The book probably belonged to whoever lived here before me. Before that. Maybe before that. This house has been around since 1885, changing hands, accumulating layers of other people's lives. I flipped through the pages—black and white photos of a man in impossibly bendy positions, instructions in small print that made everything sound both ancient and anatomical.

I brought it downstairs and left it on my coffee table for three weeks before I actually opened it again. I work remotely for a tech company, spend most of my day hunched over a laptop in what used to be the house's dining room. My back hurts. My neck hurts. I'm 34 and I move like I'm 60.

One evening, after a particularly brutal workday, I opened the book and tried the first thing I saw: downward-facing dog. I had no mat, no props, just hardwood floors and the awkward knowledge that I was definitely doing this wrong. My hamstrings screamed. My shoulders shook. I held it for maybe five seconds before collapsing.

Learning from a book means there's no one to correct you, no one to impress. Just you, the instructions, and whatever your body can or can't do right now. —  Jacob Torres

But something about it felt... interesting? Like my body was waking up after a long sleep. So I kept going. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there. Always alone, always fumbling, always wondering if I was doing permanent damage to my spine.

I've been at this for six weeks now. I don't have a routine. Some days I'll work through five or six poses from the book, moving slowly, pausing when things hurt (which is often). Some days I'll try to hold one pose—tree pose, warrior two—until my legs shake and I give up. Sometimes I just lie on my back in savasana for ten minutes, which the book says is a pose but feels like giving up.

The living room has become my accidental yoga space. I push the coffee table aside. The old radiator clicks on while I'm attempting triangle pose. Sometimes my neighbor Bill walks past the window and I freeze mid-pose, suddenly self-conscious about this weird solo practice I've stumbled into.

I ran into Elena at the market last week—she actually teaches yoga at the SILK Yoga space. I almost didn't mention my book-based fumbling, but she asked about the copy of "Light on Yoga" I was carrying (I'd brought it to a coffee shop to read, like a textbook for a class I'm teaching myself).

"That's how I started," she said, which shocked me. "Twenty years ago, with that exact book. You're doing it right if you're showing up and listening to your body."

I'm not sure I'm listening to my body so much as arguing with it. But I keep showing up. Not every day. Not even most days. But enough that I've noticed small things: my shoulders don't creep up to my ears as much when I'm working. The constant low-grade back pain has eased. I sleep better on nights when I've practiced.

The book is falling apart now—the spine cracked, pages dog-eared. I've added my own notes in the margins: "this one hurts" next to pigeon pose, "actually feels good" next to child's pose. I'm making it mine, slowly, awkwardly, in a way that probably wouldn't look like yoga to anyone watching.

But that's the thing about learning alone, from a book found in an attic. There's no one watching. No one to impress. No one to tell me I'm doing it wrong. Just me, the instructions, and the slow discovery of what my body can do when I actually ask it to move.

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