.  I had to try it. 

In my first class, I thought I would die and had a hard time believing that doing yoga in this crazy hot room was actually going to do anything good for me. However, I still tried everything the instructor asked of me. By the end of that first class, I was hooked and went on to practice every day of the week. I couldn't get enough. Some days I even went twice.  As promised, I began to enjoy many of the benefits of hot yoga. 

Eighteen months into my practice, I suffered a severe herniated L 4-5 disc injury on a project job site. The surgeons ordered bed rest, morphine for the extreme pain, and time to allow the swelling to shrink. The injury took me down completely , and I was on my back in a morphine coma for 4 weeks.  I really thought the morphine was going to kill me. At the scheduled pre-surgery visit with the surgeon, he was amazed that I'd walked into his office without a wheelchair or the aid of any support and asked about my pre-accident work-out routine.  Upon looking at the severity of the injury on the x-ray  prior to seeing me that day, he was ready to perform emergency surgery right then! After a short discussion about hot yoga and a nerve reflex test, he sent me home to recover and keep doing yoga. Yoga works! Show up in your yoga, it will show up in you.

By the time I was entering the second year of my practice, my injury was under control.  I was experiencing little to no pain and only on rare occasions, did I feel discomfort as a result of the injury. Staying strong and true to yoga, I grew my practice while exposure to many different teachers helped strengthen it. On a weekend trip to see friends,  I did a hot yoga class, but not Bikram, and discovered the catalyst to expand and broaden my yoga perspective.  The studio offered a hot vinyasa flow style of yoga in combination with the classic 26 postures of the Bikram practice. Wow!  Again, I was hooked.  I'd found something new, something more, something to further my yoga practice. Upon returning home, I shared my experience with fellow yogis and got back into my Bikram practice, but knew I wanted more.

Rebecca (Jordan-Turner) provided the “more.” She was offering hot yoga in a home studio that led to Revolution Hot Yoga (RHY).   Her small studio became my new yoga home, a place where I could build on my Bikram foundation and begin to explore the vast world of yoga postures outside the classic 26. In each practice, I found that my awareness, focus, and balance was becoming so much more present. 

As RHY began to take shape, I became aware of Jimmy Barkan's yoga and another journey began. Jimmy, another yogi starting with Bikram, took his own journey outside the classic 26 and developed his own style of yoga.  Jimmy’s teacher training was calling to me, and I completed the Level I teaching certification training in September of 2013 which took my yoga practice to whole different level. The teacher training was the most difficult task of my life, but also the most rewarding. 

I have found my yoga home and yoga family at RHY.  Namaste!

This is Kevin Scott's yoga story.

Go to RHY website

A Kinder, Gentler Version Of Myself

I can’t remember exactly when I was first introduced to yoga. For several years, I would take a class here and there and had a couple of Brian Kest Power Yoga DVDs that I would pull out every now and then, but I wasn't a regular practitioner. That is, until last May.

I was out of shape and living with my parents in Columbus, Ohio where I would crash between singing gigs. At the time, I was running several times a week but if I’m going to be completely honest, I hate running. Because I have asthma, it’s always a struggle to keep my breath going depending on the day and how active I have been.  If I stop running for a period of time, I have to put my lungs through training all over again which is no fun.

My sister talked about going to hot yoga and sparked my interest. Being a dancer in high school and college, I missed the way my body felt moving through space. After doing a little research I found a lot of information on Bikram Yoga, which a few of my singer friends swore by. But I couldn’t quite wrap my head around locking myself in a 105 degree room for 90 minutes. What kind of crazy did you have to be to do this?

Everything I read said that you needed to give it a few classes before you determine whether or not hot yoga is for you. I decided that if I was going to give Bikram yoga a try, I was going to make a commitment to myself to go five times a week for the first month. And so last May, I walked through the doors of Bikram Hot Yoga Columbus. I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful the studio and teachers were. It was the perfect place for me to begin my practice. I spent that first class nauseous and dizzy and thinking to myself “What have I gotten myself into?” But I stuck to my guns and at the end of the first month, my body was changing and so was my life. I was hooked!

I moved back to Greensboro in November and immediately tried another yoga studio in town. The hot room smelled of mold and the staff was less than friendly. I went a handful of times, but something was off. It just never felt right. Having come from a wonderful studio with amazing teachers made going there even more difficult. I missed the community that I had become a part of and there was an air about this studio that was just off-putting. I can’t explain it exactly, but I was heart-broken because I was determined to continue my practice.

