Yoga

Ok, so attended my first yoga class yesterday.

I walk in with a girlfriend from work, and we’re in steady bitch mode about all the drama of the day. Of course the Yogi who is discussing the effort of Being Present and all her students who are sitting attentively holding onto her every new-age word look at us like we are a little shot of poison botox being injected into their natural world. So we strip down into our comfy yoga gear and set up our mats – all the way in the back as to not be noticed. Now all day I’ve been feeling a little gassy. Not gotta-go-poo sort of gas, more like, just gotta toot. Not ideal for yoga. So she starts this thing out by making us roll up a blanket and place it under our backs in likely the most uncomfortable spot possible, directly below your shoulder blades. Blah blah, something about it opening up your lungs, I didn’t really listen, but the pain that is radiating in my lower back is making it difficult to breathe at all, and I’m freaking out that maybe I’m not doing it right. It’s two minutes into the class and I want to quit. And as I’m laying there I notice that some douche bag placed his mat way too close to mine, so his skanky feet are just inches away from my face. So now my back aches, I can’t breathe and all I can think of is feet. Finally she takes us out of death posture and we stand, takes me like 10 minutes longer than everyone else to get into position because of my aching back. Then she makes some remark about so many people crowding the back of the room and that she’ll have to pay extra attention to us – argh. I won’t go into detail, lots of sun salutations and lunges and reaching and breathing. I let out several toots, I know the too-close guy definitely got a whiff of at least one of them. I couldn’t help it, I tried to hold them in, but at some point you just can’t – and it’s his own damn fault for sitting so close. It was hard, wicked hard for a beginners class. We finally wrap up and are in corpse pose, different than the death pose I described earlier, and the Yogi comes around and lays hands on all of us. I don’t know what she did exactly, but she sort of rubbed the spot between my eyes, really hard, so it tingled for like a half hour after that. By the time I got home, I was sore and tired and starving so I ordered a giant bowl of pasta and ate it with white bread and butter and a giant full-fat coke and I don’t feel bad about it.