Downward Snoop Dogg

I tried my first hip hop yoga class this weekend.  Now generally, I find yoga boring and difficult, but this class had the added bonus of also being loud and obnoxious.  Oh well, at least it was long…  

It’s rather unfortunate for my well-being that I not only hate sports, but I also hate exercise in general.  I hear people talk about this endorphin rush they get after exercise and so I keep waiting for exercise to feel like eating a piece of chocolate. This has yet to occur for me.  

Taking a brisk walk in the Public Garden during my lunch break is lovely, but going to a room full of sweaty people to get on machines that go nowhere?  No thank you.  Jogging or running?  No thank you.  Running outside gives me a coughing fit and to quote Liz Lemon on 30Rock while she was mocking the joggers in Central Park: “Look at me!  I'm gonna run around in a circle so I can live longer.”

          This all being said, I know I need to make exercise more a part of my routine.  Knowing that winter is coming up and I am not likely to trek out for a brisk walk in 4 degree weather is another reason to try to expand my horizons.  I like swimming, but the logistics of it can often be a pain.  So, if I can psych myself out into approaching yoga as a relaxing, meditative, and continual practice, (like, you know, the Easterners who invented it do), instead of a form of muscle work, maybe it will make it less painful, mentally and physically.  If I could see it as a refuge from daily life instead of as a masochistic chore, maybe it would actually work to motivate me to do it.  I actually do enjoy “Freedom Joy Yoga”, which is offered in the same studio and which also consists of a free dance break in the middle of class.  It gives me a chance to break out “The Tree”, a dance move I was infamous for cultivating in college and sadly, beyond.  The Tree involves waving my hands in the air with my eyes closed as though dancing at Woodstock.  Freedom Joy Yoga is one of the few venues at which such a move is socially acceptable.

          So I thought that perhaps hip hop yoga would be similar.  I imagined some fabulous, un-choreographed hip hop dance break in the middle.  There was no hip hop dance break.  There was only an interminably long hour and a half of vinyasa style yoga set to a poundingly loud soundtrack with approximately 50 sweaty people in the room.  Music that is too loud when I haven't been drinking makes me feel self-conscious that I have become an ornery grandma.  To compound my feeling of being an octogenarian, I also never seem to have the right clothes on.  Everyone else looks so put together, but I always find myself leaving the house still searching for my one ill-fitting sports bra and grabbing the nearest sweats that don’t look too much like pajamas.  Yoga pants are expensive if you can only muster the willpower to tolerate yoga approximately 5 times a year.

I was also having a frustratingly hard time understanding what the instructor was shouting into the microphone between the blaring music and my relative unfamiliarity with the terms.  Unable to focus on relaxing my breathing, with so much aural distraction and my pant legs up to my ears, I spent the first half of class wondering when an appropriate time to sneak off to the bathroom would open up.  I generally don’t engage in any activity that prohibits me from peeing for more than an hour and a half.  I drink a lot of water, (I am a singer... with kidney stones).  I found a time to sneak off to the restroom, and was then locked out of the class and had to get help from the front desk to re-enter.  In hindsight, I just should have left altogether, but my sweatshirt was still in there and my friend Rachele might have worried about my disappearance.

When we were in Warrior Two position, instead of meditating or finding my center, I noticed the room’s dozen or so beautiful Tiffany style light fixtures, and couldn’t help but think about how my $15 dollar class fee had gone toward outfitting the yoga studio’s already presumably expensive Back Bay space.  (I also love how the black stones plunked into the sinks of the otherwise utilitarian locker rooms are supposed to dupe me into believing that we've suddenly been transported to Tibet.) The second 45 minutes of class consisted of writing this blogpost in my head, until I began experiencing a pounding, music-induced headache that being in Downward Dog only exacerbated.  Yes, I am the first to admit that music is a powerful drug, and sometimes its powers are not used for good, like this time, when it seemingly refused to aid me in releasing my shoulder tension.

By the time class was over I was a ball of misery— not exactly the result I was looking for— but I can be proud in the knowledge that I tried something new and excruciating.