View from the North 40: I swear yoga is for everyone

I started taking a yoga class for all the usual reasons: to work on strength, flexibility, balance, humiliation.

Now, if I were writing this column strictly for my family to read, I could stop at that first sentence and have them rolling in the aisles, as the saying goes. Really, I’d be killin’ it in those 18 words.

They’d react, saying:

“There’s more?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You had me at yoga.”

Ha ha ha hardy har har, guys.

“Strength, no problem. She’d be, like, ‘I am Pam Schwarzenegger. I vill bench press duh insdructor. Aahrrr.’”

“She’d still figure out how to pull a hamstring doing that. Is it possible to have flexibility in negative numbers? Anyone know?”

“The instructor would tell them to sit on the floor, put the soles of their feet together, wrap their arms under their ankles and grab their toes — and she’d be clutching barely her shins and grunting, desperately trying not to flop backward into her natural board-like state.”

“I wonder how many times she falls over in one session. How many times do you lose your balance in an hour? Nah, she probably can’t track that many. How many times do you just no-mistaking-it crash to the floor?”

“Omigawd, that could be a drinking game!”

“You know, just splat in the middle of the floor — wait, what? A drinking game? Oh, the possibilities.”

“That’s too much drinking.”

“If she loses her balance, it’s just a sip. If she actually falls, we finish the glass.”

“Oh, come on, who can drink that much?”

And then they’d haggle over the rules for a bit to accommodate the light-weights before moving on to the next round of insults. This would go on for a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes — possibly and hour — before someone would think to say:

“Wait a minute. You’re not serious are you?”

“She’s serious? You’re serious?”

“You’re doing yoga?”

“C’mon, she's not doing yoga. You’re just taking the class, right?”

“Not yoga yoga, right? It's some kind of not-yoga yoga, right?”

“Is your insurance good?”

“Do you need an ice pack?”

“Is this a peer-pressure thing? Blackmail maybe? Is someone forcing you to do this?”

“Honey, don’t you remember what happened when you tried to do aerobics in the ’90s? This can’t end well.”

“Just be careful.”

“We love you, just the way you are.”

Yes, I’m doing yoga. No, not very well, thank you, but I’m better at it than when I wasn’t doing it.

(Did you know that working on your balance can make your feet muscles sore? Actual muscles in your feet. Sore. I know that now at [email protected].)