By Amber Schadewald
By Amber Schadewald
Three to five days a week I step barefoot into my yoga studio, stuff my belongings into a cubby, and unroll my sticky mat near the front of the room. I immediately nuzzle into Child’s Pose, arms actively outstretched, feeling my spine get long as I take the deepest breath of my day.
The next hour and a half of twisting, bending, meditating, and profusely sweating is a shameless escape from all of you — friends, family, editors, publicists, neighbors, strangers — no offense, myself included. I need a break from the to-do list, rent woes, emails, party plans, and the always-present what-am-I-doing-with-my-life quandary.
My choice to routinely shut out the world and focus on a single task helps me to be a better, more open human and the opportunity to put responsibilities on hold, even just for a short few hours, is a powerful feeling. But hey – this ain’t easy breezy. Sometimes nagging thoughts steal the show and send me into a fit of wobbles. Holding focus is often more challenging than holding plank.
The amount of concentration yoga demands is just one reason I was so appalled to hear Sarah Pascual, my yoga teacher, make an announcement that cell phones were banned from the mat. My jaw dropped. It’s becoming a thing, she told the room at the start of class a couple weeks ago, shrugging while politely requesting that no one make this a habit.
I couldn’t shake this concept. Do people really bring their phones to yoga? I envisioned trying to return a text while my limbs were shooting in every direction. I decided to ask my favorite teachers about their experiences with the class-crashing technology trend. Were they pissed (in a calm, yoga-teacher kind of way)?
“The yoga practice is a discipline, and similar to martial arts or a dance class, you wouldn’t show up with gum in your mouth or a phone in your hand,” says Sarah, one of my go-to ladies at YogaWorks, who has been teaching for nine years. “It’s disrespectful to the teacher, the space, the students around you, and the discipline. But more importantly, it’s disrespectful to yourself.”
Yoga is meant to be nourishing, a way to restore and rejuvenate, but in order to obtain these benefits you have to be willing to disconnect and turn off the outside world. Occasionally someone forgets to switch to silent mode and a ringtone from behind the closet door interrupts flow. I may grumble, but the annoyance is rare and forgivable.
Keeping a phone in the company of your water bottle and towel is a whole other deal that Sarah has been noticing on a more regular basis over the past few years, particularly this year, with a handful of sightings every month.
“The studio is meant to be a sacred space and it’s sad for me as a teacher to see phones enter the room more and more.”
Thankfully Sarah hasn’t seen anyone actually answer a call mid-Down Dog, but she’s seen a fair amount of texting and reading emails. Deborah Lee, another instructor I adore at YogaWorks, regularly leads classes at five studios in the city, happily reports minimal phone interference, but the first time it happened was the most notable.
“One time I saw someone texting during class so I asked her what she was doing. The girl just said she didn’t feel like doing inversions that day, so she took out her phone instead,” Deborah recalls, still baffled. There’s no need to kill time in yoga. If you’re not down with a particular posture for whatever reason, teachers are always cool to suggest an alternative. Deborah decided to turn the story into a PSA.
“Now whenever I give my inversion demo at the wall, I say ‘if you don’t want to do this, modify like this or this, but don’t get on your cell phones.’ It gets a laugh and still reinforces the message that phones are not allowed.”
So who are these tele-carting yogis? Sarah likes to give people the benefit of the doubt — perhaps it’s a newbie unfamiliar with the rules, or maybe the person is waiting on an important call. A girl in my class the day of the announcement confessed that she had committed the crime once when waiting for a ring from her movers.
“They had all of my belongings in their truck. I couldn’t miss that call. But I also didn’t want to miss class,” she explained with timid smile. I can’t say I was sold on her excuse, but I’m also not gonna hate.
The trend points to a larger issue: device addiction. We wake to phone alarms, check the calendar, the emails, and the alerts from a dozen apps before our toes touch the cold morning floor. Maybe these yogis with cells by their sides just forgot that sometimes phones aren’t an appropriate companion. These people aren’t jerks or bad yogis. They’re just missing the point, which is a total bummer.
Deborah remembers talking to some of her New York yogi friends about this very issue a couple years ago and many agreed they’d seen the beginning stages of infiltration.
“I asked them, ‘What do you tell someone?’ She told me to tell them to ‘turn that fucking cell phone off,’” she laughs, being sure to stress that she herself would not repeat such a thing. Speaking of which, she had to let me go.
“Time for class. I better turn my phone off,” she said and headed inside the studio.
