Dec 2014 - Age & Loathing in the Yoga Studio

Age & Loathing in the Yoga Studio

by Eric Beeman

Tonight the last shuttle is undocking from the orbiting space station, re-entering the atmosphere upside down, heat shield facing Earth to avoid a flaming catastrophe. I am in yoga class, tucked in the dark of the aerobics room at my gym. The room itself is weary from a long day of Body Pump, Caveman training, Zumba classes, and other beat driven gyrations, blowing warm air over the dozen mats rolled onto the floor. The room is hot and fatigued, because now in America, we don’t simply have heat waves, but a million square mile Heat Dome roving over the country like something that should have been shot out of the sky in a bad sci-fi movie. We deal with it because, actually, what choice do we have now that we heated the whole place up so awfully?

I remain indefatigable toward my mission. Stretch, breathe, unwind.

“So,” the young woman leading the group starts to explain, and my mind flips toward all the classroom presentations I halted, chiding my female students, “Please don’t start every important sentence with the word ‘so.’ It makes you sound doubtful, like you’re learning the subject as you go.” Now even the men do it. As do NPR analysts, Presidential spokesmen… I had to let it go, I can’t be the professor everywhere. “So” she says, “Vinyasa yoga is movement done with breath,” and I think, Oh honey I have been doing yoga since the first space shuttle disaster. Reagan’s second term, the Teacher in Space fiasco, I remember I was at the gym watching it on the TV. Vapor trails disintegrating into white ash like sheets of paper tossed out the school bus window on the last day of school.

From the looks of it our instructor today was born during the reign of Bush the First. But that’s okay, Youth can lead too, I tell myself.  And I do want to move with breath.

Things start off easy enough, chirinanga, a half push up held firm, up dog, downward dog. But then the legs start flying. “So reach your left toes to the ceiling, while the crown of your head reaches for the floor.” I assume she doesn’t want my skull to crash to the highly glossed wood, so I strain my neck to keep it afloat, “add a twist and see if you can lay your left elbow across the left, I mean right thigh.”   My dyslexic thoughts get reversed twice, but somehow I pull the pose off. Midair, I am longing for the ground. I can’t watch her it’s impossible to see her from this vantage point, so I model my stance on a man’s pose midway across the room. That will have to do, and it appears somewhat sane.

I have seen yoga through every fad. Hot yoga in ski lodges led by masochistic chanting men pouring steam over rocks while you exhale a hundred “sat-nams” fingers clenched and reaching for the sky. I made it through Madonna’s yoga period, when it became okay to bring a latte to class. Then came power yoga, yoga-pilates, and other yogamalgams for the attention deficit crowd. Now it’s just out of control, why do I have stand on one knuckle and hold my leg in the air like a dog peeing. I thought I was supposed to breathe? How come I can’t? Maybe because my torso is so far bent toward back wall my lungs are pinched. “So now you want your arms to cartwheel toward the front wall while your left foot lands between your feet, firmly planted shoulder width, and walk that right foot up with as many steps as you can.” 

Seriously, this was a party game when I was a kid. Twister. Piling people onto a plastic field of dots until the whole thing imploded.

I skip a couple steps, and catch up, “straighten slowly one vertebrae at time, reverse swan dive.”  Lovely.  I can do this, I tell myself with promise. 

“Back to chirinaga, upward dog, down dog, switch your legs.” Christ, I realize we’re going do a mirror image of the previous Cirque de Soleil amateur audition drill.

I used to do 45 minutes of yoga 3 days a week. I don’t recall spending so much time with my crown reaching for the damn floor! Madonna didn’t do that shit. Now she was something to behold. What a transformation, going from the girl inhaling helium and singing Like a Virgin to Lady Evita in a single decade, reaching toward her ecstatic apex in Ray of Light. Madonna didn’t have to do yoga, she was yoga, and she knew when it was time to fade. Except maybe for that A-Rod affair, but c’mon, he is A-Rod, 27 million a year for swinging his big bat. And she got to him before Goldie Hudson and Carmen Cameron Diaz—sluts—all of them. If you’re gonna be a whore, get there first.  Now we have Lady Gaga, a growling drag queen wearing a meat dress to the MTV Awards. Zumba-Zumbala, Zumba-Zumbala, my stupid Zumba! Are we out of gimmicks yet? 

I can’t hold this ripped-axis right-leg up thing for long, so I decide to come out of posture before the next cartwheel. Fuck her, I am going to close my eyes, and lay in child’s pose until we get to the next one. Please, I hope something with my weight evenly dispersed on the floor. You know being grounded is a very important part of yoga! Nope, no chance. She’s asking us to find our Styrofoam yoga blocks because “we are going to go into some tricky balancing poses.”

Oh my god! I think, but I won’t quit, because there is a thin, flexible, gorgeous Bush baby inside of me too. I know there is. I have been doing the Five Tibetans every morning for 30 years, the ritual some yoga people refer to as the Fountain of Youth. I won’t quit because 50 is the new 30 dammit! And the way things are going I won’t be collecting a Social Security check anytime this century. I have to stay healthy! While we’ve been baking under the Heat Dome, the Tea Party Congress has been playing with debt ceilings and debating spending reductions—a whole host of financial contortions configured to keep me at work until I’m 80 years old. Not that I needed to watch the news to know that was going to happen. When I saw half the men under 25 walking around with their assess hanging out of their pants, I realized I was in trouble. These guys aren’t going to be putting money into the system! No way. I can’t fathom the effort that goes into selecting underwear everyday to pull of that particular look. That, and the fact that the price of gold is pegged to the proliferation of neck tattoos. Up, up, up! There must be a lot of collars flung up at job interviews. Oh right, you would have to want a job to go to an interview. I am doomed to work until I die.

She’s got me with one hand on a block, the other palm facing the sky, one leg bent in the air and the other pushing “toward the front wall without losing sight of your foot.”  I look for my toes while my right spleen gushes toward the left rib cage and flings out of my ambidextrous skin onto the mirror, SPLAT, my guts dripping down the glass like a discarded meat dress.

That’s a wrap! The shuttle is landing. We should have learned after the first explosion and not waited thirty years. I stand up like a deracinated tree, hobble to the corner to gather my shoes, cellphone, keys, and gym-pass, and leave the room. So long Atlantis!

 I need to find another class.