Old Lady Yoga

Today I returned to yoga class after a long hiatus. This is not tone-your-butt and streamline-your-thighs yoga but rather gentle yoga. Stretch and be at peace yoga. Old lady yoga.

Even so, I'm really bad at it. I have never been flexible--physically, I mean. (OK, right, probably any other way either.) When you sit on your mat with your feet straight in front of you and the instructor says to fold forward as far as is comfortable, well, my torso remains at a 90 degree angle to my feet. Everyone else, even the actually old old ladies, collapse on themselves, nose to knees, like living dinner napkins. Me, I'm like a textbook illustration of a right triangle.

But I'm also really bad at the mental/spiritual part of yoga. I'd like to be a good, deep-breathing, at-peace-with-my-innerness yogi; I really would. I do regard our materialist, empirical way of looking at the world as limiting and impoverished and I do absolutely believe that meditation and yogic practice and mindfulness would enrich my life. It's just that I fail so completely. I try, I really do, but when my yoga instructor, a petite cutie with a headful of dark curls and the right blend of intensity and laid-backedness, tells us to look through our third eye, I'm sorry, I'm blind. I'd settle for third eye near-sightedness, but no, I appear doomed to total blindness in my third eye. And when she instructs us to breathe into that space we've created between ourselves and the breath around us, there I am, floundering, peering wildly to my left and to my right, trying desperately to find that space I've created but, damn, it's just not there. And at the end, when we lie in our savasana pose and she guides us through relaxation imagery, and I'm supposed to be floating through the cosmos, sigh, I'll admit it, I'm composing my grocery list or trying to figure out what went wrong with that lecture this morning.

I wish I could leap unreservedly into the yoga pool of bliss. But that means letting go of the mind and honestly, there's not a chance. The life of the mind--I didn't know those words but good lord, I knew the reality, the exhilaration, the incredible possibility and power of it from the day I read my first book. all on my own: Ballerina Bess, a cardboard-covered book from the racks in the grocery store checkout line that, amazingly, I convinced my mom to buy for me one day early in the fall of my first grade. "I want to jump, said Bess. I want to dance, said Bess. I want to be a ballerina, said Bess." And damn, so did I. Because I was Bess, there, in my mind and I knew, I absolutely knew, standing there in the checkout line, that reading on my own meant I could be and do so much more.

And yet now I know, I do absolutely know, that the inability to shut off the mind explains so much of my insomnia, my anxiety, my limitations as a sexual partner, and yes, my failure at yoga. I would like to be transcendent. And deep-breathing. And able to fold up like a dinner napkin and see through my third eye. And oh, I really would love to float through the cosmos, a tiny speck-- but a totally balanced, mindful speck, a speck that is at peace with one's speckedness and at one with all that is and was and will be.

But really, cosmically, that's as likely as a toned butt and stream-lined thighs.