The Uneven Man on the Mat
What a broken body taught me about being whole
I am standing on a yoga mat with a body that doesn’t match itself. My left side is shorter and weaker than my right, from a motorcycle accident at 34. My right side has a mind of its own, from a stroke a year and a half ago.
The teacher just gave us a sequence and stepped back, and I have already forgotten it.
I always do. The stroke took some of my memory along with everything else, so I glance around to see what everyone else is doing. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes I just let my body pick the next pose before my mind does, and I follow it.
And at some point, I stop moving from pose to pose.
I was dancing.
I have spent years in physical therapy rooms trying to force my body back into something resembling the body I used to have.
I have never gotten it back. I am not going to.
The mat is the first place where that stopped mattering.
The class I wasn’t supposed to be in
I went to my first yoga class after the stroke by accident. I had gone to the gym for a HIIT class I used to love. It went badly. I lay on my mat for most of the hour, angry, frustrated, trying to be invisible.
I had nowhere else to be, so I stayed for whatever came next.
What came next was a yoga class.
I won’t pretend I had some grand spiritual opening. I was tired. My right side was still mostly along for the ride. But the teacher kept saying, follow your breath, and at some point my chest got quieter and the noise behind my eyes softened.
At the end, I realized I had stopped thinking. About my body. About my recovery. About the man I used to be and the one I was trying to become.
I went home and signed up for yoga teacher training that same week. I could barely hold a plank. It was, by every reasonable measure, a ridiculous decision.
It is the best decision I have made since the stroke.
A year ago I graduated. I am a certified yoga instructor now, which is still a strange sentence to write. I practice at least four times a week.
Here is what I expected to tell you. I expected to say yoga healed me. That a year of practice brought my left side back, settled my right side down, made me whole.
It didn’t.
I am still uneven.
I am going to stay uneven.
I have stopped wanting it any other way.
What actually happens on the mat
There is a moment in a flow class, when the teacher gives you a sequence and lets you go, where something happens that I cannot fully explain. The world outside the room disappears. There is just my breath, my body, and a kind of quiet I rarely find anywhere else.
I am alone. I am with everyone. I am nowhere. I am exactly here.
I used to think this was the reward for getting the poses right. It isn’t.
It happens because my body is uneven.
Because every transition is a small negotiation between two sides that don’t quite agree. Because I cannot do the pose the way it is supposed to look, so I have to find the way it works for me, in this body, today.
For the first time in twenty years, I am not trying to fix anything. This is also where I first learned to feel again, in a body I had spent decades trying to control.
I am just moving.
I can do yoga at home. I have a mat. I know the poses.
But it is not the same.
It’s like tickling yourself. It feels nice, but it doesn’t tickle.
The teachers I have had since the stroke have given me something I cannot give myself. Sometimes it is a cue I needed. Sometimes it is a sentence in the middle of class that I desperately need to hear.
After my very first yoga class after the stroke, in savasana, my teacher said something I have carried with me ever since:
I am exactly where I’m meant to be, right here, in this moment, in this place.
I know how that sounds. It sounded like a cliché to me too. I had said versions of it to myself for months and felt nothing.
But every cliché is true on the day you finally need it.
On a mat where I had just flowed for the first time in a body I no longer recognized, it finally landed. It was the first time I stopped fighting and let something in.
I cried. I laughed. I cried and laughed at the same time. I had not done that in a very long time.
From one broken person to another
So here is what time on a yoga mat has taught me, in case it helps.
Yoga doesn’t ask you to be fixed before you begin. You don’t have to be flexible, calm, spiritual, symmetrical, or recovered. You don’t even have to be ready. You bring whatever you have, the body you’re in and the noise in your head, and you put it on the mat. The asymmetry I was trying so hard to escape turned out to be the doorway. The place where you stop trying to be who you were is where you start becoming who you are now.
That’s the lesson I wish I’d had years ago.
I am still the uneven man. I am still putting myself back together. But a few times a week I roll out a mat, and even when I forget the next pose, I find it anyway.
If you are rebuilding from something, anything, I hope you find your doorway.
I’ll be on my mat. I’ll see you there.
What’s the place in your life where uneven is allowed?
About the author: Nir Peled is a seven-time survivor, certified yoga instructor, and meditation teacher. His upcoming book, Beyond 100%: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks, offers a Body-Mind-Spirit framework for anyone navigating forced reinvention after a life-shattering event. Learn more at nir-peled.com.
This is a great story Nir! I also love getting lost in a workout. It's a great escape.