Clare Hitchens (she/her) is a grad of our 2024 250-Hour Yoga Teacher Training. You might meet Clare staffing our front desk some evenings, and occasionally subbing for TBY classes!
I did my first yoga practice with a physiotherapist when I was healing from a lower back injury caused by my dog bolting after a squirrel while attached to me. One day I went to see her shortly after I’d been in a car accident. Although I wasn’t injured, I was in shock, and she noticed that and offered to lead me in a yoga practice. At the end of that practice, I sat and wept, and she quietly left the room for a few minutes. When I recovered, she offered that a yoga practice can provide that kind of release of emotions, and probably for the first time I made the connection between mind and body, understanding a bit better how intertwined they are.
Once I started a regular yoga practice it became abundantly clear how it could affect my mood, and how important it was for regulating my emotions and managing daily stress along with helping me feel stronger in my body. However, there were aspects of yoga that I did not expect, and those are what I want to talk about in this post. I’m going to talk about hip openers, and I will put in a warning here about fat shaming language and sexist comments. Many of us have tight hips. We sit in office chairs, and we barely move for hours during the day. I’ve heard people proclaim their tight hips to me with what seems like pride, which is interesting. Children raised as girls and young women are taught very specific things, contradictory things, about their hips and thighs. For one, at least for my age group, we were taught to always sit with our legstogether, not to cross our knees, but only our ankles, never to sit wide legged. “Put your legs together!” could be snapped by one’s mother at any time. For another, hips were seen as places we could gain weight, and that was a thing to be avoided. Think of the saying, “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” We said that to each other all. the. time. and thought nothing of it. Denying ourselves delicious food was accepted as normal practice to avoid weight gain. Contrasting all that would be people who made comments about someone having “good childbearing hips,” which was admiration for a wide set of hips with room for a baby. Appropriate use of a female body! Layer on sexist comments such as one made to me by a male co-worker when I was pregnant with my third child. He suggested I wasn’t taking my birth control properly and I might do better to hold the pill between my knees. So, wait, should I have good childbearing hips, or should I not have sex so I don’t get pregnant?? That’s the climate I grew up in, and I was unprepared for the effect of hip openers on my life.
In my early days of yoga it took me a while to get comfortable doing something as simple as a wide legged forward fold, never mind a reclined butterfly, in which my knees were spread wide, my ankles bound together, and my body in a very open position. It felt positively immoral! The more I practiced, however, the more I wanted those poses. Deep squats, hip rotations, a wide legged child’s pose! Gradually these poses began to feel empowering—there was a freedom in them that I craved, permission to put my body parts in any shape I chose to. And even more gradually they began to feel like second nature. What this has translated to in life outside yoga is much more comfort living in the body that I inhabit. I no longer obsess about how I look in my clothes, how I look when I’m exercising or dancing or eating, how somebody else might perceive me at any given time. I’m still human, and I still have moments of anxiety, but the freedom given to me in yoga to move my body into shapes that I choose, whenever I want, has made an impact on my life far beyond the mat.
The Branches 