I remember the first time I cried in class. It was 13 years after I first stepped foot onto a mat. At that very moment, when I cried, I was lost in a sea of yogis in the middle of a yoga festival. The tears were uncontrollable. Snot was gushing from my nose. My face was blushing from sweat, summer heat, and emotions. I was basically ugly crying in public and I had lost hold of my feelings. That episode was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.
Now let’s backtrack for a moment. If you asked me to pinpoint the moment these feelings were triggered during this yoga class, I couldn’t tell you. This was the first time I had ever taken a class with my master Young Ho Kim. At the festival, I had seen, let me rephrase, heard him teach a class by way of loud music and a very succinct voice projecting names of asanas every fews counts. I followed the music and found his class and observed in awe, in intrigue, and in curiosity. At that very moment, I wanted to experience Inside Flow.
The premise of Inside Flow is simple. We flow to the beat of music. We sync our breath to the beat of music. We connect each move to music. The draw of Inside Flow is how we can seamlessly connect one move to another - that yoga in its simplest form is in connection - from the mind, to the body, to our thoughts, and on to the next. Yoga is never about perfect execution, but how we accept and enjoy the ebb and flow of our breath, our bodies, and our minds during a practice. With Inside Flow, we curate movement to carefully selected tracks and through such movements we connect. Each class ends with a choreographed flow that fits into a song and often with an explanation of why that particular song is selected. This was the brainwork of Young Ho - taking his passion in music and weaved it into his background of yoga, martial arts, and dance.
You might be thinking, Young Ho must have picked an incredibly meaningful track for it to dramatically bring out my ugly cry face, that the song he selected must have emotional factors equivalent to that of Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. This is where I tell you in my then13 years of practicing yoga, I bawled my eyes out to … Mariah Carey’s “Make it Through the Rain”. Yes, cue the eye rolls.
For me, music has always been a big part of my life. When I was a child, my father would pick me up from school and blast Stevie Wonder while we drove with the top down on our Jeep singing My Cherie Amour on repeat. My brother studied music in college and used to play conductor at home while listening to Ravel’s Bolero. Music was in my blood. I loved to listen to new music. I loved to move to music. In college, I danced, not to pursue a career in dance, but because I had a passion for movement to music. These days, you will rarely catch me unplugged when I’m in commute, simply because I’m always listening and catching a beat. So with Mariah, it wasn’t so much of what song she sang, but how Young Ho delivered a class that allowed us to not follow, but feel and experience the flow. He told of an emotional story of why the song was significant. After years of practicing and teaching yoga, I was once again able to connect movement with emotion, with power, and without judgement. I felt that I could make it though the rain, I felt the rise of the beat, I felt emotional. When the class ended, he made us listen to our heartbeat and told us to lead with that heart.
That was it. One yoga class was all it took. One ugly cry was what I needed to be convinced that Inside Flow was for me. I stopped dancing after college because of injuries. I never stopped listening to music. And with Young Ho, he brought my two passions back together without the physical impact of dance.
There are many schools of thought around music and yoga. Some may argue that music distracts the mind and in a practice, you should not be carried away by external stimulations. Some may argue music in class should have no lyrics, so to avoid playing karaoke in our head. For me, music carries my movement. That when you’re so deeply connected to your movement, music becomes part of your practice, not an accessory. As an instructor, I feel that I can best serve my students through my way of practice, that when you’re able to connect, to let go, to be free of judgment of how you move and how you feel, that is my version of yoga.
This is why FLOWGA felt like home from day one to me. It was a place where I was able to take a meaningful practice and make it accessible in an untraditional, perhaps unconventional, way. We are not here to fill the mould of what yoga should be, but how we are able to shift our practice and still see it with the true yogic intentions - to connect, to breathe, to detach from what no longer serves us. To allow us to ugly cry for when we feel so deeply connected to our bodies; for us to hear and listen to how beautiful our heart beats with each breath that we take. I love that I can take music from my childhood and share it in ways that give life and character to a practice. To me, music, yoga, and that deep connection that you can get by marrying the two is what makes a practice feel good.