Yoga: An Introduction

For the past two weeks, I've been doing yoga at the Riverside Health Club. I just got a membership there through GlobalFit, which is a rockin' good deal, if you desire a health club membership. (Basically, I qualified for cheaper membership rates through my health insurance provider.)

Anyways--I was excited to go to yoga class, because I do the yoga videos at home. And last week, I went and bought a beautiful red yoga mat. Over the past two years, I've developed a love of the movement of yoga, which so very nicely parallels my upbringing in ballet.

At my first yoga class, I discovered that all yogas are not created equal. Although I had come to love yoga, I did not love this yoga class. I have titled it "Super Slow-Moving Yoga," subtitled, "The class where we stand in place for a really long time, not moving, so that we can meditate on how painful it is to stand in place for a really long time." I didn't know until last week that standing in place could be painful.

It turns out that there are lots of kinds of yoga, so I was surprised on "Super Slow-Moving Yoga" day because I thought yoga was about movement. Renee told me there are different kinds of yoga, and that I probably prefer "vinyasa" yoga because it's about flow and movement and not about standing still for hours. Oh. Good information.

So yesterday I went back to try a new instructor and met yoga I was more familiar with: "Painfully Fast-Moving Yoga Day" subtitled, "Doing lots of complicated back-to-back movements so quickly that no one notices you're repeatedly averting falling on your face and/or cardiovascular failure."

I was in between two middle-aged guys the whole class, so it was pretty easy to feel like I was going a good job.

That's when I made another startling discovery: it's harder to touch your toes when you have long legs. I was beating myself up that all the middle-aged and retirees could touch their toes and I couldn't, until I noticed that my legs were easily 4-6 inches longer in comparion to most everyone else's. This led me to important yoga discovery two: in yoga class, comparison is futile.

I am, however, excited to be at yoga class 2-4 times per week, excited to be exercising, and excited about my new, red yoga mat. Please join me in this endeavor, so our inner lights can greet each other.

Namaste.