Twice a week, I take a yoga class at Smith. The classes are included in my alumnae gym membership, and while it's a stretch to leave work in time to make the 5pm start, I am deeply committed to them and have only missed them when truly sick or severely injured. (I even returned to class just three weeks after severing my ACL and bruising a bone. Turns out this was a bad idea, and I suffered for it, but you can get a sense for how important it is to me to go. I couldn't walk, but I believed I could do yoga.)
I began taking the classes in the fall of 2006. I had been very sick for a few years, but was finally feeling well enough to make it through a one-hour beginners class once a week. In the beginning, I hated the yoga. I hated my teacher, a bubbly Smith alumna who seemed way too perky for her own good.
But even amidst my stifled rage and irritation and frustration, what I loved about the classes-- immediately--was the experience of being in a room full of women. And not just any women, Smith women. While there are occasionally men, and may or may not be students in the class who don't identify as "women," the dominant experience is one of being among women, in a room of our own. This, I realized, is not something we get to experience all that often after we graduate from Smith. I hadn't realized how much I missed it, until I sat down that first day, tired and sore, on my mat and felt the uplifting comfort of it wash over and through me.
Yoga on its own is special, especially this yoga--anusara yoga--which is very heart-centered. Love, joy, and acceptance are central elements of the practice. But yoga at Smith--with a Smithie teacher--it's difficult to describe to those who haven't felt it. I can breathe better when I have this in my life. I breathe better just thinking about it.
When we were undergrads, this was the water we swam in. Since leaving school, unless we joined a nunnery or went to teach at a same-sex school, we had to adapt to a different kind of water. There have been plenty of times when I was in the full company of women; but, particularly after having spent so much time alone since moving back to Northampton, returning to that space and being with those women for an hour every week--it had tremendous healing benefits. Like a fresh water fish seeking refuge from a brackish new environment, I have returned home, and when I enter that Smith room, my gills fill up with the best and freshest oxygen imaginable.
It is my hope that some of us might come together to practice yoga for an hour with my teacher at Smith during reunion. I'll ask Kirse to put it on the survey in April, to see if there's any interest. Until then, I hope that wherever you are in your life, you may find access to a room full of women of your own--whether it is through a shared religious practice, music, service, support, or any of the other myriad things that bring us together. Namaste.
Labels: classmates, opinion, reunion, Smith news
