FollowWith finals honing in, Berkeley students turn to their favorite methods of distressing. For some this means eating a lot of pizza and for others it means hitting up the treadmill. But for me it means getting some much needed hot yoga.
For those unfamiliar with hot yoga, let me emphasize the most important detail: heat, usually between 98 and 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Regular hot yoga-goers will tell you just how amazing it feels. But then there are those exciting times when the class is excessively sweltering and your thoughts fail to maintain a grip on the sanity that is dripping off your body concurrently with roughly three pounds of sweat.
Sometimes there’s this awkward moment in yoga where you think that you literally might die right there in the studio because it’s so goddamn hot. Your chest feels hotter than it’s ever felt and your vision begins to blur. You aren’t even choosing to focus on your breath at this point; you have to or else you would drop to the sweat-drenched floor, passed the fuck out.
Of course, in this moment, the teacher calmly instructs everyone to “let his or her thoughts be kind” or some mantra of the like. You really wish you could think about anything other than the fact that you have entered survival mode where your primitive instincts have kicked in. Your sole priority is making it through these 60 minutes of extra intense, hotter than hell exercise. Your thoughts are anything but kind.
And you know it’s bad when the ambitious girl in the front row walks outside with her head down to recompose herself after a relentless Warrior Two sequence. You think, oh shit, even the yoga moms are dropping like flies. If she can’t get through this, what does that mean for me? You focus on your breath even more, just to make sure that your lungs are still functioning in the midst of this physical and psychological crisis.
After the remainder of your sanity tells you that this class is likely the last thing you will ever do, you find yourself in Savasana, or Corpse Pose. The teacher opens and closes the door a couple of times to get some air flowing because she finally realizes that she has slowly baked all of her beloved students like cookies in an oven for the past hour. Every gust of air feels like God. Class wraps up in the next couple of minutes, and then you’re done. You came close to death, felt the touch of God, and that was it.
And however little sense it makes, you’ll come back in the next couple of days and do it all over again.
Awkward moments will undoubtedly feel just as overwhelming as before, but not exactly the same. Perhaps it is this smallest feeling of accomplishment that keeps us hungry for more. Or perhaps yoga-goers are freaks. We may never know.
Happy Finals.
Image source: www.catlarimore.com
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