The room is eerily calm.  It smells like a spa.  I need to figure out what that fragrance is and make my bathroom smell that way.  The lights are dim.  I could probably fall asleep right now if the circumstances were a bit different.  There are at least forty people in the room yet not a single word is being spoken.  I feel like a sneeze would be a sin.  My breath is already changing and I haven’t even been in the room for sixty seconds.  What will people do if I pass out?  Surely, they have an emergency plan all worked out.  I won’t be the first person to pass out will I?

I look around to find where the college girl placed my mat.  I see three purple mats in the corner of the room.  Mine is purple right?  I should have put my name on it or something.  One has a toy car laying on it.  Is that their creative way of letting people know whose mat is whose?  I pick one of them and hope that I don’t start sweating on someone else’s mat.

I place my water at the corner of my mat in what looks like a safe place away from any leg movement.  Leave it to me, though, to kick my giant cup of water over in such a serene environment.  Looking around, not even pretending to know what I am supposed to do next, I see people appearing to be napping while others are stretching in ways I haven’t been able to do since I was seven.  I sat on my mat and gave a few stretches from high school track and then went with the napping option.

My sister had told me about hot yoga probably a year ago.  And I didn’t hide my opinion of it from her at all.  I laughed and told her she was absolutely nuts.  One, why yoga?  I can’t stand all the slow, calming talk and ‘looking deep into your soul’ stuff yoga seemed to be about.  Two, why on earth would you want to exercise in a sauna?  I sat in a sauna one time in my life and hated every minute of it.  Hot tubs I get.  But I just never got the point of sitting in a room so hot that sweat is literally pouring down your body and you can hardly breathe.

Yet, here I was for the SECOND time, attending a hot yoga class and eating every word and laugh I gave my sister.

The honest reason I was there was I found an amazing deal on Groupon…and I wanted something to do for myself once in a while.

Sweat literally began dripping from my every pore within twenty minutes.  I have never in my life been a ‘sweater’.  When I would work out (or layout in the sun), I might sweat but never have I ever had to grab a towel and literally wipe sweat from my skin so that it would not fall to the floor.  Never have I had to wipe sweat from my face to keep drops from running into my eyes.  Never have I ever ended a work out in clothes that felt like I had just climbed out of a pool.  Until yesterday (well, and last week).

But I loved every minute of it.  Yes, my flexibility is not even close to what it used to be but I enjoyed stretching and hopefully strengthening my muscles.  And it now lends a challenge to me each time I go to see how much further I can go.  And the one-hour of calmness after a day with a strong-willed two-year-old was very refreshing (not to mention the cold, scented oil towel they passed around at the end of class!).

While hot yoga may not be a Montana-thing, it is certainly worlds different from anything I had tried in Marion.  And new experiences are what I am hoping for here in Montana.

And, by the way, it was only as I was rolling up my mat at the end of the sixty-minute class that I realized the toy car that had been laying on the mat was not the studios creative (odd) way of distinguishing people’s mats.  I was Liam’s.  He had been stuffing cars into my rolled up mat just a few hours before.  Proof that a mom can never escape her children (and never would I want to!)

So, 18 more classes to go before they have me hooked and charge me full price!

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