Yoga Convert

I'd been to one yoga class previously in NY. I remember a lot of chanting, headstands and balancing your body on your elbows - none of which I could do. After that one encounter, I wrote yoga off as stretching and acrobatics for slightly kookoo people, despite the fact that most of my friends do yoga on a regular basis and they're not kookoo.

A couple months back, I had dinner with a good friend who was visiting from out of town and her friend who lived in the city. This friend had been an investment banker, then received her PhD in Accounting at Stanford, then...gave up several peachy job offers at hedge funds to become a yoga instructor! I was immediately enamored (don't all of us have a secret desire to give up the yuppie life and do what our hearts desire? And here was this girl who was doing it).

This girl *glowed*. Her eyes sparkled. Her body was the leanest yet most muscular female body I'd ever seen. She reeked of health and happiness.

She tried to convince all of us at dinner that we all needed yoga. For balance. Flexibility. Tranquility.

Still. I'd written yoga off as not for me. I told her: "I'm REALLY inflexible." And she said, like a wise yogi: "Saying you can't do yoga because you're inflexible is like saying you can't take a shower because you're too dirty." Hmm, good point (Stanford grads are so smart).

Fast forward a few months. My welcome package from the surf camp in Costa Rica I'm going to be attending in March instructed that in preparation for the camp, we should start swimming and practice lots of yoga, to build upper body and core strength. Yoga? Blech, not for me.

But then SF got hit with this crazy storm and it just would not stop raining. So I figured, might as well spend this rainy afternoon trying out a yoga class.

The hour and fifteen minutes flew by. My body felt good. Great actually. My joints and muscles cracked throughout the entire session - most of them hadn't been stretched like that in a long time, if ever. My arms felt sore in that awesome way when you've gotten a good workout.

Ok ok, I'm officially hooked. I came home and immediately looked up the schedule and started planning how many classes I could realistically take in a week.