Tammy,

Tropical Storm Sandy, who changed her name to Frankenstorm for Halloween, left the South Florida coast somewhat submerged so yesterday’s beach yoga class was washed away.

Beach yoga classes are important to my psyche.  After a long week, I, like most, look forward to doing fun stuff during the weekend.  When friends won’t call me back about our plans (maybe I call them friends but they probably call me “nothing-else-to-do guy”), the Monday-through-Friday stuff has me so exhausted I nearly sleep away the weekend, or when it’s a must-do-laundry weekend, I hanker for beach yoga.  Beach yoga is weekend salvation.  I love the thick, cottony clouds mixed in with the warm, orange and pink colors of the sunset.  My entire body feels like nothing matters as the hypnotizing sounds of the waves rush in and out.  The rocks that bookend our beach “studio” inspire dreams of being in a vacation fortress.  Did I mention that at beach yoga I can do full wheel pose?  On the beach, the sand is forgiving so I can even do crow pose.  Indoor yoga forces me to wear a helmet for crow attempts; surely that’s not how I like to style in yoga class.  On the sandy shores I successfully flip the dog, well, most of the time.  But if I were you, I wouldn’t get anywhere near my oddly raised canine leg.

Somehow at beach yoga I even seem to overlook a couple of, shall we say, peeves.  Like the senior citizen who runs through our class every week and hits on our young teacher in broken English.  Did I mention that his shorts are barely bigger than a speedo?  How about the drunk dude who walked by our class and insisted he could do the inverted poses?  I thought it might be funny but the resulting sloppiness almost made him toss some pretty, pretty nasty cookies.

With the clocks rolling back an hour next week, I fear my last beach yoga class of 2012 was cancelled.

Gary

Tammy,

Today I went to your yin a/k/a happy hips class.

At the beginning of class you played a song that made us feel like we were in exotic Costa Rica.  Wow!  I remembered that you had scheduled a yoga trip there.  I had never heard of a commercial in a yoga class before and I am sure the creators of yoga were rolling over in their graves.  Those old guys; how were there hips?  I didn’t care about the subliminal message; I loved the music as my mind went on a scenic meditation that yoga hadn’t yet come close to delivering.

Then it came time to get hip and I’m not talking Edward Burns type hip.  You started with a three minute king pigeon.  My hips were hemorrhaging more than an alcoholic with the DTs.  A short time later it was the firefly pose.  The hips were burning and screaming like the towering inferno.  In the frog position I wanted to leap right the heck out the back door into a pool of soothing jello.  Why do you call it happy hips?

As far as your yoga vacation in Costa Rica, the water skiing, zip lining, and snorkeling, really sound like a dream.  For what we now know will be killer yoga, I am not yet ready to have my remains sent back to the States in a yoga body bag.

Gary Kahn