After hearing about Revolution Hot Yoga (RHY) from a friend, I signed up for an unlimited week. Following the first class, however, I was a little sad because it wasn't the Bikram yoga I'd come to love. But Rebecca (Jordan-Turner) was so lovely, and I was determined to give it a fair shake. I’m so glad I did. The teachers at RHY are all such kind, giving people, and after that first week, I felt like I’d known them a long time. 

Once my brain moved past the differences from the Bikram sequence, I found the Revolution Series to be challenging and inspiring. I feel like it will allow my practice to grow, and I'll never outgrow it because it’s never exactly the same from class to class. 

I like how strong and powerful I feel practicing hot yoga, and I've been able to do things I never imagined my body could do. One night when attending an Advanced Practice Club class with Rebecca and Emily (Rex), I found that my body was actually able to do a few handstands and headstands. I remember getting into a 90 degree handstand and thinking “I can’t believe my arms are strong enough to do this!” It was a great high!

Being a perfectionist by nature and extremely driven, any time I can’t do something “perfectly” or the way my mind thinks it should be done the voices in my head start to taunt me. After a recent car accident, I've had to take a step back from competition with myself. It's been and continues to be a journey to learn to accept where my body is that day and find peace with it, even if I could do it better yesterday, last week or last month. It’s a very grounding experience. 

A regular yoga practice has helped me in so many ways. I’m an opera singer and breathing is the baseline upon which a singer builds technique. Without breath, there is no singing. The Ujjayi or Pranayama breathing that is practiced in Bikram has helped me with this tremendously. My lung capacity has increased along with the ability to better regulate my breath. Additionally, practicing yoga has gotten rid of a lot of tension that I tend to carry in my back and shoulders, and the pain that used to follow me around from a dislocated hip when I was a dancer is completely gone. Learning to accept where I am on any given day has followed me into auditions, rehearsals, and performances. 

Yoga makes me a more balanced human, and I'm kinder, gentler version of myself when I'm practicing regularly. Yoga asks us to slow down, bring our focus inward, and quiet our minds.  I find that I can focus more steadily through the day by taking the time to care for my body in the hot room.

This is Stacy Dove's yoga story.

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Yoga Is A Pretty Amazing Way To Be Good To Yourself

I was first introduced to hot yoga in 2005 at the age of 19 and sought the practice with hopes of gaining some kind of clarity during a particularly brutal stretch of hard living. Because I used alcohol as my solution to anxiety, depression, and stress (as well as to just cope with being a human) from the ages of 16-24, I had countless instances of realizing that the medicine didn't work. I perpetually wanted to become a healthier, happier person. 

My first Bikram yoga class was at a studio near my hometown in Long Island, and I recall instantly loving the powerfully cathartic experience of doing this ridiculously strenuous exercise in an unbelievably hot room.  In the few classes I took at this studio (always had trouble sticking with things), I got a sense of the emotional transformation possible through yoga that stayed with me. The owner of the studio, a fiery, direct and unfiltered redhead, would urge us to open our hearts in Camel and dump all “toxic, emotional garbage” out through our forehead and onto the mat during Rabbit. 

As someone who was constantly consumed with a negative and caustic internal dialogue, I felt an immediate connection to a practice encouraging a mind-body connection to deal with strong emotions. With a regular practice, I have consistently found that I'm better equipped to deal with any emotional discomfort through the preparation of dealing with physical challenges in the hot room, sweating alongside other yogis who no doubt are fighting their own battles.  

I finally established and have continued to stick with a consistent hot yoga practice beginning in November of 2011, at another Bikram studio in Greensboro at about the same time Rebecca (Jordan-Turner) began teaching. I had been sober for more than a year and decided to sign up for an intro week at the studio because I was feeling lethargic, unhappy, and like something was missing. In those early days, I gravitated toward Rebecca’s classes because I was attracted to the attentive, insightful, and affirming voice she always brought to her classes.

