I like to do yoga. It helps me de-stress . . .and also, when I tell people I do yoga, they think I’m deep.
The hard thing about yoga is not practicing the poses, its practicing non-judgment. During a crowded class, I’ll be concentrating on my pose, and less than six inches away, there can be another person concentrating on her pose. I’ll notice if she’s in full-bind or half-bind and then compare her flexibility to mine. I rarely come out on top. I tell myself, well she’s much younger. But really, I don’t know. I estimate age based on how prominent the veins are on top of a woman’s hands. It’s a well-known fact among dermatologists that even women who apply sunscreen religiously to their face, forget the hands. Doctors have yet to figure out how to apply the miracle that is Botox to our hands. But believe me, once they solve that giant medical mystery, there will be throngs of women waiting in line to inject their fingers, excluding the thumbs of course, to prevent age-revealing vein protrusions on the top of their hands. Walking around with hands like the robot Wall-E would be a small price to pay for the ability to once and for all hide our age from the world. In the meantime, the best doctors can offer is to harness fat from our stomachs and inject it into our hands, plumping the skin, turning slack to taut. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Incidentally, I learned this from an article in a national women’s magazine whose brand message is celebration of women over forty. That’s some celebration. (I won’t tell you the magazine, but the name rhymes with s’mores). But I digress. What I find distasteful in yoga class is not the hairy shirtless guy glistening with sweat, (nope, don’t mind him at all actually) but the women with fake breasts. A big part of yoga is learning to accept yourself, so getting implants just seems like cheating. The woman next to me did not have fake breast from what I could see and I stared longer than I care to admit on this blog. She was in a fantastic half-moon and I had to face the fact that even giving myself my usual age handicap, she was far more flexible than I. Then I noticed her feet...her second and third toe were significantly longer than her first. Significantly. These were toes that gripped the mat like Spiderman’s suction gloves, feet that looked like they could grab a trout out of a rushing river. I was hypnotized by the wonder of her feet, their strength, their uniqueness, their overall yoga-ness when the thought burst into my brain like an unwanted party guest….my feet are prettier. Non-judgment is something of a work in progress Namaste.
0 Comments
|