There’s No Easy Way to Say This

There is no easy way to say this, but through no fault of my own, I seem to have joined a cult. Now, the good news is that it doesn’t seem to be one of those cults where you have to hide your young because I’m into ritual sacrifices or anything, although I’m still learning and if that changes, I’ll certainly give you the courtesy of a head’s up. Especially if you subscribe to my feed.

It started when I went to yoga. Because I wanted to be more flexible and relaxed. Flexible and relaxed! Why didn’t I see the brain washing coming?

Because I’m stupid, that’s why.

So, one day, we’re doing yoga, and I’m in pain, praying for a quick death, when suddenly the teacher says, “look around the room and see the pictures of holy beings. Their light is helping you with the positions.” Now, this is the same teacher that I’d misunderstood before, so I thought that maybe instead of light, she was saying might, or even kite, but whatever the diction absolutely nothing was helping me with the yoga and I was still feeling very ouchy. But the teacher is not satisfied with a general “their light/knight will help you” and she starts naming all these holy entities, like Jesus and Buddha and then someone else with her “elephant baby”. So I look up because although I’ve seen plenty of Jesus and Buddha, I’m less familiar with the Elephant Baby, and there it is. Elephant Baby. So of course for the rest of the class, I’m obsessed with the Elephant Baby and thinking how if I were an Elephant Person, a lot of these yoga poses would be a lot easier to do because the trunk would really extend me and maybe being an Elephant is less of a birth defect and more of a blessing, although I still don’t quite see the holiness in it.

And then the next class, they tell us the story of Krishna and his girlfriend Rama. Of course I almost pass out from boredom and the only thing that is keeping me awake is my biting the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from giggling. And the story is that in one of the yoga classrooms, there is a statute of Krishna, but it is covered up because he is so beautiful that when he is presented, all the attention must be on him. Sounds very Kardashian to me. And then, we have to chant. And I can’t bring myself to do it. So I sit there, looking straight ahead at the teacher, who has her eyes closed, like everyone else, and I try to figure out if I have the nerve to check my blackberry really quickly, but then I chicken out because what if the teacher sees and tells Krishna?

And then everyone opens their eyes and the teacher produces a small statute of Krishna and says that as we’re doing our ext routine, she is going to have the assistants bring him around so that we can all take a look and I sort of internally roll my eyes. So then we’re in this pose that I can only assume is called the Twelfth Circle of Hades and I am in such agony that I would do anything to make it stop, and I consider yelling out that I’d like to return to our previous discussion of Krishna, when the assistant brings the statute towards me and I see that Krishna is blue. And somehow that makes me feel better.

I have no idea why Krishna is blue, but when I tell John about it later, he says that he’s probably really cold.

Maybe.

Namaste.

One year ago ...

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