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Something changes when you begin to practice yoga. Actually, a lot of things change when you practice yoga. Sometimes subtle and sometimes glaring, these altered perspectives usually cause you to experience yourself as well as everyone and everything around you a little—or a lot—differently. Whatever these changes, they can’t help but spill over into how you show up to life. That’s exactly the intent behind yoga.
Not that there’s anything wrong with preaching to your girlfriends how backbends will make them more open to life or closing your eyes and chanting to yourself during an argument, but we tend to become so accustomed to these changes that we forget it’s not how we’ve always been. Nor is it how most people act. And that’s okay. But sometimes we need a reminder that what may seem perfectly normal to you but miiiiiight seem a little surprising to anyone hasn’t spent any time on the mat.
40 Things Only People Who Practice Yoga Understand
Maybe you…
1. Stretch a little too dramatically while in line at the grocery store or airport
2. Tell your family to “just breathe” every 5 minutes.
3. Experience trust issues because of teachers who lie about there being only 5 more breaths left in Forearm Plank
4. Care a little too much about placing your mat in the back row, on the left, third position from the wall
5. Find yourself unknowingly shifting into a cross-legged sitting situation during Zoom meetings
6. Obsess about foot-borne diseases after walking through a puddle of someone else’s sweat following class
7. Know what phase the Moon is in or that Mercury is in retrograde simply by overhearing students and teachers at the studio
8. Ask yourself, “Are you overdressed for the hot yoga class?” (Yes. The answer is always yes.)
9. Know the irony of rushing to make it to class on time only so you can hear your teacher tell you to slow down throughout your practice. Every damn time.
10. Have a tendency to plop down on the floor in a way that isn’t typically sanctioned in social settings
11. Believe that your Spotify “top songs” playlist is NOT a completely weird mashup of ambient forest sounds and chanting monks alongside Dua Lipa and Beyoncé
12. Turn your head and instinctively look upward under your arm whenever you’re on the subway or airport shuttle and reach for that strap dangling from the ceiling
13. Engage ujjayi breath in public and freak people out a little because they think you sound like Darth Vader
14. Get a little overly sentimental when the teacher kindly walks close to you and whispers “Your other right side” rather than announce it in front of the entire class
15. Drop into a squat—on the subway, in a coffee shop, at a clothing store—because your hips desperately need a stretch in that moment
16. Have a sweat towel preference and can recite the difference in sweat absorption rates among chamois and terry and cotton and lycra
17. Know the soul-crushing despair of your last work meeting running late and ruining any chance of you slipping away to class
18. Stretch while you binge-watch your shows
19. Realize that you consider jeans to be dress-up clothes because you haven’t worn anything besides leggings since 2019
20. Rely on a self-care routine that’s an inexact algorithm of yoga, meditation, and screaming obscenities
21. Obsess more than the average person about whether your hips are abnormally tight
22. Consider anyone who replies, “Of course we can reschedule, go to yoga,” to be potential soulmate material
23. Feel like you’re left wanting Savasana whenever you take an exercise class at the gym
24. Scream—sometimes silently, sometimes not—when your favorite teacher has arranged for a sub, gone away on vacay, or inexplicably disappeared from the class schedule
25. Find that certain cell phone rings, wind chimes, and doorbells trigger a Savasana response
26. Freak out when you’re stuck in traffic, having a disagreement, or at the dentist…and then remind yourself to breathe
27. Find yourself un-ironically asking “have you tried lavender essential oil yet?”
28. Rely on your breath to warm you outside during winter by practicing Kapalabhati (Skull-Shining Breath)
29. Understand that “yoga math” means no matter how many minutes you practice in a day, it’ll make all the minutes that follow more bearable
30. Forget to wipe down your mat for 24 classes straight even though you walk past the bottle of cleaning solution and towels each time you go to the studio
31. Feel the futility of trying to find Warrior 1 hips
32. Get a little weepy when the hotel website boasts “free yoga” but you later learn that means there’s a cheap mat in the exercise room that hasn’t been wiped down in years
33. Realize that meditation isn’t so scary
34. Talk about your “moon flow” rather than “that time of the month”
35. Think it’s an unquestionably reasonable thing to dedicate years of your life to learning how to balance on your hands
36. Understand that yoga stoned is very much a thing
37. Remind yourself “it’s a practice not a performance” (not just in terms of yoga, actually, but everything in life)
38. Experience the challenge of engaging in a significant conversation with someone within an hour of Savasana
39. Understand the subtle differences among five identical pairs of black leggings
40. Know, on a very deep level, that it’s not just about the shape
Additional Contributors: Carrie Bell; Yogi Bryan; Stephanie Acosta; Rachel Land; Jenny Clise; Erin Deeley; Chris Keyes; Sierra Shafer; Jamie Aranoff.
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