Kramer's Karma

We know, it’s Monday. And Mondays were supposed to be yoga days. We realize we’re getting off to a slow start with this feature, and hereby promise to get our asses in gear soon.

Not next week, though. No. Next week we’ll be in Boston doing a teacher training. Listen, won’t you feel better reading about our harrowing yogic adventures knowing that we’re trained professionals? Obviously the only reason we’re putting ourselves in thousands of dollars of debt to stand on our heads and practice breathing is so we can blog about it afterwards. Duh.

Truth be told, this training situation is making us nervous. Not because of the reading requirements or the yoga itself, although six hours of daily yoga does sound a little intense. That’s like forty thousand downward facing dogs.

No, we’re nervous about a little thing we like to call the giggles.

It’s not like we don’t take this stuff seriously. Yoga is great, breathing is important, chakras matter, we get it. But we’ve had our share of…episodes, and on more than one occasion have each been on the verge of laughing so inappropriately that we almost peed our yoga pants.

First, there was our Bikram teacher, clearly trained at the Jerry Seinfeld School of yoga instruction. You know how Jerry had that less-than-endearing habit of laughing at every single one of his own jokes, about halfway through? Yeah. That’s what this guy did. Except they weren’t so much jokes as yoga poses. And we’ll tell you, there is absolutely nothing funny about standing on one foot and desperately trying to hold on to the other, raised five feet off the ground and angled awkwardly behind your head.

That is, there’s nothing funny until you make mirror eye-contact with your contorted friend rolling her eyes as Jerry chuckles away, causing you to topple forward and onto the mat of your disapproving neighbor.

Mirror eyes are deadly, and were also to blame that one time we thought we’d take a break from all of the sweating and try “gentle yoga.” Fortunately, our new teacher didn’t think yoga was funny. At all. In fact, she was so earnestly engaged and in love with each and every one of our individual body parts that she demanded we look in the mirror at our reflections, locate our shoulders and say, out loud:

“Wow! That’s my shoulder! Look at what my shoulder can do!”

Naturally, our eyes drifted from our incredibly capable and lovely upper arms to each other's faces, both near bursting from the strain of keeping it together. Five minutes of a self-imposed time-out later, during which we buried our heads in child pose, presumably overcome with gratitude and adulation for our limbs, we managed to compose ourselves and rejoin the class.

We think we’ve learned our lesson. But next week will definitely be a challenge, and we’d be lying if we said we're not secretly praying for a studio that's mirror-free.