Now that I've taken a yoga class, I can truly say that yoga DOES deserve the hype
with two BIG caveats: number one, I don't think I would have benefited at all from it 5 years ago. I think I was able to get a lot out of it because I'd already gone through a journey of learning that my body and its feelings and reactions weren't the enemy.
Back when I had a more antagonistic relationship with my body and I was still keeping all my trauma bottled up and tamped down, I think it would have been very frustrating to try to do yoga.
The second BIG caveat is that it depends hugely on the instructor and some yoga practices are basically "exercise" in that it's supposed to be actively "hard" and you're expected to push/force your body through distress.
One thing that is really helpful to me about yoga is that you don't push to the outer extremity of your limits.
The mentality of exercise is doing things with your body that are as hard as you can possibly tolerate, for as long as you possibly can, as determined by your force of will and ability to ignore pain. Yoga was very different because instead of straining my willpower to the absolute limit, it encouraged me to be highly aware of what parts of my body were being challenged and engaged. Instead of pushing that to the point of the worst distress I could stand, I was encouraged to explore the bodily experience mentally and notice how my muscles and joints worked together, how they held or released tension and how my emotions reacted.
I had some really strong emotional reactions to yoga. A lot of these were positive. I loved my instructor, but there was an instructional video we were assigned and also a guest instructor that made me really upset and angry. Like, "ruining my whole day" angry.
And it was the same kind of thing in both cases: they were making it into a sort of "push through the pain" exercise class mentality, purposefully trying to get to the limits of what your body can tolerate, instead of like. meditative and engaging with your body.
The most common and consistent comment I get on my writing is that it's visceral. On i am an exit (the Buckyfic) I've gotten so many comments to the effect of "wow your descriptions of bodily experiences of pain and emotions are so vivid and intense." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.
This is interesting to me because I'm not trying to make it intense, I'm trying to make it accurate. The rest of my experience with life suggests to me that there is something unusually visceral and intense about my actual experience of my own body. Even before I knew i was autistic, I had a ferocious, hateful awareness that I was more sensitive to literally everything than everyone else.
I think I latched onto certain aspects of the exercise mentality too strongly: when I was in martial arts, I very much showed up every day with the mentality that I was going to push myself as hard as I possibly could and get as close to my physical and mental limits as possible.
I LIKED martial arts, it made me feel strong and capable, and the ability to mentally dominate my own body by "pushing through the pain" was definitely part of that.
Looking back on myself as a kid I'm amazed at two things: how much distress I was in and how much I hated myself about it. I felt like I deserved to have something horrible happen to me, for, I don't know, being terrified by nearly every aspect of being alive?
My child self is like some kind of shining beacon of power and light to me: filled with terror beyond anything the hearts of the adults around me could make, yet indomitably serene, brash, and unselfconscious.