Why Type-A Women Love Yoga
Kindness, love, and body acceptance are in short supply in the world of work. In female-filled yoga studios, it’s a different story.
By my second year of law school, I was desperate. I was exhausted and wracked with anxiety. When I woke up one day in excruciating pain and unable to move my head, I hobbled over to the university health center, where I got a big shot of muscle relaxers in my right flank. Over the next two weeks, I took my final exams in a cloud of prescription painkillers and Flexeril.
The next semester, instead of signing up for my usual high-impact cardio or boxing class at the gym, I decided to try yoga.
It stuck (and it made my neck feel better). More than a decade later, I have a regular practice and a teaching certification. And when I look around classrooms in cities from New York to Nairobi, I see people who feel familiar: ambitious, overextended, Type-A women. The kind of women who, like me, might have managed to displace a disc in their cervical spine just from stress.
For a great many women, a yoga practice also offers a rare, largely female space where the ethos is one of treating your body with kindness.
