I don’t know if y’all do yoga or not, but I had a weird experience with it today. Have you ever seen an aggressive yoga instructor? Not me. The ones I know are all “No worries” and “All is divine” about everything. But today. Whew, today was different.
The new yoga instructor, whom I’ll call Mary, was a petite Asian woman. She was soft spoken and seemed to be entirely yoga-ish until we started the practice and she morphed into a tyrant. Good Lord, if anyone had a bone out of place, Mary snapped at her.
“NO! The leg is straight!” she barked like a Catholic school nun. And then “I SAID STAND UP!!!” to the entire group as we scrambled to please her. Yikes. I was not blissed out; I was freaked out.
“RELAX! LET IT ALL GO!!!!” she commanded us in the final pose. I didn’t let anything go; I was too busy concentrating on not trembling, as that may have displeased her.
In the end, she ordered us to clean our mats and put them away. “And roll the mats tightly! Or I will make you do it again!” I scrubbed my mat till it shined, then rolled it tighter than a mary jane. I may have curtsied when I gave it to her, my eyes lowered in subservience. And do you know what she did? She held it up as an example. “This,” she said to the group, “is how we roll a mat.” And then, “NO! All of you need to roll them again, like hers!”
I know I shouldn’t have been proud, especially when I left my comrades re-rolling for the remainder of the morning. But I couldn’t help but have a little bounce in my step (although I’ll most likely have nightmares tonight and will never, ever go back).
