yoga with Adriene with Emily
“What are you working on lately?” Honestly, I am working on forcing myself to do one brief online yoga class every day. I’m working on other things too but this is the only goal I’ve been chasing with any kind of consistency since March. My ability to read and write comes and goes. Sometimes I have focus and sometimes my brain is a sieve that other people’s ideas float in and out of. My own ideas are inchoate and random or nonexistent. Most of my conversations are about the specifics of my family’s childcare schemes and the vagaries of what we’re calling “school”. Most of my spontaneous social interactions are a weird dance of trying not to get way too deep way too fast with someone whose whole identity to me/role in my life is “Jacob’s dad.” Shit is weird, has been weird, will continue to be weird. So for about half an hour a day (ideally!) I take refuge in the controlled world of Adriene, who is always in a serene room in Austin with her three to five houseplants, her yoga mat and her dog Benji.
One of Adriene’s many charms is that she has a class for every need, from “Yoga for Loneliness” to “Yoga for After a Disaster” to “Yoga for Core (And Booty!)” The classes also range from 5 minutes to an hour, so you really have no excuse not to squeeze one in. Also, five minutes can feel like forever. When I was first starting to do these videos I only did ones from the under 10 minutes section for quite some time. Gradually, I worked my way up to one of the 30 day yoga challenges — the most recent one, from January 2020, which explores the concept of “Home.” I am not the first to remark on the apropos nature of this theme.
I would go on to complete one additional 30 day challenge, and to begin a third (which I abandoned because it wasn’t shot in Adriene’s white-walled home studio and that for some reason was an inalienable part of the experience for me?) and I have to say the first one was the best one. It really turned my quarantine around! I stopped drinking on weekdays and stopped eating too much candy and instead I started occasionally thinking about my breath and trying to drink enough water. I regained the ability to read a book, for a while. I did yoga on “vacation” upstate with both my children hanging off me.
However, recently, I feel like my yoga with Adriene journey might be coming to something like its natural conclusion. I haven’t run out of classes (a fear I once genuinely harbored) but I have mostly memorized the Adriene jargon and sequencing, to the point where I can usually predict when she will break into song or talk about her pre-Benji dead dog or encourage the viewer to “play” with crow (I refuse to “play” with crow). I still love her. I’ll always be grateful to her. I might return to her! Right now, though, I think I need something more extreme and cultish and ridiculous to get me excited about working out alone in the living room of my friend Lauren’s empty apartment. I hear good things about “The Class” …