What The Class Taught Me About Being Right

I’ve never cried so hard doing jumping jacks.

photo by Jaimie Baird

PART 1

“Hello Body!” Natalie yells from the screen. I’ve watched her perform before, in plays and on stage, but I’ve never seen her like this: on my television. I’ve been in a squat position for what feels like years now, pulsing far past the moment the fire crawled its way up my thighs. My eyes are closed. I focus on the darkness behind my eyelids and run through a checklist of my form: weight in the heels, ass back, belly button to spine, shoulders down, chest up. I meditate on the repetition of each pulse, pulse, pulse. Sweat starts to run down my back.

“What do we do when our mind starts wandering?” Natalie asks. 

I rub my palms together like I’m making fire with sticks because that’s what Natalie’s doing and it looks like it might be a nice distraction.

“We give it a job!” she answers. 

I nod. 

“We give it a direction!” she shouts. 

I pull a deep inhale through my nose and let out an open mouthed “AAAHHHHHHH!” My thighs are numb now. My body feels restless. I want it to stop, but I breathe in once more and, alone in my house, yell with all the rage of a modern woman over and over again. Finally, with a sigh of relief, the music ends and Natalie releases us from this position. I’m still. 

Then the tempo of the music climbs. It grows louder in my ears and my chest and I tap my heels into the floor. I forget Natalie is there. I fling my hair. I roll my shoulders, arch my chest, and bob my head. I gyrate, a live wire in yoga pants. I’m in a fugue state, churning my hips. I’m back in my modern dance class, covering ground now, limbs flying across the floor to the explosive slap of live bongos. I “woo!” like I’m at a concert. Like I’m the dorkiest, most uninhibited, least self-aware girl at the show. For a moment, I transcend this space. For just a moment, I owe no one anything.

Then we start the jumping jacks. Linking music and movement has always come naturally for me, and there is something about doing jumping jacks with Natalie that is, dare I say, fun. Maybe it’s her, maybe it’s me, maybe it’s because I didn’t realize that’s exactly what I needed? At Natalie’s cue, I exhale a loud, voracious “HA!” with each jumping jack. Not like laughing, but like yanking the roots of my insides up from my gut and out of my mouth and flinging them at the wall. 

After a while (because, yes, the jumping jacks last “a while”) the repetition makes me feel both soothed and unearthed. I’m not sad, but now I’m crying. Tears stream down my cheeks and I shut my eyes, still shooting my arms to the sky. I forget where I am again. Then I am laughing. At myself, at this scene, at the twisted look on my face, at the unexpected weight that has been lifted from my chest.

Then the music stops and I am still again. I place both hands on my body to feel it rising and falling. I’m not even halfway through and my heart is punching the inside of my chest. I suck in a deep breath and I sway. This is The Class.

The Class is a workout method originated by a former yoga instructor and fashion executive named Taryn Toomey, and when I try to explain it, I say that it’s like breathwork, yoga, meditative movement, and a HIIT class in one. It originated in New York City and now has expanded to a home in Los Angeles, weekly retreats, pop-ups, and a Digital Studio, which is how I access it. The Class website explains, “The Class is a fun and challenging workout that combines strength-training, cardio, and mindfulness to help you feel better.” But if you were a believer in The Class, you’d know this was an understatement. Because you’d have to be just that: a believer. 

The Class was in its nascent stages, 2013 or so, when Natalie asked a small group of friends to be her Guinea pigs as she trained to be an instructor. She was a working actor and bartender at the time and this segue seemed viable, not because actors can also be fitness instructors, but because Natalie is a whir of heat and light. The sun, attracting others into her orbit. Even when she is still, she is thrumming. 

At Natalie’s invitation, we’d arrive buoyant and fresh faced to empty performance spaces in Brooklyn or borrowed rooftops in Queens. She’d fill 75 minutes with a melee of lung-busting, military-style exercises, like four consecutive minutes of burpees, seemingly hours of push-ups, and what I’m certain must have been days of jump squats. The repetition was meant to be meditative, but all I could meditate on was when this class would be over. And there was more to it than that.

