Getting Bendy

Periodically, I feel guilty about yoga.

I know yoga's all about acceptance, and living within your abilities, and only doing what you want to do, but if I'm going to deal with putting on a sports bra, someone better make me sweat. And it's better if they're yelling at me while doing it.

Which is not to say yoga instructors can't rile me up, although I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of the intended yoga effect. My very first encouraged me to breathe through my uterus. That certainly got me sweating. A couple of years ago, I thought maybe I'd be able to handle yoga early in the morning, before I really woke up enough to process the ridiculousness of being AT the gym, but not feeling like a shower was necessary afterward. (Well, actually, this was in Cambridge, where some people feel like they NEVER need to shower...which is enough to merit at least a good rinsing after getting too close.) The downfall of that particular class was the insistence on my least-favorite part of the whole concept: the savasana.

For those of you who maybe live in a part of the country for which there IS no peer pressure to yoga for Health and Wellness, savasana means deep breathing. (I mean, I don't know what it MEANS, but it means deep breathing.) So, at the end of every class, everyone has to lay very still on their mats, and, you know, breathe. It's just like sleeping, except that you got out of bed an hour and a half earlier, and now it's time to go to work. So while all the dirty Cambridge retirees are slipping into their first siesta of the day, I'm using the opportunity to make a list of things to worry about for the day. And while the instructor's extending the savasana because she thinks everyone needs the extra time to relax, my blood pressure's shooting up because every minute I'm laying there is one more minute to be late to work.

So, anyway, that was the end of that.

But when I ended up with all this free time/all this independence from money, and could no longer justify a gym membership, I invested in a set of yoga CDs at the secondhand bookstore in Berkeley. I thought I was so smart...It cost something like $10, and comes with 130 minutes of audio yoganess. And with nowhere to be, who cares if a single workout takes an hour? What the hell else was I going to do?

I made it through two of the 20-minute discs over four sessions, and gave up. It's just too boring. I mean, it's not even a DVD. If I could watch television and still understand the instructions, that'd be one thing, but listening to this dude with the ponytail and staring at my floor? No.

But Adam's mom was in town this weekend and told a really disturbing story about her pelvic bone somehow ending up at a weird angle, and how she had to have it popped back into place. And then last night, I saw Denise Richards go to the chiropractor, and it just looked so violent and the popping was so LOUD...Well, I don't deal well with bones. Thinking about them makes my legs go numb. So if I need to be bored for a while in order to avoid some quack jerking my bones back into place later in life, I'm in.

So this morning, I set up Adam's yoga mat and ambitiously put in the 75-minute Vinyasa Flow CD. It was nice. It was the first time I've done one of the yoga CDs and didn't need to use the flashcards. The sun was coming in through the window, and, unlike in our Berkeley apartment, there's room to stretch out and do all the poses correctly. I planned my outfit for the day around the fact that I felt my legs would probably look better after the "workout." I imagined that it was going to be a really healthy day. Yogis eat lots of fruit and yogurt. I have both in the fridge. And I'd drink nothing but green tea and my whole system would be cleansed out. I think rearranging your gut on a mat does that.

Then I got bored. I held off as long as I could, then glanced at the counter on the stereo.

I had lasted ten minutes, 14 seconds. And that was the end of that.

Yoga sucks. But my outfit looks really cute.