Thoughts from Hot Yoga

The irony doesn’t escape me: I’m in my usual spot in a small and very hot yoga studio, under the window rather than in front of a mirror looking up at the sky, to keep myself grounded (and truth be told, to feel a gentle coolness sneaking in to the 100 plus degree room). That puff of cool air keeps a balance of yin and yang that I can feel on my skin. I watch as wisps of clouds drift past steam boiling off distant buildings. And there, reflecting my word of this year 2026, SOAR, are pigeons. Flying to and fro, landing on balconies and window ledges across the high-rise canyon of Broadway.

It also doesn’t escape me that what soars most in New York City are pigeons. The rats of the sky. Survivors. Scrappy and relentless, thriving in exhaust fumes and filth, making their nests in the broken and discarded. They’re not the birds we photograph for social media—no powerful hawks or inspirational eagles. They’re the birds nobody wants to be, and yet they’re everywhere in the city, adapting, persisting, claiming this concrete jungle as their own.

Maybe that’s the most New York thing about them. They don’t need anyone’s permission to soar. They just do it anyway, in a city that’s too busy and too dirty to notice. Showing us there can be beauty in darkness and challenge and the things we might overlook. That soaring doesn’t always look Instagram-perfect but it is relentless and consistent as you look to the city scape.

I’ve learned so much in this room. From the fact that ankles can sweat, to the puddle forming beneath me as I transition from warrior to child’s pose. Sweat drips off my nose, my elbows, pools behind my knees, in the small of my back. My hands and feet slip slightly on the mat, leaving wet prints of where I’ve been, evidence of the work, the intensity and focus.

And then the sudden unease as I really look down at my mat, quickly grabbed and thrown in my carry bag proudly displaying advertising of the Strand Bookstore (true New Yorkers love to display advertising of the true culture of this city). One side of my mat advertises a past New York Road Runners Women’s Half Marathon I accomplished. The other side? An ad for Bloomingdale’s. Swag from a race where the opportunity to practice yoga in an iconic department store seemed interesting and unique at the time.

The mat holds both versions of me. The runner. The consumer. The woman who finds empowerment in miles logged and PRs achieved, and also the one who, let’s be honest, appreciates a wander through racks of beautiful clothing for sale. As I hold downward dog, sweat dripping onto both messages equally, I struggle with this: How did an icon of empowerment: yoga, running, race achievements, end up wrapped in the very things we’re not supposed to value anymore? Shopping. Vanity. All the trappings of a department store—the endless consumption of items filling voids we didn’t know we had.

I’m reminded of my assigned yoga spot at Bloomingdale’s, amidst hundreds of women doing downward dog next to the handbags, the fake glow of fluorescent bulbs lighting the endless rows of limbs lifting, stretching as we were asked to breathe in deeply the intoxicating smells of new leather of the bags piled about us.

But maybe, like the pigeons, there’s something real in this contradiction. Something honest about being a whole person who contains multitudes, even the unfashionable ones. My sweat doesn’t discriminate between the side that says “athlete” and the side that says “woman.” It falls on both, honest and unapologetic, like a pigeon claiming its perch.