My neighbor down the road is like the Jedi Master of yoga teachers. "See," my friend, Kelly, scolded, "this is why I worried about getting you involved. Yoga is an ancient mind/body/spiritual discipline that should not be mocked."
Let's get this clear. The only one I'm mocking here is me (and my friends, Cassie and Kelly...a little). But there is no getting around the fact that my addled brain is going to connect yoga-to-Yogi-to-Yoda. So if I say that yoga is no picnic...you know that I am speaking in a certain cartoon character's distinctive dialect ("Hey Boo Boo...pic-a-nic baskets may be good on the lips but they're a lifetime on the hips!"). I can't help it. And don't tell me that Yogi Berra wasn't born for yoga with his often-deep philosophical meditations: You can observe a lot just by watching. Even so, Kelly kept a close watch on me last week for my first class of Beginning Yoga.
Kelly's been trying to get me to take yoga with her for over a year. Lots of talk about flexibility, stretching, Charlie Brown's teacher's voice: Wha wha wha wha...wha wha wha wha. Easy to ignore until the voice of reason finally spoke up. "You're going to love it," raved my friend, Cassie, "For the last ten minutes, you lay on the floor with a scented eye mask on your face and listen to soothing music." Wait. What? Okay...I'm in.
Until I met the teacher and then I was almost out. Brenda is pure sinewed muscle. She can fold herself in half and then into quarters. She is happy and positive. I glared at Kelly. Kelly knows that the two traits that I detest more than anything are "happy" and "positive." "We carry a lot of stress in our shoulders," Brenda told us, standing before me like a slender, graceful crane. "Does anyone know where else in our bodies we carry stress?" "I tend to carry my stress in my fists," I responded, standing before her like an irritable, ungainly orangutan.
For my first class, I worked a lot on opening my pelvic floor. I sat on my yoga pad and chanted (to myself, because Kelly kept glaring at me), "If the pad's-a-rocking, don't be a-knocking." I was proud of myself because I realized that I'd developed a mantra (and it was only my FIRST day!).
Brenda has a lot of nifty yoga gizmos to help me with my balance (and to make me not feel bad when I can't touch the floor (or my ankles or my knees) when asked). I mastered Mountain, turned into a Table, and didn't truly destroy Downward Dog. But Pigeon Pose kicked my a$$. Brenda gave me a bolster cushion and I promptly flopped off of it. But you know that old adage, "When you fall off your bolster cushion, you need to get right back up on it again." I simply slid off the other side. It was like the Rolling Log event in American Ninja Warrior. Disgusted, Kelly eventually wrestled me into position.
Sydney went with me this week. I wasn't sure if she went for the health-and-wellness opportunity or if she went to catch a rare glimpse of her mother in the most unlikeliest of habitats. Kind of like the time Hillary Clinton visited the Wyoming County Pike Fair and spoke in a cow barn. Not something that one sees every day. "How did I do," I asked her when I got home. "Well..." she answered, "aside from when you made your group of foam blocks topple over like dominoes, I thought you did very well."The evening's theme was "Full of Grace," which applies harmoniously to (most) religions. I listened with interest as the Hindu philosophy of grace was shared, nodded and smiled with my hands poised in prayer before silently concluding, "And Jesus said, Amen!"
Mind.............check.
Body.............check.
Spirit.............check.
Well worth the investment of a five dollar yoga mat.
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