#7: Awkward Facing Hunchback Pose

I apologize for the delay in getting this latest post out.  It's been a busy week! Unfortunately work came between me and yoga. And as they say, when work comes calling...well, let it go to voicemail, get a few extra hours of sleep, have a nice cup of coffee with a bagel, water the plants, make sure the cat's still alive, pay some bills, get caught up on old episodes of Parks & Rec...and THEN you go to work.  

Between work trips to the Midwest and North Carolina, I did manage to knock off classes #6 & #7. Or as I will now refer to them, #horrible6 and #horrible7 (and not in a cute Twitter way).  I will cover class #6 in this post, and save class #7 for Saturday - there's just too much that needs to be analyzed and decompressed!

Crisis averted - I did decide to go back to Blissful Monkey. It was just easier, and honestly, I didn't have the time or energy during the week to research alternate choices.  Class #6, my nice, relaxing Thursday evening Iyengar class - which I had previously been enjoying - decided on this night to be a dirty pirate hooker.  My day was going fine, and I was actually looking forward to the class, and then it took a steep, terrible turn for the worse as soon as I entered the studio.   It was like getting hijacked by Somali pirates at the bottom of the Gumdrop Pass in Candyland:

I'm having a great day! Off to yoga!

Somali pirates?!!? Isn't Candyland landlocked?

 It started with the new fee per class that I now owed ($15), since my 2-week/$25 pass had expired.  Trying yoga, I've found, is great when I'm paying next to nothing.  When I'm suddenly paying $10/hour for something, it had better either fetch me coffee, or generate TPS reports for me to review - not forcing me to hold 'Plank' for a superhuman amount of time.  The only other 'reasonable' options were a 30-day pass for $110, or a 10-class pass for $140 - both of which the instructor tried to recommend for 'value'. Instead of being honest and saying, 'I'm actually just giving yoga a shot, and there's a 96% I may never even walk by a yoga studio again after class #10', I took the easy way out with an almost-complete lie and said, 'actually, I'm traveling quite a bit over the next few months and may not have the time to make it to many classes.' Great - three minutes through the door and I'm already a cheapskate and a liar.  I can usually make it an hour on most days.

On to the actual class.  My lifelong classroom strategy has always been to blend in and remain anonymous (this may date back to my kindergarten days, where being quiet and inconspicuous allowed for more shameful paste-eating time).  Being farther from the instructor has always been better, and I set up in my typical spot near the back of the studio. As I was warming up (ie, laying there), my ears perked as I overheard the instructor talking to a first-time student, who had decided to take this class during a short visit in Boston. Thankfully, New Girl decided to set up next to me in the back of the studio.  Sucker, I thought. Setting up next to me and being a horrible newbie will deflect attention off of how almost equally terrible I am - just what I need. Wrong. 

First, the instructor relocated to the back of the room (next to me) because it was roughly -10 outside, and her practice space was apparently too close to the door. More likely, she wanted to keep a closer eye on me so I didn't poison the class with anti-yoga.  There went my anonymity.  Throughout the class she helped me with poses - to a point where I felt like I was doing almost everything wrong.  To her credit, I almost certainly was; since many of the same people I started this Thursday class with were still attending each week, the class was growing progressively challenging - whereas I felt like I was not growing more flexible or otherwise showing signs of improvement. 

* * *

Side Bar: During this class, I also realized that I have two primary coping strategy poses for dealing with difficult or ambiguous yoga instructions:

1.  Awkward Facing Hunchback Pose - this is a pre-pose, and loosely resembles a few moves from Michael Jackson's Thriller dance:

The purpose of this pose is to make you as far-removed as possible from the actual ambiguous pose that you anticipate the instructor will ask.  So when the instructor says something like 'make your buttocks descend' or 'pull your hamstring closer to your bone', any movement you make towards anything out of this pose will look like progress.  Set the bar low so you can always return to somewhere in the middle. (That's not just yoga blog advice - it's also life advice. You're welcome.)

2.  Conscientious Objector Warrior Pose - This is also a pre-pose, but it's a pre-pose you do while everyone else is doing the actual pose.  What I've discovered is that instructors like to tell you to go into Downward Facing Dog or Plank AND THEN explain what you're supposed to do during or right after.  F-that, my shoulders can only take so much - 30 seconds max.  Successfully completing this pose involves getting into the required pose as slow as humanly possible to delay a significant amount of Downward Facing pain; sometimes the pose is just acting like you're establishing a more stable stance so that you can coming up out of Downward Facing Dog or Plank pose for a few moment  - to really sell this pose, sometimes you need to do a few arm rotations, while quizzically studying a classmate who seems to be demonstrating the correct pose. 

* * *

Second,  New Girl was a god-damned flexi-straw.  Yup, she probably could have fit herself within a toaster oven during her bendy warm-ups.  Thanks a lot, New Girl, you make me look like a yoga jerk.  Fast forwarding to the end of the class, I overheard her telling the instructor that she was a professional dancer and had taken a decade of ballet.  Wonderful - I had been conned by a yoga ringer.  

Needless to say, between a more difficult class from previous weeks, to frequent instructor intervention, to New Girl out-bending me, I found this the most challenging class to-date. But the worst was coming: Inversions.

Inversions, our instructor said, are regarded as an important part of yoga practice. Inversions, for those unfamiliar with yoga, are when you choose to defy gravity and everything else logical to somehow make yourself go upside down with some crazy David Blaine voodoo bullshit. Headstands and whatnot. And apparently it was the last pose the entire class was going to do before cool down.  Well, except for me.  The only types of inversions I like are apple turnovers and roller coasters, and thankfully the instructor had already planned to oblige me and provided me with a substitute pose to do against the wall which worked the same muscle group  This capped a very frustrating night.  

No lie: Yoga seems to be getting harder, not easier.  What happened to the fun, relaxing stretches that I had really enjoyed earlier in the month?  Hopefully things get better during the last 4 classes...