Yoga Prose

 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.

The instructor had big, big, big hair that flopped around in a somewhat hypnotic way as she swayed and inhaled and exhaled. She had glasses with strings attached that mysteriously disappeared halfway through the class, and she wore a colourful t-shirt slathered with happy-faces. “This should be good,” I thought.

We were admonished for mirroring her movements, since we were supposed to be moving creatively, as our bodies wanted us to move, as if we were in our living rooms. She most certainly looked like she was in her living room. “If I were in my living room,” I thought, “I’d be sitting on the couch watching TV.” I closed my eyes and worked very hard to do anything but what she was doing.

And then the metaphors began. My spine was to be like ivy curling around a trellis. I was to squeeze the toxins out of my back. I was to feel my left leg being cleansed. I was to climb a ladder to my goals, then let go of them because all the love and happiness I needed was already within me. I was to breathe happy-joyful breaths, in-in-in-whooosh, and I was to do twists, because twisting the body untwists the mind; in fact, from now on, whenever I was confused, I was to twist. I was glad that I was twisted away from Big-Hair when she said that, because by that time I was actually giggling. In the meantime, I was to connect with the spaces in between my thoughts. “What the __?!” That was the space in between my thoughts.

I turned my attention to the cadence of her voice. She ended every single statement with an identical downward-swooping inflection followed by an impossible prolongation of the final consonant. “How does she do that?” I wondered. “That’s just not natural.” It was like a puzzle, trying to figure out what she was doing with her mouth to make the letters linger like that. To add to the effect, she sprinkled unintelligible real-yoga terms liberally throughout the class; however, she kept forgetting the English words for right and left, which seemed to interfere with my energy, since that information is rather crucial to one’s movements when one is twisted around a trellis. “Maybe,” I thought, “if she twists the other way, she’ll be less confused.”

She was, I noticed, the kind of yoga instructor who feels quite comfortable adjusting other people’s bodies for them uninvited, and my turn came when she decided that my back was not sufficiently arched to present a proper fish pose. She slipped her hand under my ivy-spine and drew my neck and head back onto the mat. A jab of pain ground into my head at the precise location of my hair clip, as I had known it would if I stuck my head where she wanted it, but of course my arms were trapped under my supremely arched vertebrae and were therefore unable to remove this obstacle to my tranquility. “Yoga is so dumb,” I thought.

Well. It was 7:30. Look at that. Time’s up, lady.

“And now we’re going to move into our time of meditation. It may take about ten to fifteen minutes for everyone to get their massage.”

“Massage?!” I thought. You have to realize that I have been conditioned by the public school system to believe that it is evil to touch anyone for any reason. “Massage?!”

I decided to stay, though, because the idea of Big-Hair leading me in meditation promised to bring on a fine chain of giggles in the spaces between her thoughts. So, I splayed my body across the mat and waited for the show to begin. I relaxed my right palm. I relaxed my right armpit. I relaxed my right ear. I relaxed my fourth toe. Her voice was moving around the room. I opened one eye to try to see what sorts of ghastly things her hands were doing to the person beside me, but my peripheral vision was not up to the task, and I couldn’t very well turn my head and relax my left ear at the same time.

Her hands rub-rub-rubbed against each other, applying what I hoped was hand sanitizer but suspected was something quite the opposite. But then her exotic hippie-hands made contact with my neck and shoulders and all was forgiven. “I really need to do this more often,” I thought.

I had just relaxed my body so much that it wasn’t even there any more (or so she said), when the door opened and it was established that our little meditation had cut into twenty minutes of the next class’s time. She was understandably confused by this information, and I thought that perhaps she should do some more twisting when she got home.

I, of course, was completely immobilized, having only relaxed one of my hip abductors, so I wasn’t sure whether or not I was actually capable of rising from my meditative state; however, I did feel myself exiting the room and drifting towards the scale, and found my weight down by a stunning pound and a half. I also found that my injured calves and sore shoulders were feeling remarkably pleased, and that my serene big toes felt good as I walked home in my most comfortable shoes. On my way I wrote this story in my head, hoping I wouldn’t forget any of the hilarity before it made contact with my computer keyboard, and I think I have succeeded. I’m a little worried that some of my best stories are bound to cause offense, and I can’t have Big-Hair taking me to court, so I won’t be sending this one to my local paper anytime soon. But if you want a good laugh, and a good massage, Monday night yoga awaits you.