Yoga Day Three

Yoga Day Three: What's it All About, B.K.S. Iyengar?

Now, on the morning of day four, with no more yoga to do, Plot is walking around feeling...and this is true...centered. Physically, he means, as if he has a little more balance. Of course the feeling is imaginary, after only three days of very basic yoga practice, but he kids you not. He feels it. And if he feels it, it's true for him.

But oi yoi yoi rama lama ding dong. Yoga Day Three hurt so bad, so bad. Loose Leaf decided to let Plotnik and Beth have it on their last day, though she probably wouldn't think so. Whereas Monday and Tuesday Plotnik felt like he was straining but well within his limits, on Wednesday those limits were breached. It's not unlike riding a bicycle -- the height of the hill doesn't matter as much as how long it takes to get to the top. In yoga, you can stand practically any position if you don't have to hold it for a very long time.

Plotnik doesn't know the name of the posture where you lie on your back and wrap your hands around your calves so you can pull your thighs back to your chest, at the same time arching your back and tightening the gut as you attempt to cast away all your past transgressions, which are surely responsible for the searing pain in your hamstrings and knee sockets and shoulders. It is still bearable until Loose Leaf tiptoes behind you and gently coaxes your shoulders back even further, forcing the knee joints and lower back to pop like a bowl of Rice Krispies. "Try to flow with your energy," she says, or something that sounds like it, but to Plotnik this just means "Hold on, it can't last too much longer."

Halfway through the one hour class Plot is wishing, dreaming, praying to hear that demented clock one last time. Each new pose is more painful than the last one, and harder to hold, and each time, when the release comes, and he and Beth sit in the Myassana on the Floorassana resting position, yoga seems to be becoming more and more problematic, and the odds of Plotnik ever doing this thing to himself again, ever, if he makes it through this hour, are getting longer and longer.

He has to sit on a pillow to get his rear end high enough to hold his back straight. He absolutely has to move his hands to make room for his foot, which makes the lunge less a lunge than a Strolling Tiptoe. He can hold the Arrow Warrior pretty well, until Loose Leaf suggests with a tip of the finger that he should bend that front knee more to the rear and straighten the rear leg. Then the pain starts at his cramping toes, moves through the Achilles to the calf to the thigh to the hip to the back to the front to the shoulder to the neck to the hair. Everything hurts at once.

The thing about everything hurting at once is that you can really only feel one thing at a time. It's as if your pain sensors take in all their stimuli and then dish 'em out at five second intervals, knee follows hip follows shoulder. When the first thing hurts a lot, your toes cramp, which takes your mind off the first thing, because now it's the second thing.

Perhaps this is what Big D is like, only in reverse? Everything gets quiet, one organ at a time, and then instead of your toes cramping they just fall asleep forever?

Strange thoughts to be having during the Downward Dog. "Your Downward Dog is much better today," Loosey says, and that makes Plotnik feel better. "You both are making progress." Loose Leaf probably doesn't hear Flexible Beth's derisive grunt but Plotnik does.

He also realizes Loose Leaf is right: At glacial speed, he and Beth are indeed moving forward. The discipline of yoga, coupled with one's desire to limber up those joints (all of them) that have become stiff with the passage of time, move you into a different space, one it is important to investigate. We are always willing to choose 'comfortable' over 'pain,' even when we know that on the other side of pain is growth. We are all guilty of this. But when we choose comfort over everything else, we start to dry up.

Especially when we hit a certain age, and let's just suppose we are feeling somewhat less needed than once before, as if we've already put a firm black X into each box on the This Is Your Life Form # 226 that Mother Nature requested we fill out, and if we just folded the paper neatly on the crease and handed it in this very morning no one would think anything were out of order.

Is it really all that important that Plotnik's hip flexors and quads and shoulders become more flexible? No and Yes. No, because, shit, you know, what's the point? But Yes, because if they don't get better they're going to get worse. He does not want to hurry the year when he has become The Great Plotnik Emeritus, such a fine old man, we love him so much, what a guy, can you imagine how that stooped-over old fart ever wrote one note of music or rode his bicycle up this hill?

And if life is what you make of it, so is how you feel. Plotnik feels great this morning, and when he bends to pick up the dewy newspaper, which is protruding through the fog bank so its plastic bag and rubber band are only half visible on those front steps that Jacky Wacky painted fresh already almost a year ago, and his knees don't sound creaky at all, and his back feels ramrod straight, and his quads and hip flexors feel ready to run down this hill and up the next one, he can thank Loose Leaf and kiss her on the cheek for her kindness and patient yogi-ing. So he does. (smack)