Once I asked a friend if he was good at css and he responded with “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it!” This was my attitude I approached my first yoga class last week.
And I told the teacher that I had never done yoga before but it was sort of a lie. I had done it twice - once my sister and I tried going to a yoga class and left a few scary seconds in, and once I saw a yoga position printed on the back of a cereal box and tried it, while eating cereal, which is pretty advanced. I felt like these two brushes with yoga would be my secret weapon. Oh sure I’ve never done yoga before, BAM, dog posse. I mean dog pose. Things were going to go great.
Class started with us all sitting cross-legged on the floor, silently, I can only assume everyone was remembering funny things that happened in middle school or thinking about different food pairings (peanut butter and greek yogurt?)(tried it when I got home, don’t recommend it). I hadn’t even made it to lunch food thoughts before the teacher came over and whispered that sitting cross-legged seemed to be too advanced for me. She suggested a modified pose that I would call “just sitting normally on the ground” and she called “Hero’s Pose.”
Assuming she made that up on the spot to make me feel better about failing at sitting, I mentally already awarded her an A for Friendliness. And we were only a minute in.
“If you get overwhelmed, just go back to Hero’s Pose.” she recommended.
Then she told us to put our hands together, and then grab our minds and put them in between our palms. I stayed in Hero's Pose and kept my mind wherever it normally stays.
Holding our brains was the first of many bizarre feats of flexibility asked of us. The most common was to move our hearts. “Lift your heart as high as you can.” “Float your heart behind your shoulders.” I just moved my boobs whenever she said this. I don’t know what everyone else did, I thought looking at people might be bad yoga etiquette.
Things I did look at: the window where I could see the restaurant chefs making breakfast. The ceiling lights - one of them had a face in it. Or I may have been having yoga-induced hallucinations.
Toward what I assumed was the end, the teacher congratulated us on “A great warm-up!” and then things kept going, as people often do after warm-ups. And we powered through lots and lots more heart waving and Hero’s Pose and listening to a sound that I thought was a broken fan but halfway through class realized was a relaxation tape.
And then it turns out the last 15 minutes of yoga are a nap, so, being a hero really wasn’t that difficult after all.
Full disclosure I wrote this months ago and have not been back to yoga since. Sun salutations, suckers. Just kidding it really was fun.
