Yoga Blows

I don't understand the appeal of hot yoga. People would tell me stories of their first class, of puking or fainting or general misery. "It's so hot, sweat just pours down your face and body It's so liberating."

Sounds oppressive to me. I have no aversion to heat, but I do have an aversion to things that make no sense. Even so I was curious, curious to see what hot yoga was like, how miserable/liberating it was. While in New York visiting Brown I tagged along with her to yoga on a Sunday morning to givce it a spin. We'd been eating lots of greasy and starchy food, and even though we'd been walking all over the place ("the New York workout"), I still had a big urge to excersise.

We have free weekly yoga sessions here at my work in California. I've gone to maybe half a donzen. They're very intro-level, held in this dark loft with no mirrors. I like the darness, the lack of mirros. Karen, the instructor, makes everyone feel comforatable and competent. Leaving work yoga, I feel these infusions of energy, like I want to go and run a 10K.

I stopped going to work yoga because it stays light out for longer, and I can't bear to be inside in this dismal loft when the sun is shining outside in the big world. I was making pretty okay progress, gradually getting familiar with the poses and such. I'm still a novice, but not a first-timer.

So I felt pretty okay trying out the hot yoga. I'm in good shape, I can take heat. Brown and I pulled on yoga clothes and walked the few blocks from her apartment to the studio. Brow said she liked the instructor and that it was a big reason she went to classes there.

$17 for a class. What kind of poopie is that? Dude, that's way too much for a yoga class. But that's wha tthey charged. Brown generousy paid for over half of it. I got myself all signed up. "We have a new instructor this morning," said the studio's owner.

Hmm. Whatever, maybe this new person would be really good. Brown and I took off our shoes and grabbed our towels (for the sweat, you see) and went into the hot room.

It felt like a dry jungle, maybe, or a large dry sauna. After rolling out my mat, I took the cue of a few folks in there already and lie down in corpse pose. That's one yoga pose I have down pat. It was nice, this soothing block of heat pressing down.

People kept on filtering in. Some girl put her mat right in front of mine, which completely blocked my view of the mirrors. I decided not to say anything, since I'd done yoga just fine with no mirros before.

The new instructor came in. He was wiry but buff, wearing just these little shorts. Some yoga men seem to be really up themselves about their bodies, like a yoga version of a musclehead. It's hot in the yoga room, though, so wearing nothing but little shorts was sort of a necessity. I made a mental note to remove my tank top if it got too searing in there for me.

The instructor introduced himself and asked people their names, if any of them had done hot yoga before. I raised my hand, and he pointed at me with this long finger. "I'm keeping my eye on you," he said.

We started with all of these poses. Boom!, just like that. Karen eases into things so gently, and she speaks out the subtlies of each pose so that you natually fall into it. This dude was doing no such thing. His words translated to no body movements that I could conjure up, except Twister. I recalled the first time I ever attempted to drive a stick shift, how one gear went to another and how I didn't understand it and wasn't able to make the car do it. That's the way my body was with the poses.

Plus there were all of those mirrors. I didn't like them reflecting me and everyone else. I wanted not to look at them, but they drew my eyes with their flickers of motion. The girl standing right in my line of vision was starting to bug me. The poses were starting to bug me. The intructor's lack of coherence was starting to bug me.

I asked the girl to move. I'm afraid I was kind of bitchy about it, but she scooted her mat over right away. And then I could see the mirros, but the instructor had us turn and face the windows and bend to the walls with no mirrors.

We went into triangle pose, something I may have done before. But at that moment the shape of a trianlge made no sense, the idea of an elbow meeting knee and palm facing...facing where? The instructor came over and placed his hands on my shoulders and arms, pressing gently the way yoga instructors do. He said something, but my ears only heard "wrong wrong wrong."

Next pose--same one, but other side. I still didn't have any idea what the hell we were doing. Everyone else did. I looked that them and hated their snobby yoga asses. Why could I do this in the dark at work and not in here, a real studio? Next pose, the instructor came over again and said and did stuff that was no help whatsoever.

I was getting pissed. I don't like having my mistakes micromanaged. By the fourth time the intructor came over, I'd had it. I saw him making his way to my area out of the corner of my eye, and I ran out of the room in a wordless huff. Fuck that dude.

I sat down in the changing area, which seemed frigid after the drowsy heat of the studio. The heat I'd actually liked--I wanted to see how it felt to stay in there for an hour and a half, to work up a good sweat. But no way was I going back in there. I couldn't face that guy and the whole room of yoga snobs. I thought about putting on my shoes and going on a nice long run--running is something I can do the right way--but I sat, immobilized.

I thought about all of the times in my life when I'd been wrong in front of a bunch of people. High school marching band, crew practices, math classes, gym classes, cooking school fiascos...all places that my flaws became so very painfully apparent. That stuff was years ago, but the sting can emerge at any instant--decades-old hurt that suddenly feels so new and fresh. I'd forgotten how I spent half of my youth trying to overcome feeling ugly, clumsy, graceless, awkward, inept, and stupid. I fogot that because now I don't feel that way too often. You get older and figure out what you are good at and stick with it. I'm good at writing and hiking and cooking. I'm pretty okay at sewing. I can clean things really well. I am good at doing the same thing for several hours--hiking, jogging, making cookies, getting a grove down. I don't venture out of my comfort zone a lot. Perhaps that's the right you earn as an adult.

Still, you can't grow if you don't venture out of those cozy areas. I used to suck at rowing, but I did it for four years and then got reallly good, and I'm glad. I sucked at band, and I eventually quit, but I did learn a lot about myself (like that quitting can be a good idea) during my band years.

I stayed in the room on a bench, stuck. I wondered why Brown didn't come to check on me--I was her guest, after all. I could easliy get back to the apartment on my own and have soneone buzz me up, but I didn't want to just leave her. We'd come together, and plus my mat was still in the studio. No way was I going back in there.

So I sat and sat and sat, testing myself and my friend. I started to think she was upset with me for causing a scene. I wished I had the book I'd been reading. I forgasve the intructor, who I knew all along only wanted to be helpful but had been doing a terrible job of it. I sat there for a fucking hour and more than that, listening to peoples' footsteps on the floor above and the creakeing and shutting of the door below.

Finally the class let out. The intructor came over and apologized to me. That was cool, we both learned from it and whatever. Brown came out and we gathered our stuff (including a refund for my class fee) and left. I was still upset a bit, but not with her. Just with everything.

I'm going to do yoga here at work next week, just so I can say that I didn't give up. But I still think that yoga is not for me. Another friend of mine worked for a short time at Yoga Journal before getting laid off. They'd hired him to work in the ad department, and then they decided to outsource the ads. So he got laid off. A few days after his layoff, we got an envelope from Yoga Journal. Inside was a series of collages amde from yoga retreat brochures, the main one a paste-up of letters reading YOGA BLOWS. Tony, I agree with you. Yoga can blow.