Yoga

So now the stretch and lift and pause and the straining of muscles and the blossoming of the hips and chest cavities. I am my body. It is so easy for me to abandon my thoughts and become one pulsing, widening body. I can ignore the cloying scent of incense. I can overlook the cheese-cloth skirts and the little silver bells around people's ankles. I am my body and my body is sensual and it revels in this slow stretching of self. Yoga is like sex. Walking is like sex. Swimming is like sex. Sex everywhere that my body is pressed to find it's own rhythm. I fall into the metronome of sex. My body sweats and drips and pinks with the rush of blood.

They have to ruin it with the meditation. This lying still and listening to whale song played on a tinny CD player. They have to drone in that terribly placating anti-panic voice "breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth..." I breathe. Focus on your breath. I breathe or else I would die. I am still and silent and I can hear the god-awful drone of whales and all the incense comes flooding in to my lungs as I draw breath in, to a count of ten, releasing it into a room full of sweating, humming, cheese-cloth wearing women and a man, (that man, the same kind of man who can always be seen amongst a bevy of attractive cheesecloth wearing women).

The meditation is anti-sex. The meditation winds me up and quashes my desire, replacing it with a burning resentment. I resent the meditation. I resent the people who chose to record the sonic roar of under-water beasts and called it 'health-giving'. By the time the meditation is finished I am about as far away from calm as one could ever be.

Yoga is sex, but the humming bit just winds me up.