Musings by Moss Yoga

Stress is a part of life. Lately stress has been a big part of my life. With Work, trying to pay for college educations, constant seductive offers coming in from Jennifer Love Hewitt and Heidi Klum. The stress is sometimes more than a little rough. A friend of mind recommended Yoga as a good way to release tension, become more flexible, and reduce my stress.

So I went to Target and bought Yoga for beginners. What I should have bought was Yoga for the extremely large, uncoordinated, over aged beginner with bad knees.

First things first, I’m not even going to try to find the yoga outfit the lady wears during the DVD. I’m quite sure it wouldn’t flatter me, and it definitely was not my color (sea green). Sea green makes my hips look big. Actually, my hips make my hips look big.

The first Yoga position involved dropping to your knees and sitting back on my feet. This move alone made it pretty obvious that yoga guru’s are more than a little on the sadistic side. I’ve had six knee surgeries over the years mainly from playing hockey. I didn’t want to have to tell all my macho friends that my 7th knee surgery was caused by my first attempt at what was the easiest of all the yoga moves.

To make it clear to you my butt never touched my feet. At one point, the pain was so intense I saw God. God told me Yoga is for young women who are still able to move with amazing flexibility. Then with a thunderous sound to his voice he stated “You are not one of those girls!”

I quickly sat up saving what would have surely been a catastrophic knee experience. As I did sit up both knees yelled at me like a first grade teacher yell at the student who’s eating paste. They were not happy at all.

The next move involved a sort of sideways lunge that had my feet pointing in opposite directions, my right knee forward, and a twist at the mid section that now had me looking like one of those Aunt Annie’s pretzels you get in the mall. (I like the cinnamon sugar combo) My right knee sounded the “Danger, Danger, we’re going down” alarm and I was on the floor. I wasn’t supposed to be on the floor, yet I magically was. Trying not to be a quitter I got up and tried it again. She (the instructor) was on her 4th or 5th rep by now. I was finding it hard to convince myself that this was going to get easier. Probably had something to do with the sudden onset of swelling in my right knee.

At this point, the sweet, cute little instructor has become a psycho, sadistic, hater of all things in life, especially beginning Yoga students. At one point I saw flames shoot out of her eyes and horns grow on her head.