Back in the spring just a few weeks into quarantine, I heard “the COVID-19” as a way to explain weight gain during the pandemic.
After all, everyone was home, everyone was baking bread, and gyms and yoga studios were all closed.
And oh yeah, we’re living through an actual global pandemic, each day more stressful and overwhelming than the last.
As mothers, we maneuvered work obligations from home while logging our children onto Zoom school. We placed our grocery store orders, crossed our fingers that we’d get even one original selection, and drove across town to drop off a roll of toilet paper when we had one to spare. We bid farewell to glimmers of free time as they set with the sun, day after day.
I remember sitting for 8 hours straight, tight with stress and adrenaline, transitioning my brick and mortar yoga studio to a virtual business and coaching other yoga studio owners to do the same.
Between e-mail blasts and social media posts and trying to figure out if music sounded acceptable or downright awful for Zoom H.I.I.T. classes, I’d serve up perfectly golden grilled cheeses for my two-year old while frantically searching for virtual log on credentials for my kindergartner and still somehow perform pretty, pink manicures for my four-year-old.
Messaging was on point.
Members logged on for virtual yoga.
Kids were fed and happy and connected.
My family and my business were safe and healthy.
Alright.
I know this sounds a bit dramatic.
And I’m really trying to be honest with myself over whether it was actually like this.
And you know what? It freakin’ was.
It was like this for families everywhere.
Then in the midst of my own marketing and mothering, I heard the COVID-19 weight gain comment.
You know, like the Freshmen 15.
The phrase evoked a deep pang of shame because it hit me:
I, a yoga teacher, was gaining it too.
My jeans were getting tighter.
My push ups were getting harder.
And running the 2-mile loop around my neighborhood had me sucking wind like I’d just sprinted a 400 meter race.
Catchy as “Lose the COVID-19” may be, I hated the phrase the moment I heard it for it’s shameful attempt to guilt people – ok let’s be honest, women who are working so damn hard as it is – back in shape and back to yoga and back to being “healthy.”
Here I was like so many, keeping my business afloat despite a massive economic shut down while making sure my family was healthy and safe, yet my quarantine weight gain was making me feel less than.
A failure.
Ashamed.
And if I’m being honest – freaked out.
I started to think, ok, when everything gets back to normal I’ll get back to the hot room everyday and back to a normal schedule and back to plenty of grocery store selections.
I’ll get back…
Saying I’ll get back enough finally stopped me dead in my mental tracks because I realized I was pitting two versions of myself against one another.
I’ll get back slyly hinted that who I am now is not something to be content with and proud of.
All of a sudden my quarantine weight-gain nudged me with a touch of grace: the freak out wasn’t the extra pounds, it was the fact that I wasn’t practicing any kind of self-love.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a piece called Sweat Your Way to Self Love because I wanted to share how yoga made me love what I saw when I looked in the mirror.
And make one thing clear: yoga didn’t change what I saw, it changed who was looking.
I like to call the mental state in which you find yourself after yoga class “the post-yoga bliss.” In this bliss as you sip your coconut water, you savor a cocktail of confidence and power, garnished with patience and compassion.
In this state, you know that no matter what comes your way, you’ll be able to handle it because the class itself brings you to your edge every single time and you persevere in the face of that sweaty yoga challenge.
And that’s where the self-love comes in.
You show up on your mat and you do the hard thing and no matter what you weigh and what you look like, you feel freakin’ phenomenal about yourself for getting through.
Whenever I teach yoga, I always remind my students that the class is really a reflection, a sort of microcosm of what’s going on in the outside world. We don’t do yoga to be better at yoga, but rather we do yoga to be better at life.
When class ends and the students leave the studio or log off Zoom, we always say, “great class!” because even on someone’s worst, weakest, most inflexible yoga rodeo, that person still showed up.
And those hard classes are truly great classes.
Now maybe, just maybe, this state that we’re in is the hard thing that brings me – that brings us – to our edge.
And the fact that we’re here, living and loving and staying in business and supporting our neighbors and hybrid schooling and maybe once in a while putting on our nice sweatpants is reason enough to take a sip of that confidence power cocktail, garnished with patience and compassion.
When the hard thing is yoga, it makes us love what we see when we look at ourselves.
Well now the hard thing isn’t as curated, and it isn’t as kind.
Which only means we need to love ourselves more.
