I Am No Yogi

Clearly, this is not me.

So last night I went back to the gym. I know that you are impressed! I'm averaging a whopping once a week which is dissapointing considering my goal to fit into some of my sadly unwearable pants.

However, considering that my weekend included a wholly unexpected hike down a mountainside carrying a squirming two year old, and my monday was spent participating in team sports with my co-workers, this is turning into a pretty physically active week.

Any hoo, as I was saying, I went back to the gym last night and took my first yoga class in three years. There was a time when I was taking yoga classes once or twice a week and, even at that particular high point in my yoga career, I was no good at it.

Nothing has changed.

I am convinced that there is an extra tendon in each of my joints that is reinforced with titanium and constricts any sort of flexibility I might be trying to achieve.

Every other person in class can touch their heels to the ground in downward dog. Everyone else can pop right up to full wheel. And as I struggle to touch my fingertips to the ground when folding forward during my sun salutations, everyone else has their palms pressed firmly to the floor.

And doing any binding moves? Psych!

Now, I have good balance and I have the stamina to make it through the class... but the flexibility thing really bothers me. The sloppiest person in class is more flexible than me and it's pathetic!

Meanwhile, the yoga teacher is this very cut and dried fellow with big nostrils who breathes like a wild stallion while doing breath of fire. His nostrils were so distracting that I couldn't look at him during the class because, like a pimple or a birth mark, my eyes were magnetically drawn to his nose. This did not help my form.

On the positive side though, since part of what I love about a yoga class is the usual craziness of the instructors, it kept me engaged. Waiting to see what his nostrils would do next.

I've had other teachers who looked like super cute cheerleaders (hi Nicole! Stop innapropriately 'adjusting' my husband!), hippy grandmothers and german automatons (shades of Heidi Klum). But I have never had a teacher who was as un-yoga-instructor-like as the guy I had last night. No chanty music, no stories about the hindu gods. Only one resonant 'Ommmmmm' at the end. But with oxygen-quaffing nostrils like his, how could he resist?

My favorite instructor had a beard down to his navel and a buddah belly. He would mutter during the entire class and every once in a while you'd pick up just the end of a though...

"... and now we are breeeeeeeathing through our yoni as we roooooooooll down into reclining goddess pose... feel aaaaaaaall the energy come in through your yoni right up! to the tip of your head where your lotus flower rests, waiting patiently to unfuuuuuuuurl like the lotus of the blue elephant headed god Ganesh..."

And so on.

He looked like a member of ZZ Top and I was convinced that after class he would pull of the fake beard and rasta hat and look like a mild mannered accountant.

That's why I'll go back to yoga. I may suck at it, but the entertainment is worth it.

Sadly, my karma is now probably imbalanced because I've been mocking my instructors.