Yoga yoga bo boga banana fanna foga me mi mo moga YOGA.
I have been taking yoga for a few years now, not religiously but every now and then, on an almost weekly basis at my gym.
I definitely missed the yoga bandwagon 10 years ago, despite an honest attempt at pre-natal yoga that was….well, to be honest, it was laughable. I can’t touch my toes on a good day – never mind when I was 7 months pregnant. So it has taken me a while to get up to speed with the whole yoga THANG. In fact, I just bought a yoga mat of my own last year, and half the time I have no idea where it is. Point being, I am not a yogini by any stretch (HAH ! Punny !) of the imagination. In fact, I hate downward dog. There. I said it. Downward dog makes my nose run and I always end up lightheaded and kind of nauseous afterwards. Don’t lecture me – I don’t CARE that it gets easier the more you do it. I don’t want to do it. And then of course, there are some other……complications. Beyond the things I don’t WANT to do in yoga class, there are some things I CAN’T do.
We’ve already touched on the fact that I can’t touch my toes. In all honesty, I can barely touch my knees. If I sit cross-legged, my feet fall asleep. If I try to balance on one leg, I tip over. If I sit with my legs sticking out in front of me, I actually have to lean slightly backwards to straighten my knees. I certainly cannot bend forward in that position. My neck is wonky and my posture sucks and my knees hurt. The only yoga pose I have mastered is The Table. And even then, I am all sway-backed and cranky. I do not practice yoga as an athletic event. This is not a workout. I do not break a sweat, I do not grunt, and I certainly don’t fart like the guy next to me last week.
That was unfortunate.
I don’t go to yoga class for exercise, per se. Yoga, for me, is more about trying to calm down. Unwind. Breathe. It’s about having my own space, mentally and physically. The very last thing I want to do is spend an hour rotating through sun salutations.
Which is why, for years, I never took a yoga class. I had tried it, and I had failed miserably. I was a yoga drop-out.
And then, I took Tim’s yoga class at the YMCA. And the clouds parted, and the sun shone, and the angels sang, and I sat through a 90 minute class that felt like 10 minutes. When I walked out of that room, I was relaxed and energized. I “got it”. I understood the appeal, after all of these years, and all of the random classes I had taken over those years. For the entire hour and a half, I had never felt out of place, or that I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, which is how I had felt during other classes – even other classes at the YMCA. I would show up in sweats and a tshirt and spread out my borrowed mat next to a chick (you know the one, there’s one in every class) in a backless unitard with her ankles behind her head. I would make an effort to understand what the instructor was asking of me, but usually I couldn’t even come close to replicating what I was seeing. And my chi was messing with my unitarded neighbor’s aura…..or something.
But this class was different. From start to finish, I had participated in the entire class. Tim had shown modifications for each position so that if I couldn’t do it the “traditional” way, I could make an honest attempt without hurting myself or feeling like an idiot. Half the class couldn’t touch their toes. There were more people in sweatpants then in “yoga wear”. Lots of people were using borrowed mats, and several people were new to yoga and attending their first-ever class.
I had found my yoga tribe.
The point of this (and I do have one) is that the busy holiday season is coming, and while there are many excuses for not making it to the gym, I wanted to just throw the idea out there, that the gym is more then just weights and aerobics. And while it is almost impossible to get me to “work out”, attending my twice-weekly yoga class is a pleasure. After 90 minutes of quiet music and deep breathing, I can take on the world….or the holidays.
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