The Practice

This edition of The State of the Union originally appeared on July 23, 2004.

The idea of wearing a pink shirt still makes me twitch a little bit, but I nevertheless consider myself a sensitive, 90s kind of guy.  (Yes, I know it’s 2004.  But I love the 90s.)  I cook.  I launder.  I vacuum.  I Swiffer.  And despite all that, I’m quite secure in my masculinity.

So when my girlfriend suggested I try yoga -- and then mentioned that she’d just read in Sports Illustrated that slugger Jim Thome took up yoga to soothe his recurring back pain -- I figured I could give it a shot.  Not that I have back pain or anything.  But Jim Thome’s hitting an awful lot of home runs this year, so there must be something to it.  He’s also got that whole sexy bacon-and-eggs thing going for him, but I doubt that has anything to do with the yoga.*

Anyway, upon arriving at the Bally Total Fitness where we belong, we walked past the cardio room and into the yoga room -- a room that also serves as Pilates room, step aerobics room, and the room for something called “Funk Soul Steppin”, which, frankly, scares me quite a lot more than yoga.  When we walked in, the room was dark.

The instructor, a svelte woman whose name was Maria but should’ve been Svetlana, greeted us and encouraged us to get a yoga mat and find a spot on the floor.

I say her name should’ve been Svetlana because she spoke with the sort of sweet, sultry Eastern-Bloc accent I’ve always associated with Stalinist Russia.  But perhaps I shouldn’t stereotype -- I’m sure Natasha would’ve worked fine, too.

Following Svetlana’s orders, I retrieved a mat from the bin and laid it out on the floor, after which I removed my shoes and socks.  Yoga, like swimming, is exercise you do barefoot.  Unlike swimming, there is no chlorine to sanitize things.  More on that later.

We began our session, or “practice,” as they call it, lying on our backs, breathing in deeply through our noses.  I did this very well, having practiced it several times before -- usually while asleep.

Svetlana encouraged us to continue breathing deeply throughout the entire session, but as soon as we started doing things other than lying down, I could tell this would prove challenging.

Soon I found myself twisted into all sorts of unfamiliar positions, none of which were exactly conducive to deep breathing.  They were, however, conducive to something else -- gas passing.

Not to get a cheap laugh out of a fart joke, but I am generally not averse to passing gas.  This, however, was something altogether different.  It was my first yoga class.  Except for one other dude, I was in a room full of women in tight clothes.  I didn’t want to embarrass myself by, you know, making a stinky.  Plus, I had no idea how loud it would be.  So I held it in.

Let me tell you, when you’re twisting yourself into a pretzel, this is not easy.

Nor, for that matter, is the twisting itself.  Over the course of the hour, I attempted to bend myself into a cobra, a pigeon, a plank, a downward-facing dog, and even a three-legged dog.

This one was the most tricky for me, not because it was so difficult, but because when Svetlana told us to get into the three-legged dog pose, a song from my childhood instantly popped into my head.  Feel free to sing along if you remember the tune:

I wish I was a three legged doggie
That is what I’d really like to be
‘Cause if I was a three legged doggie
I wouldn’t have to lift my leg to pee.

My recollection of this ditty was hardly the only thing I found humorous in my yoga experience.  To start, the setting itself was strange.  The front and side walls of the yoga/Funk Soul Steppin room were covered in mirrors -- the better to see how silly we looked -- while the back wall of the room was plate glass.  This meant that whether facing the back of the room or the front, through the plate glass I could see the cardio army, marching away behind us on its treadmills and elliptical machines -- as well as the six TVs they watched as they marched.

Let me tell you, there’s something pretty surreal about watching ESPN, MTV, CNN, MSNBC, Fox Sports Net and a Friends rerun in the dark in mirror image with no sound while a woman in snakeskin-print pants soothingly intones, “Inhale cow . . . exhale cat . . . inhale cow . . . exhale cat.”

But as best I could tell, few others in the room appreciated the weirdness.

That’s probably because most of them had found their center.  Frequently throughout the hour, Svetlana suggested we find our centers.  Everyone else seemed to do this no problem.  Every time I went looking for my center, it seemed to go missing.

It’s possible I couldn’t find my center because I wasn’t breathing right.  Since yoga is fundamentally about breathing, simple “in” and “out” is not enough, and I knew I wasn’t breathing right because every time Svetlana said I should move to a position and inhale, I found myself exhaling, while every time she said I should move to a position and exhale, I inhaled.  Even worse, every time she told us to relax and breathe deeply, I realized I’d been straining -- and holding my breath.

Perhaps my breathing was off because I wasn’t focused.  In fact, I seemed to be the only one in the room who wasn’t in the yoga zone.  I don’t know if that’s what they call it, but if you can continue to keep yourself in the lotus position and not notice the sound of free weights dropping loudly on the ceiling above you -- and each time this happened in our two-story Total Fitness emporium, I looked around to see if anybody else had flinched, but each time it seemed the rest of the room was oblivious to the bang -- you are most definitely in some sort of zone.

I never got in this zone.  Which meant I was distracted by everything -- the free weights falling above us, the Yanni-style celestial music playing in the background, the funny names for the positions, and especially the other dude in the room.

Said dude was also there with his girlfriend, so I had a brother in bent arms.  But though yoga is not what you would call a competitive sport, the presence of another male nonetheless stirred my competitive male instincts.  So every time we did a pose, I looked back to see if he was doing it better than me.

For what it’s worth -- which is nothing -- I was more flexible than him.

But just when you’re feeling a little bit good about yourself because you’re more flexible than the only other guy there, yoga finds a way to humble you -- by asking you to put your face into the yoga mat.

I’m all about rolling around on the floor, but as soon as my nose neared that mat, I caught a whiff of funk that nearly stood me upright.  As Svetlana cooed, “Lower your head to the mat,” I tried not to think about how many sweaty feet had stood on that mat, but it was like trying not to think about the pink elephant in the tutu driving the red convertible.

So I tried not to breathe.  I think you would call this yoga irony.

Finally, we ended with something called the “corpse position,” which I found exceedingly apt; by then, I felt about that stiff.  After letting us spend several reflective moments as a corpse, Svetlana thanked us for coming, and I stood up.  I have never been so happy to stand in my life.

On the whole, losing my yoga virginity was a pretty cool experience -- and a hell of a workout, too.  Yoga may seem like just a bunch of hippie breathing exercises, but before you write it off as unathletic, come sweat and stretch and strain for an hour, and then we’ll talk.

But positive and mind-opening as my first brush with yoga may have been, I’m still not getting anywhere near that Funk Soul Steppin.

* A few notes on that paragraph.  First, that girlfriend I mentioned is now my wife (which is a weird thing to type).  Second, Jim Thome was then on the Philadelphia Phillies, but is now on the Chicago White Sox.  The statement, however, is still accurate:  he’s hitting an awful lot of home runs this year, too.  And third, the man reportedly is a regular consumer of bacon and eggs.  You don’t find that sexy?