I’ve been posting a lot in my own blog about doing yoga. I started taking yoga classes nine weeks ago because I thought it would be a nice workout without killing me. I was out of shape. Okay, technically round is a shape. I’ve kind of wanted to take yoga for awhile but there wasn’t a class near me in Ohio and, well, yoga sounds so woo-woo. As I mentioned in my own blog, my instructor’s name was Sapphire, which worried me*. In the first class, I was a little worried when we talked about opening the colon. I braced myself and waited for the onslaught of chakras and energy coursing through my body.

To quote myself: They… say appalling new age things in yoga. I took a class where we concentrated on our back muscles. (That’s a good thing, actually. When I told my doctor I was taking yoga he said he often tells men in their forties that if they want to avoid back surgery, they should start taking yoga right now.) The teacher started talking about how we would be lifting our palate. Yeah, we would be lifting the roof of our mouth. And when we did that, our breath energy (our prana) would circulate down our spine to our sitting bone and then come back up the front of our body to our heart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But part of the practice for me is giving it a go no matter how loony it sounds, and that particular session taught me a great deal. I concentrated on lifting my palate and tried to feel the energy circulating. And I did the poses better. My back did better, I used my muscles in my back and stomach in a whole new way and stopped using my arms to support myself. Okay, trust me, without getting into specifics, I just found the idea of lifting my body from the roof of my mouth to be a really good way to get me to do stuff better. So I thought about it. Yoga is old** and over the time its been practiced, people have found ways of thinking and talking that are very effective at communicating to other people how to do things that are kinesthetic and hard to describe. But when I listen, take these things seriously, and try to do them, when I practice yoga, I find myself feeling better and doing better and able to do all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t have expected I could do.

In other words, I drank the Koolaid. It’s great. Maybe it’s a cult, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be storing razor blades under pyramids. I don’t care. I feel tons better, it’s fun, I’ve met folks. I can touch my toes.

Then I saw that Vanity Fair had a photo spread of 20 Influential People in Yoga and I knew I had become a cliche. There were pictures of influential yoga teachers like Dharma Mittra, the guy who photographed himself doing the 908 poses pictured in the poster at the top of this entry. And pictures of beautiful people who teach yoga to movie stars, like David Life and Shannon Gannon. And pictures of beautiful people who study yoga, like the model, Christy Turlington, the designer, Donna Karan, and power couple Trudie Styler and Sting. There were no photos of Madonna, but her name came up a lot. Yoga is not cool, it’s ubiquitous. Not that that’s necessarily bad. Sanitation and sewer systems are ubiquitous in the U.S. and that’s a good thing. Maybe by unrolling our mats and assuming downward dog we’re just making the world a better place. Maybe in fifty years, yoga will be taught in schools.

A doctor once told me about the 10*10*10 rule of pharmaceuticals. When a new drug like, say, Prozac comes along, for the first ten years it’s on the market, everyone is saying it’s incredible, wonderful, life saving, paradigm changing. We should put it in the water. During the second ten years of it’s cycle, people say things like, sure, there are side affects, there are down sides, but really, it’s a great drug. During the last ten years of its cycle, people who get prescribed it are told that it’s a drug with problems, but the problems are known and understood and since the patient isn’t responding well to the new, better drugs, it’s worth trying even with all its issues.

Exercise is like that, too. I remember the birth of the running craze. I remember Jim Fixx and The Complete Book of Running and all the sudden, people were jogging. Everyone was talking about runner’s high and breaking through the wall. Running was cheap, all you needed was a decent pair of shoes. It was democratic, anyone could do it because all you needed was a road or a path. It made people healthy, both physically and emotionally. It was great.

Okay, maybe it was a little hard on the knees. Okay, maybe the injury thing, knees, back, shin splints, heel spurs, all that stuff could be a problem. I tried running. The day I ran five miles I almost died…of boredom. Training in running is a test of your willingness to be bored out of your mind. I ran in beautiful places. I ran with my dog. Call me a philistine, when I realized that my knees were hurting worse and worse, I quit.

After yoga came aerobics. And step aerobics. And more knee surgery for the masses.

Running never felt as good to me as yoga. I like yoga. Since I don’t know what I’m doing it’s never boring because the teacher is always teaching a pose that I’ve never done and often that I have every reason to believe I won’t be able to do, until in fact I do. But my shoulders hurt a lot. I’m telling myself it’s just because my arms and shoulders aren’t very strong and it’s all that downward dog. But I worry that it’s the 10*10*10 thing and right now we’re all so excited no one is saying, ‘Hey, sometimes this could get you hurt.’ Or whatever the down sides of yoga might be.

It’s great. I love it. I’m going to keep going. I just hate to know that it’s me, Sting and Trudie Styler, in this together.

*Sapphire was great, btw. Funny, down to earth. I’m so looking forward to the day I’m in good enough shape and know enough to start taking her Kundalini Yoga classes.

**It turns out that yoga is really not that old, and that some of the stuff in it is adopted from British military training. I find that hard to imagine. If I had to pick a ‘least flexible ethnicity on Earth’ the Brits would be near the top of my list, you know?