A revealing exposé of my secret grad school romance with a hoop:
I am a yoga experimentalist. Or perhaps merely the subject of a greater mega-yoga conspiracy, designed explicitly to stretch my tendons and my temperament in various hypothetically-possible ways. It’s okay. You needn’t worry. Yoga and I have a history.
It began at a weekend synchronized swimming meet in the late eighties, when, as a virgin yoga-attemptee, I worried that I might be doing something dangerously evil by lying on my back and thinking about my breathing when I should have been in church. My spirit emerged intact, however, until my next wobbly attempt, a decade and a half later, in the much safer environs of my local gym. I’ve tried power yoga, yoga fit, hatha yoga, and, in a more audacious experiment, Tai Chi (which I realize is not yoga at all, but I include to convince you of the scope of my yoga-quest). I like to think I have become rather good at it. I can twist myself in all sorts of unprecedented directions. I am beginning to think that Yoga and I are becoming too familiar with each other.
It was with a sort of giddy delight, therefore, that I discovered Hoop Yoga. “What can it be?” I wondered. “What does one do?” I rubbed my palms together in greedy anticipation. There’s nothing I like better than an adventure.