Out of the Norm

Saturday morning I went with my friend & housemate, Ruth Ann to her yoga class. She has been telling me about how great it is ever since I moved in. I wasn't so sure, but the opportunity arose and I found myself safely tucked in her Volvo on the way to Berkeley at 7:30 AM.

The studio is in the trendy cluster of shops near where University Avenue meets highway 80. The train tracks pass there and the morning Amtrak train tooted as it headed north. The weather has been trending cold lately, so we pulled our jackets closer as we walked from the car to the studio.

Less than 10 people were there when we arrived. It took 10 seconds to see that I was going to be the youngest woman in there. Most of the class had hit menopause 10-20 years ago. Being the intellectual Berkeley earthy types, they dutifully accepted the extra roll around their middles and the wire gray hairs that crowded out their youthful color. Something about their educated morals prevented them from hiding the gray, I suspected.

While I was thinking, "would it kill you to use some hair product?" I could feel their scorn as the looked at me in my bright pink tank top that proudly declared, "Freakishly Strong". This was far from my fiercely athletic San Francisco yoga classes.

Now, I have to say, I tried to block it all out once we started. My goal was to have an hour focused on my breathing - no thoughts of past, future or contemplation. Simply calm breathing. But it kept creeping in. Things like, "Wow, I didn't think they'd be able to hold warrior 2 for so long."

After quite a bit of internal judging - judging them for judging me and judging myself for being so judgmental - I realized how great it was that I was doing a different practice of yoga. When in my regular class, I'm working so hard it is easy to keep my focus narrow. In this class, I had to push myself in a different way. Instead of fighting for my breath, I had to fight for a calm mind. I wish I could say that realization made it all easy, but no. I still struggled but felt better about the whole experience.

Recently I read an article about how to become lucky. The ideas continue to echo in my head. It encourages doing things to keep the mind open to the world. Go home on a different route. Focus on what is there, not on what one wants to be there. Doing this yoga class helped me stay open - drop my drive to get the crazy yoga workout and open up to what was actually happening. I shall continue the struggle to keep my mind more alert to what is happeneing.