The Hype Is Real

As previously referenced, I love going to my friend's incredibly nice gyms. And one day, while visiting another friend in a different big city, she asked if I wanted to go to the yoga class at her gym. She told me it was life changing.

I didn't understand how a yoga class could be life changing, but I totally wanted to go.

So we drove into the heart of downtown where dingy skyscrapers made the sidewalks dark. We pulled into one of the high rises. After parking, we entered into the ground floor of the gym, which had wood paneling, employees dressed in matching black and white uniforms, and photos of famous members tastefully crowding the walls. We checked in at a desk that was thick enough to stop a bullet and took the elevator up to the locker room.

This locker room had it's own hot tub. It had saunas. It had shampoo that smelled really nice. The women in the locker room had more of a lean and polished look when compared to the locker room denizens of other friend's gym, where they had more fillers and implants.

Upon changing, we took a series of staircases to a floor that had a single yoga studio on it. This high rise gym had a bit of a Harry Potter vibe, like all the stairways might switch places at any minute. The floors seemed to make no sense– one had a pool on it, but this one seemed to only have a yoga studio.

People crowded in the hallway until a man in his late twenties/early thirties walked up. He had that lanky yogi look, his long wavy hair piled into a messy pony tail. He wore some ridiculous sandals with zero arch support that made my lower back hurt looking at them, but they did bode well for him being a yoga instructor who took his craft seriously.

When this guy appeared, the mood in the crowd changed. People began to resonate. I mean, I know this sounds woo woo, but there was a sudden energy to the group. Even my friend was vibrating.

He let us into the studio, which had polished wood floors and windows that looked out into the overcast day. We were high up, I'm not sure how many floors, and we could only see the windows of the buildings across from us.

No one in the class spoke to each other. The instructor padded around on his very flat feet and whispered to some people, but other than that, the room was free of human speech. People set up their mats and waited. The room hummed with anticipation.

The instructor put on some music. It had a rolling energy to it, and while it was instrumental and soft, there was something urgent about it. Then he walked to the front of the room and began to talk.

His voice melded into the music, like beat poetry, or dare I say it an actual song. He called us through the various poses, his cadence never wavering, his tempo set to the thrum of the music. It became impossible, even for me, who did not know all the moves, to not fall into a state of flow.

He guided us through each movement, his voice pulling us into the next, and I lost track of time. All that existed was me in that room with that yoga man, rapping vinyasas at me in a voice that could have been a god's. And while I could not do everything he asked me, it didn't matter. I was both more in my body than I had ever been and totally outside of the real world. My senses popped. I was the sweat that threaded down my limbs. The eucalyptus infuser made the room into an exotic forest. The way his voice washed with the music and met my ears, such a thing wasn't fit for public consumption. Through the movement of my body, I became non-corporal.

Time ceased in that room.

When we finally completed our last vinyasa, we lay on our mats. I felt as if I were waking from a cryogenic sleep. I transitioned from an ineffable plain back to a room full of people I didn't know. We had all had an experience together, and yet it had been entirely personal and internal.

I now understood why this random group of people buzzed with anticipation when this man hippie walked among them. Whatever he had just done to us was, simply put, transcendent. We were mortal. It was possible, he was not.

We walked out of that room and back into the modern day, and while we rejoined the world as I knew it, I had touched something beyond myself. I'd say whatever had just happened was akin to art expressed through group movement. I'd never considered such a thing could exist in random group of people, but it did. And that made the world just a little more mysterious and much brighter.

For a brief moment on a cloudy spring day, I left Earth through a skyscraper and traveled to worlds unknown. It's hard to believe, but my friend wasn't wrong. The class was life altering.