Tammy,

I was the youngest member in tonight’s class and guess who was seeing a cardiologist for a possible sedated, invasive test, potential angioplasty, or impending heart attack?  Yep, that would be me.  Already things were a little off the yoga tree of balance.

First you had us put our butt up against the crown molding in the floorboard and our legs up the wall.  “Hold that for 2 minutes, please,” you said.  Isn’t it sweet to know that all of the blood from my legs will be draining into my ailing heart.

Next you asked us to put our butt up against the floorboard and fold our body over, with the goal being that our head touches our feet on the floor in front of us.  I don’t know how you were able to squeeze behind me so you could forcefully push my back over and my head closer to my feet.  I get it; the resulting back pain was supposed to take my mind off my allegedly faulty ticker.

How about the pose where you had us lie with our backs on the floor and our legs spread in a wide v on the wall.  I felt like a feeble boy trying to break the gender of high school cheerleaders but unable to achieve this rah rah routine.  Were you intentionally trying to destroy the male psyche and start an aortic aneurysm?

A number of times you had to step over a bunch of people and get in strange body positions to help adjust me.  All I could think the whole time was that you were going out of your way to break my heart.  I thought you liked me.

Gary Kahn

PS  The doctor said I’m fine and told me to enjoy living life.  Maybe you were sending me good karma after all.

Tammy,

I was going to your yoga class yesterday and saw a hot twenty-something woman hanging out after her yoga class.  She was talking with a friend and then I noticed it.  Not a nose ring, nor a pierced eye brow, nor a belly button ring.  A stream of lightly colored air started flowing out of her mouth.  She propped her left hand up in a beautiful feminine gesture as she looked at her friend.   I saw the white stick we know as a cigarette.  She was old school defiance.

After an hour and fifteen minutes in your class I left in a dreamy yoga afterglow.  My mind flashed back to the woman I saw before class.   No I wasn’t getting all hot and bothered over her.  It seems she was smoking to elevate the post-yoga high.   Maybe something that causes cancer isn’t all bad.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Today I wanted to take a mid-morning yoga class at a local gym.

I was a guest of a friend and we got to the parking lot ten minutes before the class was supposed to start.  Cars galore.  What’s with that?  Well, there was a fitness class prior to the yoga class and there are a lot of retirees in South Florida.  We had to really scurry for a parking spot.  Saying my friend was nervous as I backed up past 15 cars through the only lane of travel would be an understatement; I thought there were going to be ½ inch finger divots in the passenger door handle.  Then, as we got into the place, the previous class was letting out; within a minute the entire floor was completely covered with mats.  Are you kidding?  What’s the Sanskrit phrase for turnaround and leave?  Yep, adios before we even started a single pose.

Somehow I don’t get the idea of massive yoga classes.  They’ve had yoga classes in Times Square, the National Mall in DC, and Millennium Park in Chicago.  I’m not trying to be negative but I like to have space for my poses.  I know you’re supposed to accept your neighbor, but touch your sweaty neighbor more than once and I get a little skeeved.  I know if they touch me, I’ll be quarantined for sliminess.  Am I missing something?  In a setting where the space is filled mat to mat, can you, or any teacher, make it around to each and every person for adjustments?  Did I miss a tweet saying only yoga teachers or perfect yoga students are invited to yoga love fests?  Is there supposed to be some sort of cosmic group connection or yoga wave in the colossal sessions?  Perhaps the best person for these classes would be the shivasana robbers as they stand to make some extra loot.

Can you let me know what the appeal is to enormous yoga classes and public displays of yoga affection?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Recently I tried something new in your yoga class.  I wanted to really get into whatever it is that real yoga people, yogis, experience while practicing.

It was right after you gave the first instruction that I tried my new yoga accessory, eyes closed during class.  I didn’t know what to expect but I was hoping for peace, friendliness, enlightenment, and exhilaration.  You started the classes and physically I could achieve most of the poses without looking; however, a weightless, stress-free, soothing state of being failed to arrive.  I was far from fantasy land.  Rather my thoughts were totally occupied by sweat washing all over my body.  My nose was now in full bloom as the remaining senses compensate for any missing.   To make matters worse, I was trying to concentrate on exclusively breathing through my nose, ujjayi style.  The lovely fragrance I perceived was that of a men’s locker room.  The studio is clean and I know it wasn’t me, so how could the pungent odor have appeared so soon after the class started?  Wait a second, could it have been me?  You’ve never said anything, though, you are diplomatically polite and try to run away from me after class.  With all this swimming in my mind, I opened my eyes to try tree pose.  I guess the land of hopes and dreams doesn’t include balance as my body resembled a weeping willow during a hurricane.  Marking a conclusion to the experiment, the body of one of my mat neighbors was a little late in celebrating New Year’s Eve and my nose received an inauspicious welcome to 2012.

If this is what people rave about yoga, maybe I should take up internet stair climbing.

Gary Kahn

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

Tammy,

Shortly before 5 at night I put my mat on the sand.  The teacher started the class.  I quickly realized the restaurant behind the beach had a guitarist playing an Eagles song.  To the right there were volleyball courts full with games going.  In front of me I saw the green water, the white-capped waves, the horizon, the kite surfers, the regular surfers, and the sun tanners playing in the water.  While you might suspect this could be an ADHD moment, everything seemed to be in slow motion.  The soundtrack in my head was the sound of the waves crashing.  Oh yeah, we did some poses but I couldn’t tell you what they were or how I did them.   Would you call this nirvanic yoga?

No, I didn’t have a shot of Jager before the class.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I went to your class today and I have never laughed so much in a yoga class; not at you, but at yoga and with you.

There is no Super Bowl for yoga; it is a non-competitive activity (except perhaps in India).   If yoga isn’t going to help American adults get somewhere, why do we practice yoga?  You don’t serve beer and the incense you burn is not magic mushrooms.  In the “studio” you create a freedom for us to laugh at ourselves when we can do a pose well, and for us to laugh even more when we don’t even come close to the attempted pose.  So yoga teacher of 14 years and inciter of laughter, what is the feeling I had today in your class?

On the way out of your class, I got in my car and it seemed like I traveled a couple of miles on autopilot.   Inexplicably I had a hankering for some potato chips.  Then I heard a siren.  I looked in front of me, nothing.  To the left, nothing.  To the right, nothing.  Yep, you guessed it.  Right behind me I saw the cherry tops flashing.  I pulled over and the cop said to me, “do you know why I stopped you?”  The words that passed my lips:  “Actually officer, I have no idea.”  He then put his whole head inside my car, looked me straight in the eyes and said:  “Are you high?”  Quickly I realized the cost of my first yoga high:  $15 for the studio and $85 for running a red light with a cop right behind me.

Gary Kahn