yoga diary - day seven

That's right, skipped days five and six, not because I didn't do yoga but because, for whatever reason, I tend to slack off on weekends.

Anyway, who reads this? It's like hollering into a cave.

So I recently read an article in the New York Times about yoga, apparently there is a woman becoming quite famous on her approach to yoga, Tara Stiles has had the audacity to suggest that yoga might be more about becoming "Slim, Calm (and) Sexy" than anything else (Slim, Calm, Sexy is the title of her book.) She recommends 15 minutes a day.

Ms. Stiles is getting significant flack from everyone else in the yoga world for exposing her dirty little secret - that she's not in it for enlightenment but rather she wants to stay fit, be relaxed and have a decent sex life indefinitely.

Surprise surprise, the book's a bestseller.

Well, me too.

When I am dripping sweat, trying desperately to stretch into lizard pose or lowering myself slowly from plank pose into position for cobra, I am not thinking of enlightenment. I am thinking about how my feet won't swell when I've been trapped at my desk for four hours and how I won't get out of breath climbing the stairs and yes, how much hotter I'll look in my black wrap around dress.

Today I got dressed in some of the old clothes that were too new to toss before I left for Austin last year because they were too tight to wear regularly in my old body. Now my new body isn't what I want it to be either but these clothes aren't tight anymore, they remind me that as little progress as I think I've made, I have made progress and that progress is not toward enlightenment, it's toward being flexible, even lithe, slender - maybe, and sexy the next time I step off the airplane in Austin. That's a fact.

I've done 21 days in a row and every one has been hard in its own way, I'll keep going anyway because I've decided that's what I need to do but if I for one minute thought that nothing dramatic would change in my appearance for all this effort? I wouldn't do it. And neither would most of the smiling yoginis sitting in their half lotus at the yoga studio two hours before they go out to try the newest thing in haute cuisine or buy a new dress without worrying about the steady decline of their physical state.

The body is part of it, sexuality is part of it, why are we all so interested in people thinking we aren't into these things? Like they come effortlessly? They don't. I did my yoga today. I didn't want to, the living room was cold and it wasn't fun but what got me onto the mat was the fact that I will improve for doing it - I will become slim, calm and sexy and I want that. Hell, don't you?