Once Upon a Time in Yoga Class

Two female volleyball players with red devil horns high five.

I’d been practicing hot yoga about 10 years when I had a loud & messy emotional response during a crowded class one day.

For some context: I started practicing yoga at 22, and I became an instructor at 24. Yoga was the beginning of my personal emotional healing journey. Though I didn’t have the words for it at the time, yoga supported me to begin completing stress cycles and working through emotional trauma, helping me to become more grounded and present in my body.

A few times this happened in surprising, freaky ways. In the early days, and especially as I trained harder to prepare for the yoga teacher training, I often got emotional in class while moving in and out of the postures, moving and holding the poses while allowing myself to feel my feelings. I got fit. It helped me heal from the burnout from getting a literature degree in my second language while managing undiagnosed ADHD. As time went on, my practice had me digging deeper: back in my body, I was beginning to shed the emotional baggage I had around feeling I had to perform to protect myself, and the ways I’d had to pretend things that bothered me, didn’t. It helped that I’d lucked out by meeting Cathy, who started out as my teacher and pretty soon became my mentor, friend, and yoga mom.

Fast forward about ten years later, and I found myself in what could have been just a regular Saturday afternoon class in Vancouver. Except the atmosphere felt charged. Energetic. For better or worse, competitive. The instructor was feeling spicy and challenged the class, a group of several other teachers and experienced students, to really push ourselves, as most of us were advanced practitioners.

As we got close to the halfway point of the class, I was sucking wind. It was extra humid and I took a little break, still standing but not doing the posture. Another teacher (a friendly acquaintance) on the mat beside me thought it would be funny to splash me with a little water. At that time in my life I was still fawning a lot and so I laughed - but inside it surprised me, and I started to get activated even though I knew Splashy didn’t have bad intentions.

As we moved into the floor sequence, I fought it, but I felt the tears start to come. Soon I was trying to hold back sobs. I had to leave the room.

When we got to the halfway point, I slipped out and bolted into the change room, falling to my knees on the carpet. Was I sobbing? That’s an understatement. I howled like a little Malamut pup who’d lost its mother: uncontrollable, loud cries of anguish ripped out of my throat, one after the other, followed by sobbing tears from deep in my belly. I had little control over any of this. My body was intent on expressing the pain it was finally, unpredictably, able to express.

Then it was over. It felt longer but my weeping lasted just a few minutes. The front desk manager checked on me. The owner stuck his head out of the office.

“You okay?” they asked.

“I think so,” I said.

I had no concept of what ‘taking it easy’ on myself really meant at the time, I went back in and finished the class. It was one of the rules of the subculture (read: cult), and I didn’t question that at the time. It was hard to catch my breath for the rest of the class, but this practice was my body’s happy place: I took a long savasana afterwards, reflecting on what the hell had just happened. My yoga pal Splashy came back in and apologized for upsetting me. I told him honestly: I was thrown and angry at first, it truly had nothing to do with him.

What’s fascinating to me about this event, is how this old trauma got triggered. In a group setting, surrounded by people I saw as unfriendly teammates, and getting bossed around by a yogi cool guy, my body recognized how this class setup mirrored the circumstances of a much earlier time.

For those of you who need a content warning: the next section discusses bullying.

*

What this situation mirrored so clearly was a terrible night when I was fifteen. In tenth grade, I was away on a volleyball tournament with my JV team. The first night at the hotel, I fell asleep first. One of the girls on my team - a popular, mean girl type - thought it would be funny if she and five of my other teammates woke me up at 3 AM, standing around my side of the bed, brushing their teeth and spitting their toothpaste all over me.

As far as damage goes, I know there is so much worse bullying that happens to people everyday. The toothpaste was gross I assure you, but what still sticks out to me is the palpable hatred from this group of girls.

Talk to any trauma survivor, and they’ll often say the worst part is the silence of the bystanders.

How did I handle it? I got up, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I didn’t feel safe expressing what I felt: I wasn’t close with any of the girls, and I definitely didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to give the mean girl the satisfaction of seeing me cry or lose my temper, so in the shower, I shoved all of my big feelings - all the distress, sadness, rejection, and outrage deep down into my body. I locked them away until I could leave the bathroom, and act passably calm.

I was not fine.

Suffice it to say, I played like shit at the tournament. I wasn’t present, and made a lot of mistakes. The coach, a student teacher named Kori, seemed like a mean girl herself and firmly unavailable: she had favourite players and I was not one of them.

By the end of the season, I knew I wouldn’t play any more volleyball, even though it had been a dream of mine to play at university. I felt ashamed even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I couldn’t look the girls who’d spit on me in the eye.

*

Back to the future: It wasn’t ideal to have a dramatic reaction like that in a public yoga class. Many people I knew only casually overheard my wild howling. In truth though, I didn’t feel too embarrassed about it. I felt relief. I wasn’t in control of my response, and it was such a powerful physical and emotional response that trying to hold it in would have been painful and ultimately counter-productive. I’m glad I was able to physiologically release the energy of the incident, which had been stored in my cells for almost 20 years.

It took me a very long time to get over the impact of the volleyball team incident. It cost me a dream, although arguably, it didn’t have to: my next two high schools’ coaches both tried to recruit me for teams, which I declined. Eventually it also cost me a few hundred bucks for EMDR in therapy.

I’m not sure how to end this. I don’t have many grand sweeping things to say about recovering from trauma except that no deserves to be treated like that. My friend Ty says this thing about forgiveness, that forgiveness means “I’m FOR giving this back to the person who wronged me.”

I will stand on that. I can’t forget, but I refuse to carry the shame this incident incurred. It simply doesn’t belong to me.