Adho Mukha Svanasana

What?

You don’t know what that means? Then you must not be up to speed on yoga-eese like I am. Adho Mukha Svanasana refers to the Downward Facing Dog pose in yoga. It is a transitional pose, a resting pose and a great strengthener in its own right. I recently had the benefit of attending two 90 minute yoga classes. And by benefit, I mean blogging benefit. Not achieving-my-physical-mental-and-emotional-union benefit.

A girl in my Weight Watchers class lost 5 pounds and when the leader asked her what tip she could share with the others about her success, she instantly mentioned a yoga class down the street that was offering 10 classes for $10. I thought about. I knew up front it probably wasn’t for me, but I thought what do I have to lose? Yoga can’t be worse than running, right?

And it’s only $10 for 10 classes? I don’t know how much that is per class, but it can’t be much. (ha! that Mason joke never gets old to me)

So one night, I put on my sweats and headed out to Sunstone Yoga to participate in the 90 minute BEGINNER class named Fire. In hindsight, the title of the class should have been my first clue. The website describes the fire class like this.

The core class offering is the Fire Series, which consists of 34 postures performed at moderate pace over 90 minutes in a carefully controlled environment. The Fire Series is accessible to students at any level and provides all students from beginners to advanced with an ever expanding set of challenges and rewards.

Temperature: 98.6° Humidity: 60% Beginners Start Here!

For some reason, when I read 98.6°, I thought…that’s natural body temperature of a human, it can’t be that hot, right?

Wrong.

Not just a little wrong. A LOT wrong. Oh, and more people showed up to this particular class, so the room “was just a little bit hotter” according to the leader.

It was 101.3°.

I know, because I stood directly in front of the thermostat and stared at it for approximately 88 of the 90 minutes. The other two minutes I was in an upside down pose of some sort…or at least attempting to be. And for the record, 101.3° is A LOT hotter. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the instantaneous sweating that took place when I walked into the room. As I looked around upon entering, I noticed that the others were wearing either a sports bra / spandex shorts combo or their bathing suits. Seriously. Bathing suits. Not one other person in the entire room was wearing ¼” thick sweat pants.

I walked in and found a spot near the back of the pitch black room. Then I layed down and meditated mimicking the rest of the room. I started to think about the yoga etiquette page I had read earlier that day on their website. Apparently, leaving the room in the middle of the session disturbs the balance of the room…or some non-sense…and the yoga-Gods will bring upon bad luck for two weeks. The fellow students would feel the loss of my energy if I were to leave the room early. Or something like that.

About that time, the leader walks in, turns the lights on to dim…just enough for me to notice that what I thought was the back of the room…was actually the front and center of the room….and I had positioned myself smack dab in the middle of two Madonna-looking-yoga-professionals. The rest is a blur. Somehow I made it through 90 minutes of torturous poses, floundering around. The longest 90 minutes of my life. When I left, I looked like I had jumped into a swimming pool.

Fast forward 24 hours. I convinced myself that going just once was not giving yoga a fair chance...plus, I was not going to get the true benefit of the 10 for $10 special. So I decided to give it another shot. This time in my bikini.

Ha! Yea, right!

But I did go. I lost the sweats and I checked three times to make sure that I was really in the BACK of the room before I put my mat down. This time the class actually was 98.6°.

Everything was going great... and then came the tooting.

Once again, I had managed to pick the worst spot in the room. This time for a different reason. There I was, twisting and turning my body next to a lady with extreme gas.

Extremely LOUD gas! Holy tooting!

Judging by the reactions of the other students in the class (or lack thereof) it is quite possible very normal among yoga posing people to toot. But that didn’t stop me from being super self conscience as she ripped them 2 feet from me. Do they think it’s ME? Is she okay? Why wasn’t THAT listed on the yoga etiquette website?

So, two classes it was. That is officially how long it took me to decide yoga was not for me.