Conventional Confession #4: Loving Yoga About as Much as a Punch in the Face

Today’s confession is less about a conventional choice than just a simple opportunity to rant about something very personal to me. You see, I hate yoga. I am no yogi. I am a swimmer. I am not flexible, I do not have patience. The only thing I’ve got is discipline, but even this sometimes can’t get me through a series of difficult poses.

Despite this lack of enthusiasm, I still practice yoga. Because I’m a swimmer, I do yoga to ward off the painful joint issues I experienced in my youth. It does help quite a bit, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Sometimes, when I’m twisted into a pose my body does not like, I silently wonder if maybe this guy was right after all (warning: expletive content). However, when each class is over, I feel so good that I come back the next time. What can I say? I despise doing yoga, but it’s the good kind of despicable.

In fact, I used to be very good at yoga. In college I had a wonderful teacher who guided me through my discomfort until the movements were almost second nature. I was in great shape, and I had a svelte little body that could stretch and contort into whatever I asked of it. After a couple of years, this teacher moved away, and I just couldn’t find a class I liked. So, I stopped practicing yoga altogether, and my body has never been the same. Lately I’ve been wondering what happened to that body, which is why, six years and twenty pounds later, I’m working on getting back into that shape, no matter what the pain and suffering involved.

This morning, after I flung myself from my warm bed at 6:45 am, clumsily maneuvered my legs and arms into my yoga clothes, drove to my class, and suffered through an hour and fifteen minutes of doing things human beings ought not to, I crawled into my car for the drive home. As I drove through a neighborhood on my way to the freeway, I noticed a dead animal in the street. I expected it to be a squirrel, or maybe an unfortunate cat who never learned that cars are not his friend.

But as I neared, I realized it was a kitten. A kitten, who couldn’t have been more than five months old. I respectfully drove around it, not wanting to run over it again. And then partly because of my fatigued body, and also partly because I have an all-consuming, almost pathological love of animals, I wept in my car. Though it was clearly dead, I had to force myself not to give in to the urge to pull over and cradle the poor thing, its life cut violently short before its time. You see, at that moment I understood what it felt like to be flattened and bloodied, and if the kitten had felt anything like what this morning’s class had inflicted on me, then I was thankful it had been put out of its misery.