I Hate Yoga

As part of my efforts to achieve a more lissom body I have started going to yoga once a week. I’ve always heard good things about it, that it centers the body and the soul. Whenever you see someone doing yoga on the telly, it’s always with a beatific smile and an extraordinary girth of movement. Yoga is supposed to make tracksuit bottoms look effortlessly stylish. Yoga is going to be the thing that carries me through my midterms and class papers on a cloud of serenity, the stresses and heartache of life rebuffed firmly by my impenetrable chi.

 Four weeks in, I have discovered that I really hate yoga.

I can’t cope with the paradox of it. The instructor is roughly the size of my little finger, with huge eyes and elfen features, and the most soothing voice ever known to man—a voice with which she invites (not tells, but invites) her pupils to bend their bodies into positions which go beyond the limits of human possibility, let alone the most recent edition of the Karma Sutra. She pads around the room barefooted, entreating us to ‘be kind, be kind to your bodies’, while we tie ourselves into knots, rupturing a couple of internal organs in the progress. How can someone so gentle and soothing be capable of causing my body such pain? It’s not as though I’m even obliged to go through all the motions, but the way she invites a person to assume the Downward Dog is so weirdly hypnotic that you find yourself wanting to do it just to please her.

I felt sure yoga would turn me into an unflappable, poreless creature with luminous skin and a washboard stomach. Not so. While all the other girls in class move casually from pose to pose, my body takes every available opportunity to scream in protest: flushing my face, frizzing out my hair, and occasionally making me whimper in agony. While drenched in sweat last week, muscles shaking with the effort of maintaining the Reverse Warrior, I caught a glimpse of the girl kneeling next to me arch backwards until her nose touched the mat behind her. The mere sight of this physical impossibility caused my muscles to give out from shock- or possibly lactic acid- so that I collapsed like a broken accordion into a boneless, gasping heap. Chi? Chuh.

 

It’s true that there are a large number of extraordinarily good-looking men who go to yoga. Blonde, tanned men with clothes that just fall away from their bodies at any available opportunity, revealing their rock-hard abs, sculpted arms, and taut thighs. But they’re too perfect. The view of such a man becomes decidedly eerie once you see them lift their entire bodyweight off the ground, suspending themselves with no apparent effort on their two middle fingers: maybe a big toe thrown in somewhere if they’re having a slow day.  I tried to demonstrate this move to The Graduate via webcam, and only succeeded in kicking a hole in the ceiling and trapping two or three nerves in my neck, while he looked on with an indulgent smile. 

So, it seems that I’ve not quite mastered the inner poise business quite yet. But I am going back to yoga tomorrow afternoon, because I refuse to be defeated by it. By the end of this semester, I will be bendy. 

Namaste.