Culture

Coronavirus-Quarantine Diary: “Yoga With Adriene”


I’m not exactly what you would call an athletic person. In the story I’ve always told myself about myself—a tale endlessly fascinating to me, and surely less than fascinating to others—my aptitude lay in the head rather than in the body. From a young age, I knew that I liked to read and write, and to think about reading and writing, and those tendencies, coupled with what I saw as my essential corporeal clumsiness, led me to feel that any type of sustained physical activity must not be for me. I was, generally speaking, a high achiever, and exercise was not an area in which I was likely to achieve, so what was the point, exactly? “I like to sit,” I would sometimes tell people, when asked what my favorite sport was.

I’m nothing if not consistent, and my own personal mind-body problem held strong and stubborn for many years. As I’ve grown older, however, I noticed my will beginning to soften a bit. I was still the kid who had a difficult time learning to swim, who never quite grasped how to ride a bike, who strolled rather than dashed the two-thousand-metre run in my physical-education senior-year finals, but I was also aware that I was, increasingly, an aging adult with a stiff back, slack muscles, and a cardiovascular system desperately in need of a workout. And so, periodically, I would resolve to make an effort. I ran outside; I swam; I played squash; I joined a gym and left it and then joined it again. I struggled in all of these activities, and most if not all of them fell by the wayside. Then my friend Vanessa told me about the “Yoga With Adriene” YouTube channel.

In the past few years, Adriene Mishler, who is based in Austin, has become widely known for her videos, in which she leads viewers in gentle but invigorating yoga routines. (Mishler offers these videos for free on her popular channel, whose subscribers now number more than six million.) There is nothing especially radical about Mishler’s videos: you are not pushed to any personal physical limit, and no promises of extreme bodily or psychic transformations are made. To do a “Yoga With Adriene” video is to do just a little—the routines rarely last longer than forty minutes, and most clock in at the ten-to-twenty-five-minute mark. But it is precisely this relative modesty—which might admittedly be considered a drawback by more hardcore exercisers—that I find most attractive about Mishler’s regimen. This, and her soothing voice, calm instructional style, and occasional goofy jokes (not to mention the presence of her near-constant sidekick Benji, a serene blue heeler), is what allows me to come back to the yoga mat rather than shove it into a dark closet in a flurry of frustration and self-loathing.

In these odd and destabilizing days of coronavirus-induced self-quarantine—anxious and restless and boring all at once—there is nothing that I would recommend more highly than a spot of “Yoga With Adriene.” Every year, on January 1st, Mishler offers a thirty-day challenge, centered on a particular theme. This year’s was “home”—in retrospect, a prescient choice—and, since I’ve been nowhere but in the past days, I’ve found myself drawn to the videos from this monthlong schedule. Coming to the mat for a few minutes each day provides a sense of structure and routine that’s otherwise missing in our current shapeless reality. Whether you are, like me, not very connected to your physicality, or even if you’ve just forgotten what it feels like to be a body under quarantine’s spatial restrictions, Mishler’s routines allow for the creation of a consistent, sustainable meeting point with your fleshly self. Her videos make a small but meaningful space in which to feel, say, one’s hamstrings stretch minorly but pleasurably, and to know that, at least for now, that is enough.


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