During each sequence, as I prayed to Our Patron Saint of Rest to please make this stop, Natalie asked us to examine our thoughts: to confront our darkest, most negative self-talk—and then bulldoze it by tapping into our physical and emotional reserves. To believe we could go beyond.

“Where does your mind go?!” she asked. Like a preacher in spandex, she jumped and wailed, encouraging us to vocalize with lots of “Ahhhhhhhhh”s.” She explained we needed to audibly release stuck energy pent up inside of us. This wasn’t like the spin classes or the TRX series at my gym. “What are we, in group therapy?!” I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to yell with abandon. During jump squats. In a room full of people. I couldn’t see Natalie’s vision, one she seemed hellbent on imparting to us.

Even equipped with the vitality of my youth, my background as a dancer, a runner, a practitioner of yoga, my athleticism—and optimism—was not enough to keep up. I was bothered by what seemed to be a gap in who needed the benefits of The Class and who could actually access it both financially and physically. Often the space was filled with wealthy, painfully thin women who had full-time nannies but no jobs. Then the celebrities, models, and socialites came flocking and The Class began to embody a breed of aspiration I had no chance of achieving. When each class was over, I would shuffle, half human and drenched to my shins, into the electric arms of New York City streets in hopes they would revive me, and unsure why I kept showing up.

One day on a walk with Natalie, not a Lululemon legging in sight, I said, “I think The Class is great for people who are in a lot of pain.” For people deeply afraid of confronting themselves and their problems. Meaning: I am not one of those people. Natalie mused with the zen of a highly therapized wellness professional. She pursed her lips. “Mmmm,” she replied, narrowing her eyes in thought. 

I explained confidently that I do not have a gaping hole that it seems The Class wants to help me fill. I do not need to be exorcised of my demons in the form of a 75-minute sweat expulsion that has left me so breathless and fatigued I can barely see straight. I was not interested in whatever Taryn was trying to achieve with this method. I did not believe. 

I would take The Class, begrudgingly, once more in 2016 and not again for six years.

With Natalie at a Class pop-up in L.A., 2016

PART TWO

From a child’s pose, my face inside a pillow, I let out a low, muffled moan. Each time I am surprised by the timbre of myself, unlike any sound I’d ever made, on purpose at least. A wounded animal, not yet succumbed to her injuries.

With the approach of every contraction, I feel its undertow. The rearing back of a wave so thick and powerful I know, as it rises, it will come at me like a fist and bring me to my knees. I tell my husband “it’s coming” and he presses his knuckles into my lower back with all the weight of his body. As the contraction crests in my lower back, the moan crescendos until it disappears, my body once again still water waiting to be stirred. 

“Wow, you’re managing these contractions incredibly,” the nurse said. At first I was embarrassed. I’d spent all of 2020 reading birthing books that mentioned the moans, or rather, the necessity of the moans. I will not be yelling or moaning, I thought to myself. Then she said, “If you wanted to deliver naturally, I’m sure you’d handle it well.” Silently I beamed. I had no intention of delivering naturally, but her praise meant I was doing it “right.” As if there were a right and a wrong way to have a baby. 

After an objectively speedy 24 hours of labor, my obstetrician, whose entire face I never saw, said from behind her mask, “I’m just not sure she’s coming out this way.” I had been pushing for two hours and vomiting into the blue plastic bags my husband held to my mouth between contractions. The color drained from my skin. The pain and pressure in my lower back caught me so off guard, I was certain the drugs were not working despite my nurse’s assurance. My baby was not dropping, regardless of my position. 

a moment of calm before the storm

“We have a scheduled C-section at 8 p.m.,” my doctor said. I looked at the clock. It was nearly 6 p.m. “You can push for another hour if you want, but if something goes south here, I can’t guarantee we can get you in on time.”

I opted into a hospital birth knowing I might be slapped with limitations. But this wasn’t just about me; there were two heart rates and blood pressures to consider. Two lives in the trust and care of a system I’d willingly entered into. And one exhausted first-time mom who didn’t have the right answer.

