buddah

This has been the week for weird exercise. Earlier this week I went to a yoga class where I was clearly party crashing. There’s a group of about a half dozen gay men and women who seem to frequent this class every week. They were all very familiar with one another, and they’re all in on the same joke. It was really nice to be there, and somehow I didn’t feel left out, just entertained. The class was a very basic level 1/2 flow and it moved along nicely until the instructor got really into it.

The more the instructor got into her teaching, the more her voice began to change. This is not unusual in a yoga class, but the manner in which it changed was odd. Her words became longer, slower and more exaggerated, and after about twenty minutes she completely dropped all the long vowel sounds. When she was telling us to point our toes to the back of the room it sounded like, “bring your taaahhhss to the bouck of the raum.” I wanted to giggle and I kept waiting for someone to come out and say, “Live from New York it’s Saturday Night!” But no one did and I had to keep my giggliness to myself.

It was a great claaaahhhhsssss.

I tried a different yoga studio later in the week and I knew it was going to be different. It’s one of these rock and roll yoga studios where they’ve made it into a workout. This type of exercise has never been my favorite, but it was a dollar a class with Groupon so I figured I’d give it a go. I was happy to find myself rolling out a mat next to a really nice lady I know from the kids’ school and I was just behind Melissa so I knew I was in a good place.

Shows you what I know.

Along the left side of the room there’s a small counter for storage and I noticed that there was a paperback that had something to do with Buddah. I figured it probably didn’t belong to the lady with the fake tits and trout pout, but I hadn’t really expected our instructor to try and read during the class. There was a very limited warm up and then a series of exercises on the left side of the body. Then our instructor said, now do that on the right side three times and meet us in down dog. I was totally confused. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to memorize the flow, so I sort of got his attention and shrugged. He looked back at me and shrugged so I said, “I have no idea what’s next.” He replied, “Someone invented this flow thousands of years ago. Invent a new one, it doesn’t really matter. Just do yoga.”

So I just did yoga. But as I created my own series (because I am NOT a quick study) I had to remind myself that I’d only paid a dollar for the class. Then I had one of those stupid internal discussions. You know, the kind of discussion you have with yourself that is so totally annoying that you go to yoga to shut your brain off.

It’s a good thing that this class was only a dollar. If it cost more than this I’d be bugged.

But it very well may be a $24 class. I don’t think I want to come back here and I paid $24 for 24 classes.

You can’t be so judgy, maybe the other instructors are great.

They probably all suck, look how happy everyone is with this class. This is a terrible class and they love it.

OMG me don’t look now but the instructor is reading a book.

I was stunned, just when I thought he couldn’t get any more mediocre he picked up his Buddah book and started reading the pages while absentmindedly saying, “repeat the series three more times and meet us in child’s pose.”

As annoying as he was, I was still getting a semi decent workout so I didn’t leave the class. Which is good because while we were cooling down he started to talk about community and that our happiness contributes to community. “This is blog fodder”, I thought, “it’s worth a dollar”. He then went on to talk about his senior year of college and how all his friends were freaking out that they didn’t have jobs, but he decided that to be a good member of the community he wouldn’t freak out about not having a job. Then he went on to tell us that his mother was very upset that he was graduating college without having a job. One phrase that was oft repeated was, “But Mom, you told me when I was a kid that you just wanted me to be happy.”

He went on to talk about how yoga could help us regain our youth even if we were really old, like sixty. I’m pretty sure the oldest person in the room was close to fifty and I couldn’t possibly have been the only one who thinking that they were relieved to not be 22 again, wearing Lululemon and talking to a room full of strangers about how I’d disappointed my parents.