Morning Yoga

 After scanning the huge selection at the also huge YMCA here, I thought I might have found a yoga class. It wasn’t as though there weren’t several to choose from, but at this point in life my yoga abilities aren’t what they used to be, although I’m not at the chair yoga stage. So no to the one where they hold the poses for up to five minutes, no to the “high energy, fat burning” one, and definitely no to the one called Power-Fitness yoga in which they exhort the members to “Be prepared to move it!” (exclamation point is theirs)

          In hopes of finding one like my gentle yoga class back home I reserved a spot on the floor today for a class simply called “yoga”.

Before class. Okay, this is just showing off, right?

        

  The website advised participants to arrive around 5-8 minutes early to “respect the relaxation techniques at the beginning of class.”

  
       

It was just as well that I misread the time and arrived at 9:50 for what was actually the 10:30 class. There was already someone there ahead of me, and by 10:10 most of the floor was covered in yoga mats.

      

  

  I also saw no one too concerned about observing the idea of quiet for relaxation. Most were chatting with their mat mates and bustling around the room.

          When the instructor walked in I should have realized this was not going to be typical of other yoga classes I’d attended. The last time I’d seen her – a diminutive and ageless woman who looked like she’d been a cheerleading coach in another life – was in an aerobic class that stayed in motion for 50 minutes straight.

          Sure enough, there was none of that initial cross-legged sitting on the floor, easing into the poses, or more importantly for me, loosening up aging joints. There were also very few poses that I recognized, or ones that flowed from one to the next. She seemed to be very fond of planks and bridges, and we each had a small plastic ball, which we’d grip with our feet in the air, or clutch as we balanced on one leg. Her merry, “Grab your balls!” grew tiresome after a while.  

          It was all too much for this aging body, although I hung in there till the end, only falling over once, and the man three rows over was very kind about rolling my ball back to me after it escaped under my neighbor’s down dog.