Yoga Update

Tonight I went to a yoga class in in my new neighborhood. In the old neighborhood I belonged to a gym where I mostly just went to yoga classes. In the new neighborhood the place where I take yoga is an actual studio, so it's much calmer. I liked the classes in the gym, but it's nice to be taking class in a room that feels devoted to yoga, with no sounds of machines or chatter or technobeat coming from outside the glass windows. The windows in this room look out onto the street, and you can hear the sounds of the neighborhood settling down for the evening as the class goes on--birds, conversations, occasionally the high voice of a child.

A very nice thing is that the teacher whose class I took tonight, D., was also a teacher at the gym, so there is some continuity in my yoga life. D., a guy, has a lovely calming presence. He also has a sense of humor. Well, maybe what I mean by that is that he laughs at my jokes. Tonight, there were only four or five of us in class, all women, most of them around the same age as me. (How old? Somewhat older than our President and his spouse.) As D. was getting set up for class, he asked, "How is everybody feeling tonight?" Nobody answered right away. I was thinking about how I hadn't been to class in a month and how I was feeling it, so I said, "Stiff." Then I added,"Old." This obviously struck a common chord with the other women, because a couple of them started laughing hysterically. So, for good measure, I added, "Tired." Even more laughter.

D. laughed too and said, "All that good stuff." Then he said, philosophically, "It's all fuel for practice."

And fuel it was.

The class is really a little too hard for me, but it's at the right time, after work, and I like it that only a few people come, as opposed to the beginner classes, which are much more crowded. And I feel comfortable with D., having known him before, and I also feel comfortable substituting less difficult poses or taking a rest when I need to.

The classes are long--an hour and a half as opposed to the hourlong classes at the gym. But one nice thing about yoga class is that time seems to vanish in a way. Each part of the class--breathing, warming up with sun salutations, standing poses (sweat POURING off me at this point), then the stretching, inversions, backbends, whatever else, seems like its own little eternity, and then at some point you realize that you're sort of heading toward the end of class, but you still don't have any real sense of time. But then it's time to rest--corpse pose--and it's over, and you have to go outside again.