Thanks to anyone who hung in there with my last few posts. Writing helps me understand myself a little bit better.
There are many things on my mind today, but I think I’ll linger on the subject of “Hot Yoga.”
On my bus ride to school every day I pass a benign looking building, except for the sign out front that declares, “Hot Yoga.” For the past four weeks that I’ve taken the bus, I’ve wondered about Hot Yoga.
Wondering is as far as my curiosity carried me thanks to my bus buddy. She distracts me from my queries to talk about our supply list or how late we stayed up the night before stuffing our binders full of page protectors.
But then I went to dinner at the house of my sister’s friend. It was delicious. Halibut in coconut curry sauce. Conversation covered all kinds of tidbits from school, to vacations, to an invitation to Hot Yoga.
I choked on my coconut sauce. “Hot Yoga?” I sputtered. “What is Hot Yoga?”
My sister’s friend laughed. Hot Yoga, she explained, is yoga in sauna-like temperatures. The heat supposedly relaxes the muscles to send them into a deeper stretch. She then pulled out a book to show me a picture of an individual positioned stomach down on the floor with legs stretched behind him, up over his head. All I can say is that, yes, it’s true, and no, the description doesn’t make sense.
But, this lovely lady cautioned, the first time you go, all you can do is lie there, because the experience is so intense. She apparently crawled out of the studio afterward.
I brought up these details with some of my school friends, who all seemed to know what I meant by Hot Yoga before I had the chance to explain it. I must have smalltownitis, since I’d never heard of it before. Groan, Yuck, Bleh, they all responded in that order.
Hot Yoga claims to clean the body of toxins, one of them said. It sounds like it certainly does the job, because people who dared to walk into a Hot Yoga house and managed to escape by crawling out reported that they threw up.
I’m sure it is no surprise to hear that I have no intentions of accepting the free guest pass. I’ll just stick with Hot Dogs, or Hot and Sour Soup, or Hot Tamales. Thanks anyway.

Advertisement