The Idiots Guide To Yoga Class – How I Joined Up And Ran Away From One

The Idiots Guide To Yoga Class – How I Joined Up And Ran Away From One

So there I was with a few day of leave right bang on the hottest days of the year and nothing else to do and nowhere to go to and so what do I do? I sign up for the toughest of all fitness programs available today- yoga class. Now before you start correcting me that yoga is not all that hot a fitness trend let me state that I have been officially informed by the government of india that yoga is great for fitness and for losing weight and for general health and all that we worry about as the inches and the kilos creep up our frames. Maybe that itself should have warned me- when the government starts supporting something so enthusiastically it inevitably ends up being a scam. But then again every minute a sucker is born and you live and learn by your own mistakes, right?.  

My mistake in this case was believing in all the yoga hype and going and joining a yoga class in my near neighbourhood. I even stopped going for my walks for a couple of days to prepare myself mentally for the coming change in my fitness levels courtesy yoga- for i am a great believer in getting rest whenever you can and however much you can, in anticipation of being worked off your ass later. So fully rested and fully prepped up both physically and mentally i went to my very first yoga class wearing loose dresses as prescribed and anticipating being wrung out dry by all those asanas i would soon be doing.

The new age yoga guru- i wont use the exact word i have in mind for him as this blog contains the occasional family readers- who had charged me extra for a one on one class to better handle my fitness concerns and to give me proper solo attention as he explained when he asked for an eye popping amount as that month’s fees, started off the class by handing me a bright pink yoga mat and asking me to plonk my generous sized butt on to it.

“ Observe me closely, we will start off by practicing proper breathing techniques. Till now you have been breathing improperly but now i will show you how to breath” intoned my yoga teacher leaving me flummoxed. Call me a cynic but the very first thing we do as soon as we exit the fluid filled mother's womb we call birth,  is to start breathing on our own, a reflex which evolution developed over billions of years as we crawled out of the primordial ooze to become land based animals. And here was someone telling me that for all those billions of years we have been doing it wrong.

“Open mind, open mind, be open minded believe your guru and his words”  i chided myself, don't be so cynical and common sense based I told myself for even the prime minister has said yoga is good so there must be something good in it, so lets wait and watch i counselled myself and turned back with full reverence to my yoga guru who told me to breathe in through one nose and breathe out through the other. “And then...?” i asked eagerly? “Repeat this till i tell you to stop” intoned my wise yoga master. So feeling slightly foolish but willing to experience new things i continued to breathe in and breathe out through alternate nostrils while the yoga guru sat on his mat checking his mobile phone, watsapping someone, checking out you-tube videos and generally looking bored.

At the end of thirty minutes which was the halfway mark of my allotted one hour of yoga class he asked me “Now how do you feel? Do you feel tired?” Strangely i didn't feel tired at all. “Bored” should have been my candid reply but having recently decided to be always polite and also as my ass had gone to sleep following an unaccustomed sitting on the floor, i replied “yes”, and hoped we would move on to all those asanas shown on tv by sexy women doing yoga.

The yoga teacher smiled knowingly at me and said good “You have done pranayama correctly and that's why you are so tired. Now i will show you a new asana- its called savasana- you need to lie down and stretch your arms and legs. Now close your eyes and follow my instructions carefully. Feel yourself. Do you feel your feet relaxing? Do you feel you arms relaxing ? Do you feel your eyes relaxing? Relax completely” And i followed his intonations and and was lying there relaxing completely until how long i didn't know when he suddenly said “Now you can get up. Thank you for coming to yoga class and see you next class”.

I looked at my watch and saw that i had spent the remaining half of my class lying down and relaxing. That's thirty minutes of sitting and breathing and thirty minutes of lying down and relaxing for a total of one hour of yoga class. Against my better judgement i again went back to the same class twice more hoping that at least this time i would be taught something proper but as the usual routine of breathing and sleeping did not vary, i decided to abandon yoga once and for all and go back to walking in my neighbouring park.

So the lesson i learnt was that yoga is just bullshit masquerading as ancient indian wisdom and most if not all yoga teachers are scamsters and rogues who prey on the too stupid to know better crowd like me who follow fitness trends instead of trusting to gods own two legs given for walking which is the ultimate fitness tool. I advise all my readers to learn from my lesson and don't be like me – run if anyone talks to you about yoga. It sucks, it really truly sucks.