Yoga, I am convinced, has rescued me from a lifetime of back pain and immobility; but my first few sun salutations were more laughable than laudable.  Here’s a story from many years back; I won’t say how many, to protect the identity of my esteemed yogi. . .

I went to yoga tonight because I had nothing better to do, and because I have a policy of forcing myself to see at least one human face each day besides my own. If I manage to leave my property in the process, I have done well.

I have been to a few yoga classes before, and a few million pseudo-yoga classes – those would be the ones with instructors who are athletes, not weirded-out hippies. In my last real yoga class, I was apparently unable to feel the earth’s energy sufficiently to have correct elbow-wrist alignment in my downward dog (a pose I had perfected in pseudo-yoga, or so I thought).  In my previous class, the instructor had required different poses for women whose uteri were in different states. “That,” I had thought, “is none of your business, lady.” Then she had chastised me for choosing the wrong pose. I didn’t go back for three years.

But tonight I was in that annoying frame of mind that is characterized by both lethargy and restlessnesss, and since the neighbour and the paper boy don’t count as human faces in my anti-isolation policy, off I went.

Continue reading