Finding What Feels Good
A decade of practising Yoga With Adriene
It is late Summer, 2014. I have just arrived in Nottingham in readiness to start rehearsing a play called Time and the Conways—a J.B. Priestley classic. I’m staying in theatre digs (slightly edgy rentals from a tattered list provided by the theatre) with a friend from my year at drama school, Sarah, who will be playing my sister in the show—yes I do love playing sisters with my old drama school pals.
We’ve landed in a house with an elderly couple who in a couple of weeks time will kick us out over a misunderstanding about a door—for which I can only reassure the reader that we were not at fault. All that’s in the future though. For now we’re rather cosied up on the top floor of this huge, creaky old house. We’ve cooked a giant lasagne that’s going to last us all week, caught up on a new series of Bake Off as well as with each other, and promptly swept off to bed ahead of our first day.
I wake exceptionally early—with excitement, I suppose, it’s been a while since I last had an acting job. I make myself a hot drink and get back into bed for a bit. In between scalding sips I glance at my freshly picked out clothes that have taken on the shape of the chair overnight, a final once-over from across the room.
I try to sit up a little straighter and puff up the pillows behind me and suddenly remember some pretty stern advice I received from a masseuse not long before leaving for Nottingham—I need to start doing yoga apparently, ‘for your back’ he had said to me. I’d had spells of doing it up to that point - hot yoga I’d gone to pretty religiously for about a year in 2012 - but I left because after a while it felt like I’d joined a cult. I’d also done quite a lot of other classes here and there elsewhere, but always found the rooms a bit competitive and kind of snooty, I would either overstretch or want to curl up into child’s pose until it was all over, so riddled was I with self-consciousness. I also didn’t love the teachers…
I open my laptop and type ‘gentle morning yoga’ into my YouTube search bar just to see what comes up—right, ok, woah, thousands of options…er… I’ll just hit the top one.