By JEFF SACKS
I’ve gotten back into yoga. For those of you who have seen my body lumbering about town on a walkabout or on my way to Red Clover Ale Co., this is almost every bit as absurd as you think it is.
It’s thanks to my wife’s desire to keep me alive forever and her nervous energy for squeezing as much activity into each day as humanly possible that I have reconnected to my breathing, am getting more limber, and am enjoying yet another activity with her as well as our friendly cat Zeus when we can’t bear to hear any more of his howling meows at the closed door. He loves to be the center of activity, and I swear is he’s getting the hang of yoga, too. He’s great at the flop-on-your-side-so-you-can-get-pet pose.
As you might have guessed, no amount of yoga is going to ever get me to be able to sit in lotus position or half lords of the fishes pose or do a proper pigeon pose. These are just geometries that don’t work for someone with tree stumps for legs.
Yes, back in my day that’s how leg surgeries went. Twist your knee, and whammo…you woke up in the hospital with barky skin and immobile replacement limbs. Yet, come to think of it, I’ve never had my legs replaced. Weird.
Seriously, though, almost every other pose, aside from the torture chambers mentioned above, offers me the promise of being able to bend myself into a pretzel the shape of which mimics the skinny woman made from rubber in the app we use. I swear she’s A.I. generated.
Which brings me to something else I won’t ever be able to do in yoga: Move out of and into poses without a whole lot of grunting and groaning. It must be quite alarming for my dear wife to hear such noises emanating from someone she cares for while he moves from table pose into lizard pose. But then again, these are the same sounds I make when getting into and out of a car, so maybe she’s used to it by now.
I just don’t understand why stretching the smithereens out of my extremities hurts the way it does. It’s like pins and needles until I moan and creak into the next position.
The way I see it, the goal of my yoga training isn’t for me to become another one of the local yogis, but just to start small and keep working to go deeper into the poses. That’s not too much of an ask for me, and it’s something just about anyone can do if I can do it.
I’ve even developed an affinity for a particular pose. It’s called shavasana and it’s done at the conclusion of every session. Shavasana is translated from Sanskrit as “corpse pose” because one lies face-up on the ground, arms and legs comfortably spread, eyes closed. Accordingly, it’s probably a pose I don’t want to go too deep into. You know?
Look for local classes. There’s even a yoga studio right here in town on Grove St.
Namaste!
