A Very Bad Idea

It's all Groupons fault. My addiction to this discount website now lingers on the brink of insanity, and a few weeks ago they posted deal, 30 Day Unlimited Class Card at the Yoga Room, a studio I've been meaning to try for awhile now. The way these deals work you have a while to activate your new deal, and the 30 days starts from the point of activation. Enter my Very Bad Idea. Every once in awhile you'll see a studio post a 30 day challenge, where they get people to buy these class cards and see if they can go to yoga every single day for 30 days. I think at the end you get a tee shirt. "If I bought the Groupon, I could do it," I thought. I could go every single day for 30 days. Ignoring the alarm bells in my head that usually are clanging away when I have a Very Bad Idea, I clicked Buy.

I am, at best, an occasional yogi. I've been going to yoga on and off for nearly 6 years now, never more then a few times a month. This is enough that I've learned the basic positions, and picked up some beginners Eastern philosophy, but I never get any better. In every single class there is that girl in the front of the room with the Yoga Body, slim, perfect posture, and she's in the advanced modification of every single pose. I sit there, barely able to get my fingers around my big toe, the mind goes to a very un-yoga place. A jealous place. An occationally petty place. Then the teacher says something about breathing and how we all move at our own pace and I try to move back into the calm mindset. I breathe in through the nose, and out through the nose. I gaze down to my toes. This is usually about the time I start noticing that I need a pedicure.

Once in awhile I get ambitious and decide I'm going to start a daily practice. "Screw the girl in the front of the class," I think, and then cringe at how far off course this thought puts me. "I will practice a little every morning. My muscles will stretch and adapt with this daily practice. I will get more flexible and centered. I will begin to cultivate infinite patience. I will slowly become better then the girl at the front of the class." It always starts at the noble goals and ends at the petty ones. Dammit. The daily practice goes well for a few days, I get up a bit early, go through a few sunrise salutations, a balance pose, a spinal twist, and a Boat Pose just to work on the abs a bit. Then comes a morning where I've slept terribly, and the choice becomes get out of bed for 20 minutes of physical activity, or lie here and sleep for those 20 minutes. The inner struggle does not take long. Usually I promise myself that I will do the daily practice before bed that night to make up for it. I try, I do. But somehow, standing on my yoga mat at 11pm, my balance poses are not quite the same. I sigh, roll up the mat, and tell my husband to make sure he cleans out the cocktail shaker before he comes to bed or the lemon juice will make it sticky.

Eventually the daily practice falls away, and I end up dealing with my own lazy attitude again. This is of course, the over arching problem. If you don't do yoga on a fairly consistent basis, the progress melts away, not to mention you fail to build up any muscle memory. Well no more. I have purchase 30 days of yoga, and dammit, I'm going to do 30 days of yoga. My husband has been put on notice, I will not be home by 7 every night, I'll be doing yoga. I may very well spring out of bed at 6am to make it to the 7am class, because there is yoga out there and I'm going to do it. Starting March 1 I am going to march my butt into the Yoga Room, slam down my Groupon, and begin my journey to a more toned body, inner peace, and a spirit that can accomplish something. This is my gauntlet. And I am NOT going to think about the girl at the front of the class. In through the nose, out through the nose.

But I definitely need to get a pedicure before I do this.