I walked past the hot room hundreds of times before I ever went inside. Through the glass, I could see people moving through their practice, bodies glistening with sweat in a room heated to a temperature that seemed, from my comfortable position on the other side of the window, entirely unnecessary. I was already a yoga person. I took classes regularly. I liked yoga. Just not that yoga. That’s not for me, I would think, and keep walking toward the regular studio.
Then one day, after more than two years of passing that window, I went in. A teacher I trusted was leading the class, and she assured me I would be fine. There was no great act of courage involved, no resolution to become a different kind of person. I simply rolled out my mat, joined the people I had watched through the glass, and stayed. It was incredibly hot. It was also incredibly hard. And then I came back.
The practice I had been dismissing as “not for me” is known as 26-2: twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises practiced in a room heated to 105 degrees and 40 percent humidity. The sequence never changes. Once you know the practice, there are few surprises. You know what comes next, but more importantly, you don’t have to decide what comes next. Someone else does that for you.
I have come to understand that this may be one of the things I love most about the hot room. Teaching and leadership require a nearly constant stream of decisions: Have I checked in on the colleague who is struggling? What does that student need from us right now? How should I respond to the alum waiting for an answer? Have I prepared for tomorrow’s meeting while still being present in this one? What conversation am I avoiding because there hasn’t been time to have it well? Even when I am physically in one place, some part of my mind is often somewhere else, rehearsing tomorrow while still finishing today. In the hot room, I am not in charge. The teacher tells me where to put my feet, where to look, when to move, when to hold, and when to release. I listen and follow. There is an unexpected freedom in surrendering the responsibility to decide. For an hour, my only job is to attend to what is being asked of me in this moment.
The heat helps. I have spent most of my life believing I am not a particularly sweaty person. The hot room provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Within minutes, my clothes are heavy with sweat and my mat is slick beneath me. Yet when I might expect my mind to become louder, it becomes remarkably quiet. The email I need to answer disappears, along with the meeting I am replaying, the unfinished project, the unresolved conversation, the question I’m carrying about a student, colleague, or one of my own children. There isn’t much space for rumination when I am balancing on one leg and trying to breathe steadily. The predictability of the sequence has become a form of meditation. Because the structure is already there, my mind doesn’t have to create one. The sequence holds me so that, for an hour, I can stop holding everything else.
And then there is the mirror. Mirrors line the front of the studio, and for much of the class I am staring directly at myself. The teacher returns to the same instruction: Gaze into your own eyes. The direction is practical; finding a fixed point helps with balance. But there is something strangely intimate about spending so much time looking at yourself when there is little opportunity to look away. I often talk with my graduate students about reflective practice, about what I sometimes call gazing inward: creating space to examine the values, assumptions, and experiences that shape how we lead. So much of our attention is necessarily directed outward, toward the people who need us, the problems in front of us, the decisions still to be made.
The mirror asks something different. I look into my own eyes not to admire what I see and, increasingly, not to criticize it. I look because it helps me find my balance. Reflection, I am learning, is not the same as evaluation. Sometimes it is simply the discipline of seeing ourselves clearly enough to notice where we are steady, where we are straining, and where we might need to soften or begin again.
Around my reflection are other people. There may be fifteen of us in the room, and during class none of us speaks. Only the teacher talks. We typically know little about one another, yet there is an intimacy to moving in synchrony. We raise our arms together, balance together, fold together, breathe together, and eventually lie still together. No one needs to explain what they are carrying that day. We simply show up and practice beside one another.
Some days my balance holds. Other days, a posture I have done dozens of times suddenly feels impossible, and I fall out while the people around me continue. The sequence is exactly the same. I am not. No single posture gets to define the class. I find my own eyes again in the mirror, return to my breath, and continue. For a long time, I imagined that becoming more experienced would mean becoming more certain, that enough practice and accumulated wisdom would eventually make difficult things feel easier. The hot room offers a different understanding. The room doesn’t get cooler because I have been there before. Experience doesn’t necessarily change the conditions; it changes our relationship to them.
Sometimes I think about all those years I spent walking past the window. I looked through the glass at the people inside and decided I understood what happened there. More than that, I had decided something about myself: That’s not for me. Maybe some of our most durable assumptions about ourselves begin that casually. I’m not that kind of leader. I’m not ready for that role. I don’t belong in that room. Sometimes those instincts reflect genuine self-knowledge. Other times, they are simply stories we have repeated long enough to mistake them for truth.
Now I walk toward the room I once walked past. It is still 105 degrees, and the sequence is still the same. I know there will be moments when my balance holds and moments when it doesn’t. But I also know I don’t have to figure out the whole class at once. The practice asks only that I attend to the posture I am in. A teacher I trust will tell me what comes next. The people around me will move with me. And when I lose my balance, as I inevitably will, I know where to look. The room is just as hot as it was when I stood outside the window and decided it wasn’t for me. I am the one who has changed.
