Yoga, California and Me

By Dick McCullough

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Yoga is all the rage, don’t you know?  And California is the world capital of rages, trends, fads, fashions, quirk’s of any kind.  California is not just the left coast, it’s left field.  How I, a farm town boy who knows no culture beyond yogurt, came to find himself in a Yoga class, surrounded by the very trendiest, that is to say, most recently unemployed, dot.com yuppies, can only be blamed on a guy from Philly now living in Westport.  A mentsh he isn’t.

But there I was: standing on a rubber mat the size of a bath towel, wearing only running shorts, and staring at myself in a mirror that covered the entire front wall, along with a couple dozen people who actually knew, or at least postured as if they knew, what they were doing.

Yoga class, like high school popularity or religious intolerance, is fascism in its purist form: tyrannical adherence to “the rules.”  Rules that are never spoken yet can never be broken.  It’s like programming in FORTRAN (No wonder your code doesn’t work.  You’ve got a zero there!  It’s gotta be an O!) just hyped up a dozen notches or so.

For example, you cannot look at another person.  Why?  Yoga is a contemplative exercise.  Looking at someone else will apparently destroy your inner focus.  Well, there are a lot of hot babes wearing practically nothing, dripping with sweat and bending in all sorts of imaginative ways.  My inner focus never had a chance to start with.  But my peripheral vision has improved substantially.  I don’t think I need my glasses anymore.

You aren’t supposed to say anything, or make any sounds, either.  Have you ever had both your hamstrings ripped off your pelvis simultaneously as you attempt to posture your body in a position that cartoons characters only dream of?  It will inspire a sound or two, let me assure you.  But no, you are supposed to weep inwardly, staring not at the young lady with the perfect tush to your left, but straight ahead at your hairy, flabby belly in the mirror.  Yeah, right.  Oh, the dirty looks they give you if you break that rule.  Talk about intolerance.

You aren’t even supposed to breath loudly.  The form of Yoga I have decided to inflict myself with, again courtesy of Jon of Westport, is Bikram Yoga.  The brilliance behind Bikram Yoga is that they crank the heat up to that of a Swedish sauna before torturing you.  Its one advantage is that the clothes the girls almost wear become translucent.  This is good.  The air, however, loses all oxygen content.  This is bad.  Did you know that the heart, when deprived of oxygen, starts beating violently in protest?  It’s nature’s way of saying you are about to die.  But please do so quietly.  It is imperative that you not diminish the inner focus of those still living.

There are a million postures in Yoga, each one a study in interrogative efficiency.  If the CIA really wanted to uncover the latest terrorist plot, they would start a Yoga class at Guantanamo Bay.  Those “hardened” terrorists would spill their guts before the class was half over.  Of course, the Red Cross, the ACLU and a handful of lawyers from California wouldn’t allow it.  Where were they when I was signing up?

One posture got me in particularly embarrassing difficulty.  It’s called the Eagle .  You won’t believe this but it’s true.  You braid your arms together like a long, fleshy pigtail, palms eventually touching.  If one forearm is three inches shorter than the other (or if you’ve done this for a while), your palms will line up.  Your forearms are vertical, directly in front of you, at least theoretically.  Mine are always twisted so far to one side I can’t see them in the mirror.  Then you lift one leg up, toes pointed.  Squat down halfway on the other leg and wrap the first leg over the thigh of the second, then around the back of the calf.  You really need an illustration to fully appreciate the medical impossibility of this exercise.

Once in this position-HA!- you are supposed to hold it for 60 seconds.  Slow your breathing, the instructor monotonically intones.  Squat deeper, she calmly flatlines.  Wrap the upper leg farther behind the calf.  Why do all the instructors talk like Stepford Wives?  Am I supposed to be calmer if I think I’m tearing all my ligaments in two on the advice of an android?

So picture this: there is this classroom full of pinkly glistening flamingos standing serenely on one leg, the rest of their limbs so entwined together they look like war veterans who’ve lost body parts.  Except that they have this blissful look on their sweat-beaded brows, and they are absolutely motionless.

And then there is me.  I’m at the very back of the class (where I belong), my lower leg trembling as if I were having an epileptic seizure, my face contorted in pain and concentration (they are synonymous in my case), breathing heavily and loudly with an occasional groan or whimper quickly suppressed.  Out the corner of my eye, I can see several desirable young women starting to lose their inner focus as they glance at me, perfect little foreheads furrowed in concern and edging slowly away.

That’s when the instructor says your arms should be directly in front of you, your knees should be in line with your elbows and I start to lose it.  I sway unsteadily to the right, take a hop to the right to gather my balance, veer back left, hop a couple times that way and the pendulum has begun.  There I go, hopping madly left to right, then right to left, over and over, behind all these dripping pillars of inner focus, framed in the full length mirror for all to peripherally and surreptitiously view.

My great worry was I would finally topple into one of my delectable neighbors and start the domino effect Lyndon Johnson so desperately feared.  But just like Southeast Asia, it never happened.  We all survived.  Some of us with more dignity than others.

They did give me a lot more space next class, though.  That’s good.  I’m far-sighted.

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