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| boom. |
Intense & renewing flow practice to enliven the body and balance the mind. Int/Adv. Heated.And girl, you are not intermediate-slash-advanced! Remember the shame spiral! The falling! Your arms don't straighten! Your biceps are apparently fake! I told all this to my Favorite Boss Rodney, who is my favorite because he lets me talk crazy nonsense and then tells me exactly what I need to hear (he once threatened to turn off the internet in my studio after: "she weighs that? but HOW TALL IS SHE and does that mean I'm fat!?!?!" People, the Internet is a terrible place). And the best part is, he's always, always right: "well, you already cried once, what else worse could happen to you?" Every living creature needs its own Rodney.
So YEAH! Buoyed by matter-of-fact-ness, I turned once again to The Google. Judging from the poses about.com considers "beginner" "intermediate" and "advanced," I was actually IN an intermediate class on Sunday. Why this made me feel like that makes me intermediate is anybody's guess, considering how freaking hard it was, but I didn't die, so yeah? Plus, hellooooo half moon! Half moon is my Achievement Pose: it took me forever to be able to do it without the wall or a block, but now I'm all, "you say you want a half moon outta this warrior 2? BOOM." Actually, more, "oh, half m--okay, let me just move my foot and then floooooat down foot up don't over-correct with the foot corestrength no i need to bend my knee i'll get there hold on hold on BOOM whoah the boom made me lose my balance." And also chair pose is intermediate? Stop it.
Honestly, I've been doing yoga on and off for ten years. If I'm not Intermediate by now, I've probably wasted thousands of dollars, and all those Saturday mornings when I could have been sleeping in. And I realized that I wouldn't even bother to go to a beginner class, so then mathematically...
But--but! And here is where the crazy happens: the worst that could happen is much worse than some tears during shavasana, because I can always imagine worse. Hallucinate, actually: The instructor grills me on my yoga credentials and then declares that I do not belong there! The entire class rolls their eyes at the idiot who thought she should crash and Int/Adv class! I get unceremoniously thrown out while everyone laughs and does handstands! Or worse, everyone spends the entire class wondering at that girl who can't do anything right and nobody has a good time because all the advanced yogis are distracted by the girl who's bad at it! What nerve she has coming here and crashing our class, someone whisper to her in hushed tones as we're leaving that perhaps she shouldn't come back. And then I will see those people every day for the rest of my life, and they will look at me and sigh.
Which, really, the chances of that happening are infinitesimal. I don't think anyone else has the creativity to even come up with something so consistently horrible, and if they do they probably have better things to use that creativity on than caring that much about me. And seriously? Yoga people being such juiceboxes? Hardly. But that's pretty much the root of all my junk: the paralyzing fear that if I take a single tiny wrong step, all the other kids will point their fingers at me call me out as a FRAUD who Does Not Belong. Truly it's a wonder I get anything done, ever.
But this is why I cooked up this harebrained scheme in the first place, isn't it? So things would change? To deal with the existential junk that yoga forces you to face? So, I decided to strap on a pair of cojones and obey the magnet I put on my studio door for this very reason that says, "Do one thing every day that scares you.--Eleanor Roosevelt" Ain't nobody throwing Eleanor Roosevelt outta no intermediate yoga class.
Stay tuned.
Further misadventures at the 30 Day Yoga Challenge page.
Image via Yoga Journal.
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