Have you ever cried in a yoga class?

I cried three times in class today.

The first was in table pose, when TeeMomma asked us to reach out with our right hand and shake the hand of someone whose hand we can no longer shake.

I shook the hand of a dad who still remembers who I am. Immediate tears.

The second was in crescent. TeeMomma told us to feel our strong legs under us, supporting us, and honestly, I was just tired. I was tired of my legs (my mind, my heart) having to be strong and continue to hold my heaviness up. I wanted to curl into a ball and let the Earth have a turn cradling me for a bit.

I hold my emotions in my hips. Usually, it’s pigeon that gets me, but today I cactus’d my arms, bent my back leg, lowered in, and opened up.

The third was in crescent on the other side because I was still heavy and still tired, and my hips had some more releasing to do.

So they did. They released, and I cried.

No one noticed. We were all so busy holding up our own heaviness on our own mats that no one saw if anyone happened to have tears show up and mix with the sweat coursing down our skin.

No one noticed, and that’s kind of beautiful.

We spend our lives concerned with others. Every day we consider the needs of our children, our spouses, our friends, our coworkers, and our families, calculating what they need and how we can give it to them, determining what our own actions are communicating and how those actions are perceived, evaluating whether our impressions of everyone around us are accurate and whether their impressions of us are accurate, and honestly it’s all just exhausting.

It’s the nature of existing in a community, but it’s exhausting.

It’s a program that is constantly running in the background of our minds, beneath the millions of day-to-day tasks that we must get through. So this hour that we get in the studio, an hour where we can listen to our next pose and really, truly just turn inward and focus on ourselves, is such a beautiful space to hold. Such a beautiful thing to allow ourselves to do.

To be able to have hips open and tears flow and not have to worry about who is looking or judging or worried because everyone’s hips are opening and everyone is in the midst of dealing with their own moments on their own mats, that space is a gift.

After class, I laughed in the lobby with TeeMomma and other women and told them I’d cried. One woman chimed in, “Me, too!” and another commented that crying in yoga class is a gift because we don’t always take the time in our day-to-day lives to stop and just . . . cry. We don’t always give ourselves space to feel the feelings.

And that conversation in the lobby, that laughter and moment of community, was a gift, too: the gift of the safety that we can feel in a group of people that allows us to admit to tears, the gift of comradery that binds us together and lets us easily talk about the weight and speed and constraints of our daily worlds even though we may not even know each other’s names.

I cried three times in class today, and both the doing and the admitting were beautiful.

May we all find the gifts of privacy and community in our lives.

Namaste.