Today was my first day of yoga. My manager at Bath and Body Works has been promoting her parents' studio and encouraged me to go. Plus, it turns out a coworker at BCTI has been long-time friends with the couple and she also was insisting that I join. So, after weeks of promising myself I'd go, I finally got myself out of bed this morning and went.
I met my coworker on the way in and she picked out the spots for our mats. The only problem was, mine was right next to the decorative water fountain. Throughout the full hour, there were the gentle sounds of relaxed breathing, lovely music, and the tinkling of the water cascading and draining. No matter how smart I was in using the bathroom before going to class, I had to concentrate hard to not be... too relaxed. Which leads me to think of 'Friends'
Because my mind works by running clips and blips of all kinds of media, while I was supposed to clear my head, I, instead, had a plethora of brief images of what I've seen, but not really songs because the instructor had some mellow tunes running in the background. First image: the first episode of the 3rd season of 'Friends', Phoebe was trying to get Monica to relax so that she could sleep, and with the even-tone and relaxing voice she was trying to have Monica concentrate on the 'plinking, plunking' sounds of the music and 'the lovely waterfalls, and the, the trickling fountains. And the-the calming sounds of the babbling brook....' and making her friend need to pee.
My mind then shifted to stand-up comedy.
In Ellen Degeneres' stand-up she spoke of two commercials and this popped into my head as well: 1) the old Clorox jingle, "Mamma's got the magic of Clorox 2"; 2) the end tag-line jingle "By Mennen". So that took my thoughts for a while as I tried to suppress the urge to laugh out loud.
I got serious and tried to do the following things:
-Commit to myself the next hour
-Appreciate my feet
-Become a dead bug or a happy baby
...with minimal success. Commercials were going through my mind.
During the time when we were just supposed to lie down, relax and clear our heads, I continued to resist letting go of thoughts and could only theorize on "Lost". I'm working on a different idea of why there are some in the 70's, some in the 'present' and what was supposed to happen when 815 was first knocked out of the sky. And to make it even funnier, we ended our session by saying to each other-
'Namaste'
The class on a whole was fun and the people there were nice. I'll go again and do better next time.
