Guest Post: Tara vs. Yoga

My mom Tara sent me an e-mail the other day that was too funny not to share. For those of you who don't know her, my mom is awesome. She's a travel agent by day, but a comedian by night. Seriously! She used to do stand-up when I was a kid and still occasionally MCs events. She is also a bit of a health nut (sorry mom, but it's true) and ropes my dad into all sorts of food crazes like the South Beach diet. She and my dad are very healthy and active and even ran the Dublin Marathon! With that in mind, here's my mom's yoga story.

As a 56 year old woman, I consider myself to be healthy and in good shape (for a 56 year old). I strive to eat well (most of the time), work out regularly, and maintain a balanced lifestyle. I go to boot camp which doesn’t involve boots, but does involve weight lifting and aerobics. So when I confidently sauntered into a yoga class one day at the gym, I had no insight to what was about to hit me.

I thought I was prepared. After all, I wore my adorable wickable exercise outfit I proudly flaunted my yoga mat as I entered the glassed in studio. I looked the part.

As I set up my mat and sat down in the darkened room filled with 30 women and 1 lone guy, I noticed the Scentsy candles placed strategically around, the soft music flowing, and the instructor getting ready to begin. “I got this” I thought optimistically.

As Cathy made her introduction, I looked around to see if anyone else felt like I did. If she said 25 words, I only understood about 10 of them (those being adjectives with a few prepositions thrown in.) The nouns she used to describe what we were going to do, or what we were going to feel (I’m not really sure) were totally and exotically foreign. At one point, Cathy was describing types of personalities (I think). Previously, I just thought of myself as a woman, a Jew, and a Cancer. But apparently, I was also a Fada (?), an energetic person who has a hard to time relaxing the mind and body. Looking around, there were also Pitas identified and some other longer than 4 letter words that described types of people. By the way, I’m not sure if I’m making those words up or not, but that is what my little brain heard.

So here’s the deal. I thought I brought to the class all the right stuff. What I really needed was a translator.

As we moved through that hour, I have to admit that Yoga killed me. I was grunting, sweating and straining and that was just to get my breathing correct. Getting my chest to turn north while my arms were pointing south and my feet were facing east, well…it just wasn’t happening. As the instructor was saying something about our minds letting go and giving in to the moves, all I could think about was that I probably shouldn’t have worn my Spanx just so that I could look good that day. And my David Yurman bracelets were really cramping all my styling poses.

All in all, I sweated more by not moving much and I definitely felt humbled by this yoga experience.  

My adorable mom and dad at the Dublin marathon