It Felt Like Listening Again

A month of back pain, one doctor's order, and the first thing I've done to repair myself instead of empty myself.

Last night, at nine PM, I went to hot yoga alone for the first time.

A month and a half ago I hurt my lower back. Not from one clear moment, but from accumulation, from working out heavy, week after week, and then one day I just bent down the wrong way getting up from sitting and I felt it go. The pain that followed was unbearable. Your lower back touches everything. Bending, sitting, walking, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes. The worst was mornings. You’d think sleep would let it rest, but it was the opposite. The stillness made it stiffen, and waking up felt like cracking the pain back open from scratch every single day.

I did what I always do when something hurts. Acupuncture, cupping, the spot by my house that’s worked for years. It helped. Then a few days later it was reaggravated, right back to where I started.

So I went to Doctor Kim. He’s been the healer in my family and my community since I was a kid. A family friend of ours used to apprentice under him. He used to help me with physical pain when I was younger, and going back to him now felt like going back to something old and trusted. Three sessions in, he told me not to work out. Not at all.

There’s nothing more satisfying than a good pump at the end of a day that demanded a lot from me. So hearing don’t work out from someone like him should have been hard to swallow.

It wasn’t. I didn’t give a crap. If a few weeks without the gym was the cost of actually being healthy, that wasn’t even a question. The pain made the decision before I had to.

And somewhere in that forced pause, I realized something simpler than I expected. I wasn’t listening to my body. I’m decent at listening to my mind, my thoughts, when something’s off mentally I usually catch it. But physically, I’d been pushing through for so long that I stopped noticing what my body was actually telling me. The injury wasn’t really an accident. It was an accumulation of not listening.

So last night I decided to listen differently. I went to hot yoga.

I’d done it once before. A friend, Rachel Solomon, brought me to a Core Power class in Culver City years ago. It was not a beginner class, though I didn’t know that going in. The room was packed, hot as hell, we were stacked in like sardines, and she put us right at the front next to the instructor. I’m a heavy sweater. I came with a towel and still ended up sliding around on my mat, losing my grip. I had no idea what any of the poses were called. I just watched the people around me and tried to copy what they did. And somehow, after all of that, I left feeling calm. Satisfied in a way I didn’t expect.

At the gym, it doesn’t matter how strong the person next to me is, I know what I need to do to get stronger. I have the map, even if someone else is further along it. In yoga I don’t even know what the map looks like yet. The teacher says it over and over, go at your own pace, nobody’s looking at you, nothing else in this room matters but you. And I believe her. But I still want to do everything correctly, not for anyone else, but for myself. At the gym I can block everyone out because I know exactly what I’m there for. In yoga I’m still figuring that part out.

Or maybe I do know, and I just never said it out loud before. The gym has always been release. A long hard day, and lifting is how I let it out. Yoga is the opposite. It’s repair. To get more in tune with my body, more flexible, to stop pushing it like a brute until it breaks. I’ve never gone to something to fix myself instead of empty myself.

Last night wasn’t that first class with Rachel. But it felt nostalgic in the same direction. I picked the nine PM class on purpose, because I didn’t want a crowded room. Turned out only five people showed up. I hadn’t planned that, I’d just guessed that late at night would be quieter. Underneath the guess was something I don’t love admitting: I didn’t want to be seen not knowing what I was doing.

The instructor calls out pose after pose, names I don’t know, words I can’t even hold onto, and between that and my hearing not being great, I’m constantly half a step behind, scanning the room to see what everyone else is doing instead of just being in my own body. And the whole practice is built around breathing, and that’s exactly what I forget to do, because my brain is too loud trying to keep up.

But last night, even without the crowd, without the chaos of that first class years ago, something in me settled. It was calming. It was a chance to test the edge of my own stretch, my own limit, without comparing it to anyone else’s. It felt like listening again.

Today, writing this, I feel the best I’ve felt since before the injury. I lifted at the gym again for the first time in a month. My hamstrings are sore in a way that caught me off guard. I’m already looking forward to the next hot yoga class.

I didn’t choose to listen first. The pain chose for me.