There are two or three things I don’t understand in the world. There might be more. But they definitely include:
1. The continued consumer interest across decades in the Speedo (or, as Pamikins would say, the SpeedNo.) Despite my general admiration for all items cut from gold lamé, just talking about this sets off my goose bumps, and not the good kind.
2. Why yoga, in addition to apparently transforming the mind-body-spirit, also changes speech patterns, a trend especially evident in its instructors
(see Date Two below).
3. How my lack of short term memory can result in my ability to revisit to things I have already established I don’t like and find out afresh whether they can count as a New Thing to Try.
Each month I like to do something new. But, like any unfortunate network series, I appeared last month to be in re-runs, thus making October "Let’s See if I Like Yoga (again)" Month.
This time I avoided all hot yoga, proving that I am at least slightly Pavlovian. Instead, I opted for a studio in Bernal. Let me just say for the record, they were great. Besides the very first woman I met at the front desk, who apparently did not take her Yoga Peaceful Pill, everyone was really so very nice, kind, unpretentious (despite their linguistic limitatings). There were no mirrors, no sound of sweat dripping like rain off an awning into 120 degreed heated carpeted rooms. The bolsters and straps and other unnecessary yoga industry crap? Smelled only slightly foul. The instructors smiled genuinely and soberly from their fleshy, squishy, bony, whatever bodies as they greeted you and introduced their inner children with names decidedly not borne of the Nevada Playa. Did I mention they were great? So the thing to remember is... it's not you, Bernal Yoga, it's me.
People talk to me about yoga the way homophobes talk to lesbians:
Sweetie, you just haven’t met the right class. And so I signed up to go on first dates with different kinds of yoga classes, just to be sure that they were, indeed, the yogacentrics I suspected them to be. And here is what I found:
Date One: Restorative Yoga. I now understand this to be a fancy term for Napping. I see why people like it – it’s like kindergarten, but more appropriately timed, because 33 years Post-K, I am finally at the stage in my life when I am less interested in peering up the teacher’s skirt and more interested in sleeping... because I am just dog-tired. And in my desperation, I will totally pay to sleep with anything, even a pre-me slightly dampened, body-odor-scented blanket, it turns out. But ultimately, that says less about the yoga form than my weakness for a quicky wherever I can find it.
Date Two: Hatha Yoga. At least linguistically, this is perhaps the most evolved? rudimentary? form of yoga, a.k.a. Day No Wasted Words, a time of molding body and language to its essential parts. No Prepositions, Conjunctions, Pronouns, Articles/Determiners, Possessive Adjectives or Commas need apply for yoga instructor positions, resulting in echoes of the following "sentence":
... place left hand in-breath right knee out-breath slight pivot palms out palms rotate face in in-breath hmm-hmmm... Response?
Uh-uuuuuuuuuuuh (if you, like me, are a Wordy Words A Lot - the Playa name awaits patiently my arrival I am sure).
Date Three: Restorative Flow. Napping + Balancing = Napping for no one + Me falling frequently. Unless you count the Domino Effect (and my ability to mastermind several of them), this was decidedly not a
flow in the more commonly held sense of the word; it was more like a skip... like in a record or a CD. Not that anyone knows what those are anymore. I am dating myself. No really, RF, it is me, not you.
Date Four: Pilates. Every time I try to talk about this one, I am re-informed by my many yogic-headed friends out there that YOGA studios
do not have PILATES, and in my born-again virginal state I must’ve gotten confused. Thus I will henceforth refer to this as YOGATES. In this way, you all can feel more comfortable with me checking out what was so obviously "not pilates" at the yoga studio. Best date yet. I engaged many laughing muscles. Apparently a tranny form of yoga at best, or in the wrong bar at worst, Yogates and I could maybe just maybe get down, if it existed as an actual word. At least it made me laugh.
Date Five: Flow. No napping, just dominoing, and thus time to turn off this faucet and conclude to myself and my favorite yogacentrics out there that yoga? It is just not for me. It is not a lifestyle choice, it is just who I am.
So one or two things I understand. Those definitely include:
1. I am open to a less conventional set-up, if anyone can find me a Yogates Studio, I will reconsider my anti-stretching-class identity.
2. I will neither be the future manufacturer nor sporter of any bumper sticker stating: My inner child is an honor’s student at the Yoga Institute.