Deflated, I glanced between my husband and the nurse, wishing someone would make this decision for me. They stared blankly at me. My husband, pale from not having eaten in 16 hours, said with both sympathy and firmness in his voice, “This is your decision.” And I knew he was right. It was the first decision in a lifetime of decisions I’d be making for the sake of my daughter. My first opportunity to exercise my voice as a mother. “Ok,” I said, disappointment scratching at the back of my throat. “Let’s do it.”

After my daughter had been pulled from an incision in my lower abdomen, I watched in a hormonal haze as the doctors and nurses bustled around my baby, all of them laying eyes on her before me. I lay on the operating table, a clear plastic bag full of blood-saturated gauze next to me, half-wondering how I could or should have done things differently; it is in a woman’s nature to believe it’s her fault. Then my nurse stepped into my view and squatted before me. 

“She so beautiful,” she said. Then, perhaps noticing my withering state, added, “You did the right thing,” and tears fell easily from my eyes. I smiled. 

***

As a dancer, I was obsessed with “right.” Even in the free-flowing movements of modern dance, my mind still ran over the mental checklist all dancers commit to: chin up, shoulders down, chest open, belly button in, pelvis tucked, limbs long. Staccato like geometry. Fluid like water. God forbid you, like me, were never a very talented ballerina and had to experience the incessant desire to appear as delicate as a brushstroke, and your subsequent and consistent failure to do so. I was always more buffalo than butterfly.

In my mid-20s, when this failure to be a good, “right” dancer had taken its toll on my body and mind, I returned again and again to yoga. In studios with dust-strewn skylights and lush hanging plants, damp bodies packed mat to mat, I began to learn that “right” has many definitions. 

It took years to shed this allegiance. At first I compared my body, my poses, my stamina to all the others. But eventually my teachers’ messages made their way to me and I began to understand that each day we are different from the one before; we’re simply meant to meet oneself where we are at. Perfection is a myth.

This, of course, is the antithesis of dance as a performance, in which we aim for perfectionism like an arrow to a bullseye. A textbook 90-degree arabesque so straight you could pop a quarter off of it. A pirouette so airy it’s akin to freshly spun cotton candy. 

Dance as a practice, however—as medicine—has no use for perfectionism. Like yoga, it acknowledges that whatever you are carrying, there is an opportunity to move through its murky waters. My college dance professor, in all his sass, used to tell us to, “drop it at the door or use it on the floor.” And this is where I began to understand myself. Dance became my therapy. I haven’t subscribed to organized religion in decades, but each time I parted the studio doors, an empty space before me, I felt a Christ-like invitation to leave behind the everyday aches and pains of being human. Movement became my church.

This is what made me a believer.

PART THREE

My alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. I tumble out of bed in the darkness, sound machine still shushing, slide my feet into slippers, and amble downstairs to make coffee and feed the dog. I go to my desk and work on whatever it is I am writing (usually this newsletter); sometimes I work on my novel at a glacial pace. My two year old is up by 7 a.m. After I feed her, get her dressed, and she leaves the house with my husband, my day plays out with Stepford-esque predictability.

I eat my usual breakfast of 1 bowl of salad greens, Brightland olive oil, and Champagne vinegar and either 1 jammy egg and/or toasted Ezekiel bread with ¼ avocado, lime juice, and Maldon sea salt.

I finish my 1 ½ cups of brewed coffee with ¼ cup frothed unsweetened almond milk and prepare a lunch of salad greens, vegetables, and a protein for later. 

I shower and dress with all my requisite lotions and toners (and most importantly, the caffeine-infused eye cream).

I work until it is time to pick up my daughter from school.

We go to the grocery store or for a walk until it is time to make dinner.

I give her a bath and put her to bed because lately she refuses to let her father do anything, crying “Go away, daddy! Mommy do it!” 

Once she is gingerly placed into her bed around 7:15 p.m., I quietly shut her door and go downstairs to collapse into my couch with a mug of peppermint tea spiked with 1 tsp. of magnesium powder.

I respond to any lingering work emails, check unanswered texts, and hope to give my brain an hour or so of “nothing” time. 

Around 9 p.m. my husband and I go up to bed. I read a few pages of a book, chat briefly with my husband, and click off the light no later than 10 p.m. 

