Yoga

I had stopped pay­ing atten­tion to the melo­di­ous sounds of
–inhale into upward fac­ing dog
–exhale into down­ward.. etc.
Her voice was great, like lotus but­ter, but I was sim­ply putting one breath after another in a heroic effort to remain breath­ing at all – you would have called it gasp­ing if you had been the poor per­son next to me. We were not in to this Power (!!) Vinyasa Yoga Class far, maybe 10/90 min­utes. The tem­per­a­ture in the room was exactly 90°F. The ther­mome­ter on the wall, next to the clock with every num­ber replaced with the word “Now”, said so. For a “hot” yoga class, this is appar­ently on the tepid side. I am pretty sure I just had a fever. I could go on like this, but you prob­a­bly get the idea. Make funny com­ments to your­self about a big white guy in pigeon pose.

It was funny, even to me. I was smil­ing at myself. I grew up being an ath­letic guy, picked close to first on the play­ground. I played ten­nis really well when I was young, was a state qual­i­fied swim­mer, played var­sity bas­ket­ball by my sopho­more year in high school. Now I work long hours with my body held, at the oper­at­ing table, in poses any yoga teacher would be proud to dupli­cate (if they were in any way healthy) and my brain is get­ting all my juice. Mean­while my ham­strings are wind­ing tighter than the g string…
on a gui­tar (sorry, couldn’t go there this time). My body has taken a beat­ing in ser­vice to my brain. All I can say is this yoga class took me, not vice versa. And, that is ok.

In spite of liv­ing in one of the yoga karmic home bases of the world, I can count the yoga classes I have taken on one hand; but even as I found my ridicu­lous ver­sion of each pose, I also found some­thing hap­pen­ing in me. I was show­ing up, my body was mov­ing, work­ing, sweat­ing. It was thank­ing me, after many, dammit, years of doing other wor­thy and less-than-worthy things, I was putting myself through some paces, sweat­ing, breathing.

I couldn’t yet empty my brain and just be and just move. I have so long abused myself with think­ing and work­ing that I could not let it go, yet. I will though. As I lay on my back at the end of class (when the instructor’s voice was say­ing blah blah blah and my mind was hear­ing: NoMore­Pos­es­NoMore­Poses), I could feel my spine opened up a lit­tle. The cement hold­ing me in was looser, and I was tak­ing deep, long breaths.