I’m hot and pissy. Don’t get me wrong, this is how I like my summers, crazy hot & humid – to me, not much is worse than a cold summer – but that doesn’t mean I don’t also reserve the right to be sleepy, tired and semi-miserable.

We just got back from yoga about a half hour ago and I’m kind of having some thoughts about it. If Blake stops being irritating long enough for me to get those thoughts out, it’ll be a miracle, but I figure I’m going to try anyway.

I am absolutely fascinated by our yoga teacher. I think it’s because I’ve never met a yoga teacher before or really anyone who’s all that athletic in any way. The ease with which she does the poses she teaches us has me in absolute awe and as a person, even though I’ve only met her 3 times now, I can’t seem to peg her down. I only remembered her full name this time. All the other times I forgot it. I bet she doesn’t remember my name either and probably for the same reason I never remembered hers: we don’t use them.

Her studio is in the basement of her home and is only big enough to accommodate 6 people, at the most, and so far we’ve only ever had 5.  I know she’s married, but I don’t know for how long. I know she has a baby who’s just sitting up (because he was present for our first class) but I don’t know if she has any other kids. I know she has a dog, but that’s only because I saw it tied up outside her house today after class.  I have absolutely no idea how old she is. I would guess she’s around Blake’s age, but she could just as easily be older or younger. I have no idea how long she took yoga before becoming a teacher or what kind of yoga (well she said her background is Iyengar) she practiced before becoming a teacher or what kind of a student she was, as in, top or bottom of the class, if ya know what I mean.

I have no idea how long she’s been teaching.

I have no idea if she eats meat or what religion she is or if she’d be upset that I killed a tiny spider crawling on my mat today in class. I think Blake said her day job IS a nutritionist but that doesn’t really tell me anything other than it’s probably a good guess that she’s into healthy, organic eating and that she probably takes a multivitamin and maybe some other supplements too.

I have no idea if she grew up around here or if she moved here (why? especially since the town she lives in only has like, a church and a convenience store and is even further into the middle of nowhere than us) or how long she’s lived here. Her house is in a new subdivision, but I can’t tell how new. No one in the subdivision has a fenced-in yard though, so I ‘m thinking it’s gotta be pretty new. Is this her first home? Or did she & her husband own a home before this one? Or several?

Almost all of the above is absolutely none of my business but after each class, this is what I find myself thinking about. At this point in the game, I keep also thinking that yoga is probably something I’m going to stick with and I expect that she’s going to be my yoga teacher for a rather long time considering that I’m not very optimistic about us being able to move before Madison starts high school.

So how is yoga working out for me? I know some of you do yoga or have done yoga or whatever and are probably wondering how the most out of shape girl in the world is doing with it. Well I’m here to tell you that despite it not being the easiest thing I’ve ever tried to pick up and I have a lot of gripes about it because I’m so out of shape, I’ve gotta tell ya, I think I like it. Which is totally weird because I never expected to.

First and foremost though, I fucking HATE plank pose. Every time she’s all “and find your plank” I’m thinking “oh dear god, no” because my arms are nothing but little chicken wings that have a hard time supporting any kind of body weight. Now, if you’d have caught me 4 or 5 years ago, I would have done better because my arms and shoulders were actually pretty muscular from carrying Wes around, but that was the last thing I really did with them. Worse is that during last week’s class, maybe because I said before class that I didn’t sweat and wasn’t sore the next day after the first class but Blake was/did both, she made us do a thousand reps of these crazy yoga push ups that were absolutely brutal for someone who has never done a push up in her whole entire life. And that class, I DID sweat and I WAS sore the next day (and the next day and the next day and the next day – pretty much until yesterday). As I said…somewhere on the internet last week: The first week I went to yoga, the second week I survived it.

Today wasn’t so bad though, but I’m finding with each class there’s at least one or two poses or activities that I just don’t like. Today it was…I don’t even know what it’s called but she made us lay on our backs, bring our knees up to our chests, put our hands behind our knees to hold our legs tighter to our chests and then she wanted us to rock frontward and backward and then she wanted us to do the same thing without holding our knees. She was practically standing on her head, she was rocking so violently and fast and while the pose/activity itself was okay and I could do it, I could feel every single one of my vertebrae rocking against the hard floor and it fucking hurt. Want me to do that in a squishy bed for an hour? No problem. But on that floor (and really, what good is a yoga mat anyway, aside from designating your space?) I just found it absolutely painful and couldn’t understand how she could do it so hard and so fast.

And then there’s that goddamn plank pose, but  already mentioned that. I’ll probably mention it again before this post is done.

Last week she had us do bow pose for the first time, which I was absolutely useless at. I can get my hands back there to grab my feet just fine, it’s actually making my legs “bow” that’s the problem. Last week they simply would not budge from the mat. On the weekend Blake and I were laying in bed talking in the dark for lack of anything better to do and I demonstrated for him how my legs just won’t do that. He can do it no problem, the big jerk, but mine absolutely refused. Today though, I was pleasantly surprised to find that holy shit, I was doing it! I don’t know what changed and my feet weren’t exactly touching the back of my head or anything, but somehow, practically over night, my legs decided that they could do this and so they did.

The other thing I can’t do that I hope to be able to eventually do? “Step in and find your stride for warrior”. From downward dog (on tippy toes with your palms flat out in front of you with your bum in the air so your body makes an “A” shape, for those who don’t know), taking my right foot and bringing it beside my right hand in ONE STEP is damn near impossible for me. She can do it perfectly every time. Blake doesn’t seem to have trouble with it and neither do the other girls in the class, but me? I have to take 2 or 3 little steps to get my right foot anywhere near my right hand and this annoys me to no end. I’ve ever tried practicing at home and I just can’t do it. I’m sure I’ll be able to do it one day, just like I was able to do bow pose today, but I am so jealous that everyone else can do this seemingly easy thing while I absolutely cannot.

I’ll get there though…

Anyway, I’m absolutely exhausted and I’m losing my train of thought pretty fast on this one, so I’ll stop here and write about yoga again next week. (Probably.)

Oh, but one more thing about it: Right now I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love and I’m about half way through the book when she’s in her guru’s Ashram in India and she keeps referring to “this type of yoga” but she never writes about actually doing any yoga – just meditation and chanting -  so for anyone who’s read the book, what the fuck is she talking about?

And that’s all I have to say about that. Now I will leave you with a picture from my day.