My days are mundane and predictable. But I left out one part. The most liberating part of my day.

Promptly after my husband and daughter leave the house and before I begin this ritual-on-a-loop, I take 20–40 minutes that are just for me. I claim my sanity on a yoga mat. Sometimes it's pilates, other times weight lifting. When I really need it, it's The Class. 

Because once my alarm goes off and my eyes snap open, the clock starts on a flurry of to-dos. Did I run the dishes last night? We need to pay down the credit cards. I should plan our meals for the week. I volunteered to bring snacks to school. **Don’t forget to buy them.** We need to find a new tax guy. We should do something about the yard. I have a call at 10. **Shower for that, you’ll be on camera.** We have a call with the life insurance guy. **Put it in the shared calendar.** We need more dog food. What should I make for dinner?

And then there are the wants. The novel I want to finish, this newsletter that I tend to, all the books I want to read, the swell of creative goals I’ve envisioned for myself. Because once I had a child, my dreams didn’t go away. They got bigger and time got smaller, and my desires became another thing to tend to. They toddle behind me, competing for my attention.

In a former life, I’d have rather died than be subjected to the sort of routine I previously outlined. But now I find it comforting. There is too much desire, too much chaos to manage inside my own mind to deviate too far. The Class gives me an opportunity to ground myself. These feelings—they need somewhere to go.

As the music tumbles in my ears and my heart drums inside my chest, and I move, unencumbered like when I was a dancer, I feel the undertow. But this time, instead of knocking me down, it moves me forward. It starts in my chest and sweeps down and out. Sometimes it propels the tears. Sometimes I come out of my trance to find myself dancing, and briefly, at 8:30 a.m. on a workday morning, a day as mundane as any other, I am utterly weightless. Heart full, eyes wet, letting go.

As I bounce, flail, squat, and scream, I shed something with every breath. When I inhale, I may not be doing something miraculous, like bringing new life into the world, but perhaps I am breathing new life into myself. 

Finally I realized that I didn’t need to be in a great deal of pain to participate in The Class. I simply needed to be human. What I neglected to consider all those years ago was not only that we meet ourselves in a different place each day, but that also, each day there is something to feel. Something new. Or old, or persistent, or devastating, or uncomfortable, or uncomfortably familiar. Sometimes it’s deep like loss or expansive like gratitude. Sometimes it's simply confronting a long list of to-dos that feel as though they may crush you if you don’t scream at the top of your lungs alone in your home.

When I first returned to The Class via Digital Studio, I started with Natalie’s class, but I’ve since branched out. One morning in class with Karla, she said, “You cannot do this practice wrong.” This, I thought, is why I continue to show up.

I often take classes with Aimee, a former dancer, who inspires simply in the way she moves and speaks. She is sage and strong, and she has seen and lived, and I know this because I can hear the empathy, but also the optimism, in her voice. “Come here to receive what you need. However it finds expression, let it move,” she said, and I did.

“It doesn’t need to look like me, it just needs to feel like you,” said Jaycee. So I move like me, arms flailing, hips swaying, in a meditation made for release.

“What comes up in the repetition?” asks Sofia. And I do not turn away from it.

I have never taken any of Taryn’s classes. People have told me they are “shamanic.” While I don’t know Taryn intimately, I speculate she started The Class as a way to believe. Maybe in anything. To teach herself something she did not yet understand but knew existed. I imagine she was in a great deal of pain and was desperate to fix it. So she generated this method, and herself, into their respective powers. She wanted, I think, to feel alive. Which, I presume, is what my friend was after, too. I understand why Natalie fought for this.

Now I feel just fine jumping and yelling and occasionally crying, even sometimes laughing at how hard I’m crying because, geez, I really had something to let go of, huh? At the end of class, I stand alone inside the echo of my own voice. As my hand rises with my chest and I feel the dance of my own beating heart, I am reminded that there is so much life in me. There is so much to share and there is plenty of time. I remember that progress is not linear and it’s OK to be here, wherever that is. That I am more capable than I believe. That I don’t need to be right. I just need to be.