Sometimes an Afternoon Can Seem Like a Lifetime

Usually people don't talk too much in yoga class--it is supposed to be a meditative journey, after all. But sometimes we joke around in between meditative moments.

At my class last Saturday afternoon, we were getting near the end of the sequence of poses you do on your back. The teacher announced that it was time for happy baby pose. She described it for those people who weren't familiar with it: knees bent, feet flexed so that they are parallel to the ceiling, then you reach across the inside of your legs to grasp the outside of your feet, and roll around a little bit, grinning happily at the ceiling as if you were a baby in your crib. When the teacher said the name of the pose, she just said it like that: "happy baby pose." One of the women laughed and said, "There's no Indian name for happy baby?" For some reason, in my sleepily content, muscles-and-brain-relaxed state, I thought she was asking whether there was a Native American name for happy baby, and I didn't even wonder why she would be asking that. Then, I realized, oh, she means, Indian as in the Sanskrit names that the teacher usually repeats after the English names for the poses.

The teacher laughed and said, "I don't know, there must be one but I don't know it."

Then she added, "It's also called dead-bug pose."

Puzzled, the woman asked, "Bedbug pose?"

Then we all laughed, lying there on our backs and waving our feet in the air like happy babies or soon-to-be-dead bugs, as the teacher said, no, "dead bug."

"Dead bedbug?" someone else asked.

We managed to settle down in time for the stillness of the last pose, shivasana. Or, in English, corpse pose.