Baptiste with Rachel

After nearly a month of nothing to break the monotonous joy of a personal practice, I went to two Baptiste classes. One with Gregor Singleton, who is always lovely, and one with Rachel.

Baptiste is a phenomenon that makes perfect sense when you consider the average lifestyle of a young Bostonian. Just got a nicely paid corporate job that requires sitting still all day, pressure to remain thin and present overwhelming, and torn between the mental benefits of a good workout (which are lovely) and the soothing preaches of yoga (which I'm fairly fond of, as you may know). Today was especially archetypal. It rained all day and after spending the day in a business skirt sitting down at a chilly conference, I was absolutely miserable, irritable and out-of-body. I spend the day not working too hard, devouring free candy, and eating an accidentally expensive three-course lunch. In an other era, this might have been a dream. My generation sees that as a cause for a 10-mile bike ride. Irritatingly lacking challenge.

I love yoga, but I like to have some strenuous exertion each day as well. In a non-corporate lifestyle, this is easy. Life, for millenia, has been an exhausting process, after all. When I was traveling and walking everywhere, for example, I had a very yin yoga practice, because that's what my body craved at the time. Now, sitting down all day, I need intensity.

When I walked into class it seemed like everyone was in the same mood, all at once. From the audible sighs all around (I always saw that as a YTTP phenomenon) I felt myself falling into the rolling waves of class. I felt so much solidarity for the people around me that it overcame my frustration- I was safe, I was somewhere I could move and stretch and work hard (or not!) and that was okay.

If class was difficult, I didn't feel it, because it was nothing but joy. And you know, there was a part where we did a random backward bend that I bet you would be discouraged by any Iyengar practitioner. And I loved it.

for sooth and for shame, that was the part in which I felt myself get slightly dizzy and enter a completely different zone, one in which there was absolutely nothing else but the shimmering physical reality around me. And that for me is yoga. It's about getting to that point, it doesn't matter how or what style or in what manner, where you are nothing but your breath finding its way in space through vivid technicolor.

When I got out of class, everything slowed once more in identity-killing attention-grabbing detail. A sensation I've missed terribly.