Hot Yoga

Her breath smells of onions and she’s breathing in my face. Which makes it hard to find enlightenment or even breath through my nose.

“Breath in!” she shouts at me, “LIKE THIS!”

She snorts in through her nose and raises her elbows, her hands clasped below her chin, and I mimic her.  If I do it right, she’ll go back to the front of the class and leave me alone. I hope.

“Now OUT! Through your mouth!”

It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m trying Hot Yoga. Also known as Bikram, which always makes me think of Vikram, which is Pheobe’s made-up boyfriend in that one episode of Friends.

But it’s not Vikram, it’s Bikram, and it’s serious. Seriously HOT. Bikram yoga is done in a studio heated up well over 100 degrees.

I bend myself into a sandwich and huff through my nose, fighting down the urge to run screaming from the room.

When you heat up a room to unreasonable temperatures a funny thing happens to the time-space continuum. Time stretches out like a shimmering heat wave with no clear middle or end. It slows and stretches and goes on forever. I check the clock. What feels like an hour has only been fifteen minutes.  Can I make it? I’m running out of air!

I can breath. I CAN. I am not going to suffocate. Everyone else is doing it. It’s just HEAT.

While hot yoga does give you a good whole body workout, it’s even MORE rigorous as a mental workout. If you can make it 90 minutes you come out the other end a stronger person.

A dripping-wet-with-sweat stronger person.

The truth is I have never sweated so much in my life. There’s hot and then there’s HOT and then there’s HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO STAND ON ONE LEG WHEN MY FEET ARE SLIPPERY SLITHERY COVERED WITH SWEAT- hot.

I hear the fans come on and with them a fluttering of hope. But no, these are a different kind of fan. These fans circulate the freshly heated air to make sure that no one in the room is cooling off NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Finally a woman in the back stumbles out. The cool draft from the door makes me shiver with pleasure.

“It’s normal to feel nauseated! Dizzy! Light headed!” the instructor is saying, “Just stick with it!”

I know she’s a trained professional but I also know that THERE IS NOTHING NORMAL ABOUT ANY OF THIS.

I tuck my elbow under my arm pit, press my foot into my stomach and breath in through my nose.

Only 70 minutes to go.

***
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