When Was a Time You Felt Free?

And what does freedom mean to you?

iPhones didn’t exist in the ‘90s, so I didn’t snap a selfie after the memory I describe in this essay, but this is a photo from around that time, freshman year of college.

In last week’s post, I said I was going to try to find a yoga class to attend on my birthday, which fell on Labor Day this year, but I didn’t have high hopes due to the holiday. And, as I’d anticipated, it didn’t pan out: There were only a handful of yoga classes offered on Labor Day in my corner of suburbia, and all of them were sold out in advance.

But I did make it to day-after-my-birthday yoga! And the teacher had an unofficial theme running through the class — she kept repeating the words “Come home” and “Come home to your body” throughout the one-hour session.

As I moved through the poses in this gentle, restorative class, memories began to surface. They were mostly of being in yoga class in the months leading up to my ovarian cancer diagnosis in the fall of 2018, the last time I went to yoga classes consistently. I stopped doing yoga altogether when I was diagnosed, and I was only beginning to get back into going with any degree of frequency when COVID hit, launching me into a virtual yoga practice that I eventually grew tired of as Zoom fatigue set in. Then I moved from Brooklyn, where there are yoga classes aplenty, to the suburbs, where they’re comparatively few and far between. Add to that a lack of work and extremely sparse funds up until recently, and I’ve barely made it to yoga at all this year.

In the class earlier this week, as I was thinking about how I really want to get back into going to yoga regularly now that work is starting to come in again, and with it, more money, and remembering the last time I had a steady, consistent yoga practice before my diagnosis six years ago, and the teacher was reminding me to return home to my body, another, completely unrelated memory popped into my head.