Yoga Day One

Yoga Day One: The Jew Will Die Now

Loose Leaf is a beautiful and gifted yoga teacher. Her voice is soft and her commands are easy to understand. When you have finished assuming the posture you think you have assumed, she approaches you and gently adjusts your shoulder or your hand or your foot or your arm or your elbow or your neck or the small of your back or your belly or the top of your head or your big toe until you actually are in the correct posture.

You know you are in the correct posture when your shoulder, hand, foot, arm, elbow, neck, back, belly, head, all ten toes and both wrists start aching, when your muscles try to pull away from your bones, when your toes and calves cramp, when you try to drag that leg forward in the lunge that transforms the Downward Dog into the...some other kind of dog....but your foot doesn't go up there.

Loose Leaf's foot goes up there. Your foot gets maybe 50% of the way and then is stopped cold. "Uhn! Uh-Uhhhnn!" you say, but your foot will not go forward any more. No matter. Anyone can see this is good for you.

Hanky Girl's pleasant wood-paneled, book-case lined Victorian living room is the studio for these three days of introductory yoga, but, my what a coincidence, Hanky Girl herself is not present. She has to work, although she is there when we start and there in the middle and there when we're finished, but her butt is not wearing any tights and she carries not a yoga mat.

Hanky Girl's house is filled with clocks -- literally hundreds of them. So when you are trying your level best to hold the posture where you bend over your knee, which is outstretched and turned 90 degrees to your mat, though you are still facing front with your arms level and palms down, and then you slowly raise your hands until you are in the Jew Will Die Now position, and you have just been adjusted by Loose Leaf, but she still has to adjust the Great Ducknik and Flexible Beth, so you have to hold this position until Loose Leaf has finished with them, and you're pretty sure you're going to fall over any second now, and at that point the CLOCK goes off and strikes eleven, which would mean the class is finished, but then another clock goes off and strikes two, so you know it's just one of Hanky Girl's random-access clocks who go off all the time, every few minutes, signifying not one damned thing, well, that's just the way it is.

Loose Leaf and Plot and Duck and Beth and Hanky Girl have known each other for at least fifteen years, so it's all friendly, and there's none of the ooh-wow for which yoga is justly famous. The Leaf has been practicing yoga for a long time and will be an official teacher soon, so she is trying out her method on her friends. She is great and the method is great, but of the two women and the one man exploring this new world of the ancient yogis, it seems to come more easily to the women.

Which is OK. Plotnik knew this would not be easy, and he is pleased that it is not. He has identified several places on his body that need limbering up, and that's all good. The biggest place seems to be his right hip, followed by his right hamstring. His left big toe seems to want to cramp a little bit too often and his left calf wants to follow that big toe. His left hip feels a twinge from time to time, and don't forget both his shoulders, which pretty much hurt for the entire hour and some extra minutes, but you can't possibly know HOW MANY minutes because how would you ever know HOW MANY minutes with those CLOCKS going off all the time, and why do you need to know what time it is anyway, just live in the moment, feel the energy cycling through the small of your back, stretch towards the sun, clank that ninth chakra, use your invisible eyeball, try not to fart.

Plotnik has had bad shoulders for years so he expected some pain.

What he did not expect was just how tippy he would feel, how close he seemed to be to falling over when standing and tipping over to one side when seated.

Yoga actually is fun as long as you understand it is there to help you, not embarrass you, not make you feel stupid, or old, or rigid, or helpless, or useless, or helpless, did I say helpless already?, or stiff, or weak, or fragile, or piss-poor before the prospect of aging. And Day Two will be easier than Day One.

The morning's last moment is truly wonderful -- you breathe in, you breathe out, you're lying on your back, you envision the cosmos, and you catch yourself relaxing blissfully, so you start thinking about the Plotzers' lineup on Wednesday, and then you slowly roll over and sit up and the sun is shining through the window and BONG! BONG! BONG!, why, a clock! It must be 10:56! Or maybe 11:22! Or maybe no time at all. No time at all.
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