Class #2: Anusara @ Yoga Kula,

I’m running a little Indian for class. I get there, confirm with the nice desk lady that it is still early enough in class to sneak in without breaching etiquette. She says it’s cool and so I enter.

They are still in the sit-cross-legged-dim-lighting-let’s-just-talk-for-a-minute portion of class, but immediately I pick up on the fact that, while not exactly unwelcome, I am unexpected. There are only three students, perfectly aligned in a trifecta in front of the teacher, and I have thrown off the balance. Even their yoga mats match, all a dignified shade of dark purple, and so I roll my mat- which, color-wise would be described as ‘liver-pink’ in crayola parlance- off to the side and back a little, feeling out of place from the get-go.

And so the hymns begin. All the students jump in immediately, and everyone knows the words, and even the harmonies, and I’m a little perplexed. I figure the teacher must have briefed them before I got there, other wise how could these folks seem so familiar with them in what is ostensibly a beginner class?

We get into the asanas, and I am struggling. They seem a lot more in-depth, complicated even, than what I had learned in the previous class, and it seems only I am unfamiliar with the teacher’s commands. At one point we strike some funky asana, I couldn’t tell you which one, that requires you to prop your booty upon a folded blanket. I’m failing and flailing a bit, and the teacher gloms on to this, doing her very best to help me out. She grabs a stack of blankets from the pile and is rather desperately shoving them underneath my ass, trying to shim me up like a dilapidated riverside porch-collapsing swamp shanty this is crumbling on it’s loose foundation. I’m sort of embarrassed to need so much help and later mortified to see all the blankets that have been put to service propping me up. Everyone else has used just one blanket. I have used seven.

Seven.

It sucks to have your ineptness quantified so definitively.

It isn’t until I get home and double check the website that I find I have screwed up the days, that I just attended the advanced class. It’s a sisterfucking moment, but I am at least a little relieved to know there was a reason for my incompetence.