On The Benefits of Doing A Lot of Yoga
Physical, Psychological, and Beyond...
Almost a year ago now I decided that I want to become a yoga teacher, which necessarily involved doing a lot more yoga than I had been before. This has wrought a lot of changes in my life that go beyond—and are significantly stranger than—the standard wellness pitch you sometimes hear talked about. I’ve catalogued most of them below—beginning with basic physical stuff and then escalating through more psychological and esoteric effects.
Physical
I feel like I’ve gotten ~all the basic health benefits that people talk about with yoga—I have more energy, I sleep better, I’m demonstrably stronger and more flexible. My relationship to food has gotten significantly better and I’m slowly finding myself more able to gain weight (I’ve dealt with mild anorexia and been chronically underweight for most of my life). I’ve also had some long term digestive issues begin to clear up since starting. My posture has also improved in a way that, judging from people’s reactions, has made me ~10% hotter.
Psychological
I Feel More Clearheaded:
Managing or reducing stress is obviously one of the primary reasons people recommend yoga, but from where I’m at now this feels like a lossy description. It’s probably different for different people, but for me what this feels most like is that my mind is less “fragmented”. My thinking doesn’t feel pulled in so many different directions anymore, distractions are less salient, and I’m less prone to anxiety spirals. For the most part I’ve adjusted to this as a new baseline, but every now and then I’ll do something that puts me back into my previous, more fragmented state (say, spending the morning rapidly multitasking on several different admin items) and I’ll be reminded what it felt like it—it really sucks! Nowadays, however, it’s fairly easy for me to just “reset” out of that feeling with practice and/or sleep.
I’m Less Reactive Online:
In general, scrolling X (formerly twitter) went from being a crippling addiction to being a a manageable problem that I’m slowly starting to rein in. But even beyond metrics like “time spent scrolling”, the way I engage with internet discourse has changed a lot. I’m much less susceptible to rage bait, I find that I’m less bothered about a lot of what shows up on my timeline, I’m less motivated to argue. This isn’t to say that I’ve stopped caring about the things I used to be prone to arguing or getting mad about, it’s just that I’m more capable of acting on the knowledge that spiking my stress hormones and wasting 30 minutes over it won’t help matters.
I’m Less Depressed:
Another change has been in the intensity of my depression. Much like my mild anorexia, periodic, fairly intense depression has been a regular feature for most of my adult life. Now, my depression isn’t gone, but in addition to being generally less intense, it’s begun to feel more tractable, and depressive periods are less prone to spiralling out of control. One way this works is that I’m generally a lot more aware of my body and things that might be making me feel worse. Sometimes I’ll be on the verge of a depressive spiral and then suddenly I’ll stop and notice that I’m really hungry, or I haven’t been out in the sun in too long, or one of my nostrils is stopped up—I’ll go and address the problem and suddenly everything is less bad. I’ll still be depressed, but it goes from feeling like this inescapable, all consuming weight to just a “eh, this kinda sucks” feeling, one that often goes away after sleeping.
My Sexuality Came Back:
This has been one of the weirder effects for me. Ever since a somewhat bad experience a few years ago my sex drive—and with it a more general desire for intimacy—had felt like it’s been in artificially low gear. Never gone exactly, but dampened, somehow remote. This didn’t change immediately when I started practicing more or even in teacher training, but it did begin to shift a few months ago when I started becoming a lot more consistent about my morning asana and meditation practice. It felt like something snapped back into place and suddenly this part of myself was there again—this was fairly unexpected and I’m honestly still working through what to do with this.
The Weird Stuff
Insight Comes More Naturally:
For several years I had periodically experimented with various divinatory systems (Tarot, Futhark, etc.) to little avail. One day, about 1/3 of the way through YTT, I had the urge to try again, specifically with the Futhark.1 I made a set of runes with paper flashcards, tried drawing them, and this time it just seemed to click. I’ve continued this practice since and while I’m still a novice, I am at a point where it’s capable of generating useful insights for myself (and occasionally others). Likewise, there are substances that, when I’d taken them before, usually just produced unpleasant and confusing experiences. When I engage with these substances now, I come away learning something that meaningfully improves my life.
I’m More Sensitive:
This one is probably the most mixed result I’ve gotten, though I still think it’s been a positive overall. My sense of touch has become sharper and more information-heavy. Hearing, too, feels like something I can more actively control—it’s like I have the ability to spatially orient my hearing and “zoom-in” on a particular location, both inside my own body and outwards. The downside here is that I seem to be more sensitive to changes in the weather—pressure headaches when a new system is blowing in have become more common—but, on the flip side, I feel like I enjoy the weather more. The petrichor smell after it’s rained, crisp, cool mornings, the warmth sunlight—all of these feel significantly more pleasurable to experience than they did before.
My Music Taste Has Shifted:
I used to listen to a lot of really intense, fast-paced music—stuff like Metal, EDM, Techno. And the thing is, I still really like all of those things when I’m at a concert or a rave, but having them in my ears while I’m walking or doing chores feels a little overwhelming now, and also maybe unnecessary? I think before I was using ~constant high-energy music in my headphones to do something, to help myself push through things. Now I feel like I’m producing whatever that music was giving me endogenously.
Animals Are Friendlier:
This isn’t the intense version of this you sometimes hear about where animals actively flock to you, but I’ve noticed that animals I encounter seem to be “move up” one degree on a scale of hostile-skittish-indifferent-friendly. Geese are less likely to honk and make threat displays, squirrels don’t run away as much, and outdoor cats in people’s yards are more likely to wander up to me if I stop while walking by.
Conclusion — The Practice
At this point I’m consistently teaching three classes a week. Additionally, I try to take classes from other teachers most days, and in practice this averages to 4-5 classes a week. On my own, I practice Asana and mantra chanting ~every morning, although how long I do so varies, as preparation for a daily mediation practice which lasts from five to fifteen minutes, though I’m working on lengthening that. Outside of yoga I do indoor bouldering most days and I walk quite a lot, but there have been periods in the past where I’ve done those things without yoga, so I feel pretty confident about attribution for most of the effects below.
If you’re looking for the 80/20 version of this I would recommend going to a yoga class2 at least 3 times a week. The styles that work best for you are going to vary from person to person—I find that a level of intensity and speed slightly below the average Vinyasa class is a sweet spot for me. Look for teacher(s) that you click with and that feel down to earth and generally chill; longer meditation periods at the start and end of the class, inclusion of mantra chanting, and more instruction around your breathing are all usually positive signals. If you have the time and opportunity to go on a longer yoga and meditation retreat I’d recommend that, but you should maybe go with the attitude that you’re there to learn skills that you can integrate into your practice and daily life rather than treating it as a vacation.
You may have noticed that I haven’t speculated about the mechanism of action for any of these effects—I do have thoughts here, and there is scientific research that suggests some interesting possibilities. I’m planning to write more on this in the near future.
Being drawn to try working with the Futhark again was not, I think, coincidental. The mythological and functional parallels between Odin and Rudra will likely be the subject of a future article.
This does probably need to be yoga as opposed to a more purely fitness-focused modality like pilates. The only other thing I would really recommend is Tai Chi—from everything I’ve read and seen, I think it’s a system that works with roughly the same “raw materials” that yoga does, and probably ends up in a similar place at the very far end of the practice, but does a lot of different things on the way there.