The Unexpected Benefit of Being the Worst Yogi in the Room

The first time I stepped foot in a hot yoga studio, it was packed. I took the only spot available, a sliver of space by the front mirror. I could barely breathe and I sweat through pores I didn’t even know I had, but when I looked up into that mirror, I saw a room full of peaceful people doing incredible things with their bodies. I was hooked.

I'm an all-or-nothing sort of person and I can’t stand to be bad at things, which is to say that I set goals with the intention of achieving them and I don’t set goals I can’t achieve. So when I started going to yoga regularly, I went with the intention of becoming the person with the prettiest standing bow pose in the room.

The problem was, as I realized very early on, I was terrible at yoga. I quickly became frustrated at my body. It wouldn’t bend the way I wanted it to. No matter how hard my brain tried to force it, I couldn’t hold the poses. And my standing bow was downright ugly.

This was a roadblock that I simply couldn’t accept. I was not going to spend the foreseeable future struggling with the very basic version of each pose while everyone else was two or three layers ahead of me. I had set a goal and I was going to achieve it.

I signed up for the longest, hottest class—90 minutes in 110F heat. I was simply going to try harder, challenge myself more, and push myself to be better. Yoga baptism by fire.

    “ Trying harder only exacerbated how unprepared my body truly was. ”

Within 20 minutes of that class, I’d realized my mistake. Trying harder only exacerbated how unprepared my body truly was. When the instructor lead the class in sitting deeper, I tried to sit the deepest, and I fell over. When the teacher told us we could do an optional push-up, I forced my arms to dip, and instead of lifting back up, they gave out. for more info visit and share (http://veechi.org/Healthy/visual-impact-muscle-building-review-rusty-moore-a-scam/#discuss)

As I lay there, panting and aching, I made up my mind to cancel my membership. Clearly I was never going to be good at yoga—so I’d just have to quit. Having made a plan, I instantly felt better. All I had to do was get through the rest of the class.