In preparation for my Kripalu yoga retreat, where I will find my passion, Anne and I went to another yoga class today at the Laughing Lotus yoga studio.  It’s hard to explain this magical place, but I will try.  First of all, if you are a man or a yoga beginner, I suggest coming already dressed in your workout attire.  The changing rooms were labeled for “yogis” and “yoginis,” neither of which are real words.  From what I could tell, if you were completely decked out in Lululemon attire, you went into the room on the right.  In other words, I was the only person that did not go into this room.  

We then entered the studio, which was a crowded space covered with glitter, graffiti on the walls, heart stickers on the floor, a disco ball on the ceiling, and a ratio of approximately 1800 women for every man.  Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.  The ratio could even be a little more tilted towards women if you discount the male population by excluding the guy wearing shorts that looked like this: 

Although I already felt a bit out of place, I took comfort in knowing that I had an invigorating workout to look forward to.  And that was confirmed when we all sat up in our seats and listened to a 20 minute poetry reading and a group-sing of the most popular chant in the entire world.  If you haven’t heard it before, it sounds like me looking around the room mouthing “what the fuck???”

But luckily, I can work up a sweat just at the thought of exercise, so right after the instructor read, “goodnight to the old woman whispering hush,” and closed her book, I was already in quite the lather.  From there, the class did turn into a hard workout, but I was able to keep up with the 8% of instructions that were not given in sanskrit, or that didn’t involve the positioning of my vagina. I was pretty confident in my yogic abailities.

The best part of the class, by far, was when we broke into small groups of three and some random person had to spot me by touching my atrociously sweaty leg as I tried to do the scorpion:

I think I would have been more successful in my attempt if my spotter didn’t find my leg to be the texture and slickness of an eel.  An incredibly hairy eel.  

On the plus side, at the end of class when we were instructed to sit silently with our eyes closed, the instructor came up behind me and gave me an amazing magical massage.  After she was done, I opened my eyes and watched to see if anyone else got one.  They didn’t.  Heyo!  Still got it.