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June 3, 2005
Mastering yoga morning
Learning all of those healthy stretches takes practice.
DANA GREENE
What's your edge? I think I met mine somewhere in between downward
dog and the plow.
"Dana, it's time to wake up." "Not yet," I thought.
"I need more sleep. Try again in three more hours."
Sleep was not to be. Jennafer was summoning me into the kitchen
for a heavy dose of a Costa Rican blend. After a red-eye flight
from hell, which left me waiting at Pittsburgh International for
four hours before dawn, I finally made my connecting flight to Grand
Rapids, Mich.
The lack of sleep hardly compared to what was in store. There would
be no relaxing for the weary. Jennafer, my Ithaca college roommate
and a soon-to-be bride, had the entire weekend planned, beginning
with advanced Saturday morning Vinyasa yoga. Did you get that last
part? Yoga for the advanced! I can honestly say, this wasn't for
me.
So, three times zones later, after being up all night, there I was
at the Triyoga Studio, seated cross-legged, Indian style. But what
was this Jewish girl doing there? How could my friend do this to
me? Not to worry, Jennafer reassured me. Yoga has been associated
with Hinduism, Buddhism and the new-age movement. However, Judaism
also incorporates a role for yoga. For 3,000 years, Judaism has
taught the integration of mind, body and spirit. Moses Maimonides,
the 12th-century rabbi-physician, said, "Maintaining a healthy
and sound body is among the ways of God." (Mishneh Torah)
So people of all faiths can safely participate in and even benefit
from the stretching and breathing techniques if, of course, you
can survive.
Up to then, I knew nothing about yoga, except for what I'd read
in Time magazine's cover story last year and what I'd heard
from friends. I knew Madonna was into it and had long given up the
gym routine. And Sting started doing yoga a few years back. He has
been quoted in interviews as saying, "I can do things with
my body now that I wouldn't even have thought of doing when I was
an athlete, a teenager."
Personally, I never saw myself as a yoga student. What's a yoga
student? Well, someone who is at least physically flexible, who
can sit motionless for minutes on end while taking deep penetrating
breaths. You need to be able to twist, bend and contort and this
class we were about to join was an hour and a half in length. Way
too long for me!
As we walked into the dimly lit room, a warm blast of hot air greeted
us. "Are you sure we have to do this?" I asked Jen in
desperation. She simply smiled back. I'm sure this was revenge for
that April Fool's Day joke I played on her in our sophomore year
of college.
There were 20 of us spread out on mats across the dark panelled
hardwood floor. Each student had a blanket, a block and a small
towel. The first thing that the instructor or yogini told
us to do was establish diaphramatic breathing. Then she told us
how to find our edge. I tried to find mine, but I think I lost it.
The edge is where you're going as far as you can into a pose while
maintaining your deep breathing.
We moved on to Sun Salutations. Jen looked over and said, "This
is the warm-up stage." "What?" I said, a little too
boisterously. The instructor glanced my way. We'd been warming up
for what seemed like an eternity and the class was just getting
started. We were making repetitive motions, bending down, arching
our backs, doing push-ups and then doing the downward dog pose.
Then we moved on to balancing positions. We were standing on one
leg with the other leg up in the air and arms out to the side. We
did so many variations on that pose, I was getting vertigo.
The highlight of the class was when we moved into the crow position.
Or at least I tried to move into it. Knees on elbows, balancing
on our hands – didn't we quit this after evolution? On the
other side of my mat was a woman who moved effortlessly. In fact,
she moved in ways I never knew the body could. As it turns out,
she was a professional ballerina. Figures.
The yogini instructed us to go into the finishing poses, which included
the plow, legs over head. I found my body moves that way only with
help. We finally finished off with a corpse pose, lying flat on
your back. That was the one pose I could do.
Dana Greene is an award-winning syndicated columnist based
in San Diego. You can contact her at [email protected].
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