Although my life had become considerably less chaotic, I was still stressed out and struggling with this negative internal dialogue, which I summarize as “something wrong, not enough.” I was also diagnosed with ADD at this time and found that without a meditation practice, I was floundering in my sophomore year at Guilford College due to my inability to focus on difficult tasks for any sustained length of time, as good work requires concentration and mine was entirely diffuse. Yoga has served as a moving meditation that is very effective in working with my scattered neurophysiology. I would say that simply wanting to feel good is what got me in the door of the yoga studio, and the gradual unfolding of physical, cognitive, and spiritual growth has kept me coming back. 

I would summarize these as follows: 

· Physical: I had broken my right tibia and fibula a year prior to beginning hot yoga. My surgeon told me that I'd never have full range of motion in the joint and some permanent discomfort was to be expected. However in less than a year, I had almost equal range of motion in both ankles.  I’m sure yoga gets nearly all the credit for this. An injury that used to constantly ache is now rarely even thought about. Additionally, I commute only by bike and ride about 6,000 miles/yr. and love how yoga is the expansive yin to the contracting yang of endless biking. The greatly increased flexibility in my legs/hips and un-hunching of my spine allow me to enjoy human-powered transport rather than seeing it as a hardship.

· Cognitive: As mentioned, I was basically getting my ass handed to me in college as a result of unaddressed adult ADD. I don't take medication and think yoga has been a powerful tool in dealing with this neurological difference, which is clearly evidenced by my dramatically improved academic performance since beginning my practice.  The concentration and determination available to me when poised and present in Standing Bow has practical applications when mindfulness is required, whether I’m solving a calculus problem, actually listening to a lecture on some incomprehensibly abstract concept, or writing and re-writing a graduate school admissions essay. I also managed to crash my bike into a parked car in January, so it’s not perma-Zen.

·  Spiritual: Yoga makes me want to be a nicer person. A strong narrative in my past has been playing the “angry young man.”  Because I tend to take myself far too seriously, yoga has been a great place for me to find play for the sake of play within the community of overwhelmingly kind, funny, and generous yogis at RHY. If I seem to be scowling during Standing Head to Knee or Standing Bow, I’m really having a great time, I promise!

At this point I think I’m supposed to give some kind of testimonial for Revolution Hot Yoga. This is hard to do without sounding like an overzealous Yogavangelist. After a six month break from having Rebecca as a teacher, I heard rumors that she was teaching privately out of her house. Contacting her, I agreed to be a work-study for her tiny home studio that was the embryo of RHY.  I'd always loved her Bikram classes, but having essentially semi-private lessons in a space where she was completely free to design and adjust a class that was responsive to students' needs was a revelation to me of the next level of yoga. She and every one of the teachers at RHY bring this personalized attention and rigorous intuition to every class.

In the past few months, I have particularly come to love the Vinyasa classes (Level II and Practice Club), where the sequences are so fluid and demanding of mental focus and bodily awareness that my internal volume gets dialed way down and class can feel like a continuous succession of chances to see yourself and the world freshly as it is. Dozing off into autopilot, I found myself becoming bored with the rote Bikram dialogue after my beginner’s enthusiasm wore off.  I'm deeply engaged in the RHY series because it is designed and taught with a real grounding in awareness – or, in other words, actually seeing what the hell is going on around you. 

The practice I have developed at RHY has been essential in my process of learning to tap into the intelligence and compassion that I believe animates all of us. I have come to see a very real heart-mind connection in the hot room that I feel fortunate to be able to apply outside of the studio in my life.  As I treat myself so do I treat the world, and yoga is a pretty amazing way to be good to your self. 

This is Mike-on-a-bike (as we like to call him) Shaljian's yoga story.

Go to RHY website

 

Yoga Is About More Than Touching Your Toes

My daughter, Tamaryn Kelley (Who just recently became a certified hot yoga instructor!), took me to my first Bikram Hot Yoga class. Having been introduced to hot yoga earlier that year, she loved it. She encouraged me to go with her after hearing me complain about how unfit I had become. At the time, I wasn't really interested in yoga and thought it would be boring. I liked a challenge and to sweat when I worked out.

Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, I was always healthy and active. Swimming, surfing, long walks up the mountain, on the beach, or anywhere else I needed to go were daily activities. When my father turned 50, he began running, and I decided to be his running buddy. Because I had never run before, I started out alternating walking and running to the next lamp post. Before long, I ran my first 5K, 10K, half marathon, and became an ultra marathoner. I thrived on the challenge and sweat.

After moving to NC in 1995, my focus turned from running to working out in a gym where the step-and-weights class became my favorite. Always liking to push myself, I worked up to three steps holding ten pound weights. See why I thought yoga would be boring?

