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In the fall of 2007, I attended my first yoga class. For more than four years — ever since graduation had dumped me into adulthood — I’d been leveled by anxiety. My days were plagued with worry. Was I living correctly? What if I died? What if, like in that Twilight Zone episode, the rest of the world died and I lived? Innocuous things I said to people haunted me hours later— Was that dumb? Mean? Wildly inappropriate?—until I’d squirm with shame. Unable to sleep at night, I gobbled Tylenol PM, rationalizing that it was over-the-counter, as if “over-the-counter” meant “nutritious.

I’d heard that yoga was relaxing. So one Saturday morning, in the spirit of relaxation, I spent 90 minutes contorting my body inside a 100-degree Bikram yoga studio. “For your first class,” the teacher said before we began, “the goal is just to stay in the room.”

I looked at the door. It was closed. I was already sweating, my heart pounding. Around me, the other students were sweating, too, but they also looked tranquil, lying on their mats, palms open, gazing softly at the ceiling. I did not feel tranquil. I wanted to scream. But I did what I was told to do: Stay in the room. By the time we finished the opening breath sequence, I was drenched from my hair to my toes.

Juliette Etrivert

“Come back tomorrow,” the teacher told me. I was lying in final savasana. I would not come back tomorrow. How could I sweat out all the water in my body a second time? I would shrivel like a leaf. I was glad I had tried it, though. Now I could tell everyone, “I did yoga in a 100-degree room!” and then never again do yoga in a 100-degree room.

But after class, when I left the studio and felt the cool air on my skin, I floated, as if I were walking home on a moving sidewalk, or even hovering just above one. I was so blissed out, I almost got hit by a car. That night, I slept, Tylenol PM-free, for seven hours.

The next day, I bought Shakti shorts (the unofficial Bikram yoga uniform), returned to class and relinquished my earthly possessions (well, my gym membership). I was ready to walk with Bikram.

“Come back tomorrow,” the teacher told me again during final savasana. And the next day: “Come back tomorrow.”

The Bikram yoga philosophy maintains that if you practice the series every day, you’ll need nothing else in your life: no drugs, no gym, no situps, no excess food or cigarettes or unhealthy relationships. You won’t even need other schools of yoga. Bikram will sustain you. I bought it — because for the first time in years, my thoughts were quiet. At night I slept peacefully. I was in love — with the postures, with the joy I felt day in and out, with the way 10 pounds melted off my body, with the coconut water we guzzled after class, with my limbs, stretching as they hadn’t since childhood, and especially with the way my mind danced free, the weight of worry lifted.

Although I’d never met him, I was also half in love with Bikram Choudhury, the charismatic, controversial businessman who arranged his 26 favorite yoga postures into a sequence and named it after himself. I read his book as though it were a religious text.

In class, I had epiphanies that made me shiver in the heat. One teacher, after admonishing us for wiping our sweat, said: “Stop responding to discomfort by reaching for things. We scratch. We smoke. We drink. Those are temporary solutions. Practice being still.” Even now, whenever I feel jittery, I remember that advice.

There’s one particularly grueling posture in the Bikram series that involves balancing on one foot, taking the other foot in your hands, and stretching that leg out in a parallel line to the floor. “Grab your foot,” the teacher says, and everyone hedges. “Grab it!” one of my teachers yelled one morning. “No one’s going to grab it for you.” To this day, when a big decision leaves me panicked, that refrain makes me focus. No one’s going to grab it for you.

Related More From Anxiety Read previous contributions to this series.

A couple of months into my practice my grandmother noted that I was “in a state of euphoria.” I paused. The characterization unsettled me. “A state of euphoria” implied impermanence. My anxiety was gone forever, wasn’t it? To be sure, I decided to challenge myself — 365 yoga classes in 365 days. “Come back tomorrow”? I was coming! After a year, my anxiety would be an ancient relic.

The snag in my plan was that sometimes I traveled, got sick or had too much work and couldn’t find the time to practice. To compensate, I would double up — two classes a day. Who cared if that meant waking up at 5 a.m.? Or if the whole experience — commuting, two classes, two showers — robbed me of five hours a day? Who cared if I sometimes got so dehydrated, my hand curled into a claw? Bikram yoga was my medicine.

But as drugs tend to do over time, it stopped working. My anxiety would creep back an hour or two after class. To sleep at night, I resumed my old Tylenol PM habit. In pursuit of the initial high, I became frantic about how class was run. If the heat in the studio wasn’t dizzying, I felt like rolling up my yoga mat and beating it against the wall. I needed that hot room, where, like impurities from boiling water, my anxiety evaporated. If I could just be hot enough, I was sure I’d be O.K.

In retrospect, I was rejecting the truth, the way I have in malfunctioning romantic relationships — engaging in maddening repetition instead of admitting the thing was broken. Then one day, after about 300 classes, I finally let go. I didn’t have a profound reason for quitting. My first book was coming out, and I got busy.

For another year, although I kept practicing Bikram yoga to the exclusion of other exercise, I was disheartened. I was also curious about why the yoga seemed to work for some, but not for me: my muscles, unimpressed by engaging daily in the same workout, had softened. My thoughts were once again the anxious kind — dark, nasty creatures sprinting on a treadmill. But many of my classmates were toned and lithe, smiling serenely, sipping SmartWater, executing bow pose to perfection. Had I overdone it? Had I reached some kind of tipping point, like sniffing perfume until I could no longer smell? I didn’t know.

On my first day back to the gym after more than two years as a Bikram yogi, I walked home feeling not ecstatic, but content. I didn’t know it then, but after years of refusing to examine my anxiety, I was only a few months away from opening my eyes. With the prodding of a therapist, I would stop looking for solutions and look instead at myself. I’d wanted yoga to save me, to make me feel forever what it had made me feel in the beginning. But relationships don’t work like that.

You have to grab your own foot. No one’s going to grab it for you.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels “Who by Fire” and “Skinny.” She teaches writing in New York City. More of her work can be found on her Web site.