Dan, Dan, He's Our Man

 

          We had a different yoga leader on Sunday, our usual guy – sweet Dan - being away for a few days. (Really? How much relief from daily life does he need? He teaches yoga, for heaven’s sake.)

          She was a perfectly pleasant lady, but this bore more resemblance to an exercise class and used almost no traditional yoga moves.

 

          Now Dan is another story. He knows the yoga jargon without being pretentious about it and gives the clearest instruction I’ve run into yet. Okay, because he’s mirroring our moves he does have a tendency to confuse left and right but we’re used to that now. A guy thing, maybe? Then again if I had to spend an hour moving my left arm while calling it my right, I’d get confused, too.

          He’s been with us for almost a month now, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings and I think he’s been steering us into a group that actually looks like we know what we’re doing. The median age of our 15-20 person group is probably 60+ on a good day (I know for a fact of two women over 80) and we travel like pros through a smooth flow of Sun Salutation to Plank to Child’s Pose to Sphinx and so on.

          The most endearing thing about Dan is that he’s a guy in his 20s (??) who looks like a former high school linebacker. We might spot glimpses of hefty belly now and then due to a too-short tee shirt, but the boy’s got the moves.

          And when I arrived for class on Sunday, the room was bright and still being blasted by the beat of a previous high-energy class. Very different from the dimness and meditative sounds of our yoga group.

          I said, “Well, this is a different vibe.”

          Straight-faced, Dan replied, “We’re doing cardio yoga today.”