About six years ago, in one of those classes, my hip and lower back were injured, and I couldn’t take my classes anymore. Within the next year, the physical challenges of my work also began to take a toll on my body. As a Surgical Technologist at the time, I found myself in what I called “contortionist positions” for many hours of the day while assisting in surgery. The associated environmental factors also adversely affected me, and I was diagnosed with asthma and needed an inhaler. I couldn't even take a brisk walk without gasping for air much less dance for hours like I used to. To add insult to injury, I hurt my weakened back while doing heavy lifting at work and found myself laid up flat on my back for three days. My inability to be physically active led to depression and a panic attack. I even took pills to help me sleep.

Tamaryn kept suggesting hot yoga. Thanks to her persistence, in June of 2011, I went with her to a class. To my surprise, I loved it. After that first class with John Mabry, I was hooked. The yoga was harder than I expected, and I sweated! Totally in awe of those who were able to do camel and fixed firm pose, I thought, “I’ll never be able to do that stuff.” Although pale and nauseous, I caught my breath, tried to cool down and couldn’t wait to get back in the hot room. I drove home from that first class feeling amazingly peaceful, proud, challenged, and wet. Hot yoga was a workout I could do without getting injured. I knew that it was going to be my next generation of physical activity.

I practiced at Bikram regularly for over a year and began to wonder how to expand my practice. Then Rebecca (Jordan-Turner) began teaching and made reference to small corrections that made big differences in my postures. With her guidance, I was amazed at how I was able to grow my practice.

In September 2012, a large person fell down next to me (not at yoga), landed on my leg, and tore the MCL in my knee. No surgery was required, but I did have to do six weeks of physical therapy and was advised to stay away from yoga for two months. Despite this advice, I returned to yoga after only four weeks wearing a knee brace. I found myself becoming depressed again from my immobility and knew that I needed to get back in the studio even if just to lie there and meditate.

Rebecca guided me into modified poses (I didn’t even know poses could be modified.) and showed me how to practice with my body as it was. Checking the schedule, I made sure to attend her classes which I found so inspirational. Her individual attention played a big role in my physical and emotional healing. Bringing a sense of serenity and wisdom to the room, it was obvious to me that she cared about all of her students in the same way.

And then she just disappeared! Tamaryn and I were devastated but continued to practice. When I found out that Rebecca had a home studio, I was ecstatic and took a spot in class every chance I could. While there, I learned that there was more to hot yoga than just the 26 postures we did in the Bikram series requiring me to use my body and brain in new ways. Learning about vinyasa sequences, up and down dogs, warriors, chatarungas, I grew my practice even more! And then best of all, I learned about plans for Revolution Hot Yoga (RHY).

What I love about RHY is that it's truly a yoga family with no judgment, only support and encouragement. The instructors are passionate and focused on their students,each bringing their own wisdom, guidance, motivation, and experiences to the class. I no longer look at the schedule to see if Rebecca is teaching because each instructor is awesome with an awareness of the mood in the room, the challenges, and comfort of the students. Every teacher impacts my practice in positive ways.

At each practice, I learn something new or am made aware of some way that I can adjust or improve a posture. During class, I enjoy the dialogue and interaction that takes place, the soft music playing, and the laughs which make for a bit of fun. I love that I am doing something so crazy and challenging requiring such determination and focus. Sometimes, I feel like I am dancing a graceful dance with myself, and at other times, I feel like a strong warrior. When I need to sit down, I feel empowered by the way I am able to control myself with my breath. At the end of class, the cool lavender towels are such a treat, and I appreciate the opportunity to stay in the hot room and play or practice a little longer if I feel it’s needed.

In my work with tissue donation as Placenta Donation Coordinator, I need to be super sharp and detail oriented. Hot yoga helps me declutter my mind and stay focused and balanced. I am constantly amazed at the new found strength and flexibility of my 57 year old body. With yoga, I sleep well, no meds required, and asthma is a thing of the past.

At RHY, every practice is a different challenge, and you’ll never hear me complain about wanting to sweat more! I aspire to some day be like the 90 year-old who goes for her annual physical, and when the doctor asks if she can touch her toes, she replies, “With what?”

This is Avra Shorkend's yoga story. That's Avra with Tamaryn. 

Go to RHY website