A good pilates instructor should know how to work with a wide range of bodies, big and small, short and tall, injured and pain-free. — When I first tried pilates, I didn’t expect to feel like I was going to suffocate. I was lying on my back on an athletic mat, surrounded by other students on their own mats, listening to the teacher’s cues. “Put your legs in tabletop,” she said. I made a “tabletop”…

Long walks and Counting Crows songs opened a door to a secret Berkeley not many people knew. When I arrived at U.C. Berkeley as a sociology student in 1994, my heart was newly broken. I’d just been dumped after eight intense, magical months of a friendship so passionate it had turned sexual. I was leaving home for the first time, leaving my terminally ill mother and the…

Stop saying the world is ending. It’s not over yet, and we can still fight climate change. — Around 4 a.m. on October 9, 2017, my family was awoken by someone frantically ringing our doorbell. I begged my partner not to answer the door. In my sleepy and panicked state, I imagined it would be the prelude to a home-invasion robbery. He did answer the door. I heard…

Nobody asked for your advice. There’s a joke in the chronic-illness world: You mention a problem you’re having, whether it’s back pain, a clogged sink, or fake calls from the IRS. Someone responds, “But have you tried yoga?” It comes from our experiences on social media in particular. When we…