Satan Runs Yoga!
I invite Satan into my body three times a week. No, this isn’t an alcohol metaphor. (That would be more like four or five times).
I do yoga.
Evangelicals Fear Trance (Maybe Dubstep and EDM, too?)
You see, unbeknownst to many Americans — including ALL Californians — some rabid evangelicals, including Seventh Day Adventists like my life partner’s mom, believe yoga is “of the devil,” and if you “empty your mind,” Old Scratch will squat in your mental real estate. These ultra-religious commentators claim yoga makes you susceptible to a “satanic trance.”
This paranoia is undoubtedly influenced by the Hindu faith’s imprint on Kundalini yoga, a practice variant that seeks to unleash spiritual energy, conceptualized as a coiled-up serpent at the spine’s base. Well, there you go! Anytime something references a snake, it must be devil shit. Rightly so. If it weren’t for a serpent in the Garden of Eden, none of us would be paying for Netflix subscriptions.
Why We Have To Sweat It Out in Hot Yoga
You may recall that after “the serpent” coaxed Eve to bite an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam — ever the suck-up — took a bite, too. God banished us from Paradise and revealed our nakedness. (We’ll leave to theologians why God doesn’t get due credit for launching a porn industry that generates greater profits than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined).
We also won’t dally on God’s punishment of making the serpent “crawl on his belly and eat dust, except to suggest that the snakes need to get to it and stop swallowing cows, alligators, and themselves. Americans watching snakes eat weird shit on YouTube costs us 85 million manhours of productivity annually.[i]
We’ll ask instead how Satan can waltz unimpeded through our mental front doors but God won’t. Based on the intellectual functioning of rabid ultra-evangelicals, His influence seems greatest when there aren’t a ton of thoughts mulling around upstairs. Does God think it’s too exploitative to claim something so pristine? If so, get over it, Big G! This is how America, your “City on a Hill,” was built. Plus, you’re not some strip-mall developer snaking the last remaining green space in Bedford Falls. You could do some good up there! How about filling us up with an encouraging thought? We believe in you!
All the Mysticism You Missed
But to the yoga hatas, here is an exhaustive list of the “Eastern mysticism” I’ve experienced in yoga class:
(1) somebody rang a chime once; and
(2) I inadvertently learned some Sanskrit phraseology, though it didn’t stick. Terms like “bhujangasana” are too hard for Americans to remember, so we give them dope street names, such as “cobra pose.”
More snake influences!
Perhaps the most pernicious snake influence to date was one yogi blasting DJ Snake’s “Turn Down for What?” The answer being, of course, it was necessary to get to Downward Dog. Yes, yoga class plays “secular” music across the spectrum, from Dr. Dre instrumentals to heartfelt Ed Sheeran ballads that reaffirm you can succeed despite being unhandsome. But that just makes yoga as satanic as your Pandora account.
I should confess I regularly “ohm” with the group, which is the chanting/exhaling you do before and after class to connect with everybody while moving into your “flow.” If you’ve never experienced ohm’ing before, it sounds like this: “Ohmmmmm.” And, yes, it is ironic that an Ohm is a unit measuring the impedance of electrical flow while yoga “ohms” are about facilitating flow. (You now have the benefit of everything I learned in high school physics. You’re welcome).
Ohm’ing is the most intriguing aspect of yoga because it can sound as melodic as the no-longer-Mormon-but-still-Tabernacle Choir or as discordant as a band of intoxicated soccer ruffians wailing on broken vuvuzelas (though one wonders who can tell the difference between broken and functioning ones).
Ohm’ing requires tactical forethought. You must decide in a millisecond after the instructor starts whether you‘ll try to hit his or her note or harmonize by going down a half-octave. Also, will you carry the note straight or riff a little like an African-American national anthem singer? Lastly, you must calculate how deeply you should breathe in and how forcefully you can expel air and still be able to ride the ohm to its conclusion.
If you Ohm Too Quickly…It Happens To a Lot of Guys
To date, I have never matched the instructor’s ohm duration. I have a lingering suspicion the women around me think I’m terrible at sex. If I finish early on breathing…well, you know. Drawing from that sphere of human conduct, I employ “faking it” as my principal strategy. Specifically, I let the rest of the class go a few seconds before I join in. It’s like foreplay for breathing, and I “get worked up” by watching you all go first. Ultimately, it doesn’t help, so my concluding, gasping exhale makes me sound like an emphysema sufferer crawling desperately toward an oxygen tank, though on the upside, my head is in Sphynx pose.
Serves me right though. Had I not been vain, I wouldn’t have done yoga. I tried it on a lark because a woman once mocked me, saying I “couldn’t handle it.” I pfththth’d her. I was working out regularly and subscribed to the view it’s not real exercise if you can do it barefoot. Her challenge stuck, and yoga landed on my bucket list so I could prove how creampuff it was.
When yoga re-emerged on my radar this year because I was struggling to keep focus and mental clarity, I took the leap, and just as expected…I was a cream puff.
The Heat Is On
Yoga made me sweat more than any human endeavor, not only because the instructor raised the temperature in the room, but also, it forced me to employ muscles who hadn’t heard from me in years. Now we’re happily reacquainted like long-lost friends.
Yoga suppressed my appetite, relieved stress, and though my mind is as wanderlust-y as ever, it stays focused during yoga, mostly out of necessity. The Vinyasa yoga I take rapidly changes positions, so I fixate on questions like “What’s the next pose?”, “Am I doing this right?!?”, or the all-consuming query: “Sweet Jesus, can anybody smell the garlic I’m sweating out? How is this even possible? I haven’t eaten garlic in weeks! Does garlic accumulate in your pores? Should I find a doctor to write an article for the New England Journal of Medicine on my affliction?” Welcome to my rabbit hole.
Keeping Focus with SO Many Squirrels
Those fixations are still sweet relief because they limit my wandering thoughts. There are three human activities that keep me this focused: yoga, sex, and Indianapolis Colts football. This is no surprise as all three involve excited breathing and periodic performance disappointments.
Tragically, I still can’t get my breathing right during yoga. Routinely, as the instructor says “exhale,” I’m inhaling and vice versa. I’ve become the breathing equivalent of the non-rhythmic white guy who claps on the downbeat. It always amuses when the instructor says, “Remember your breathing.” She’ll know I forgot when I fall out. Otherwise, no reminder needed; I’m sucking wind through my nose with vigor.
When Meditation Shows You Suck at Meditation
Yoga also embraces the idea of meditation, and anything that helps me improve mindfulness is welcome. It’s common for my laptop to have 17 open websites, 10 or more open Word documents, and 19 e-mail drafts. I do downward dog because I AM the Up Dog (see what I did there?). I’m the horse whose blinders fell off mid-race, flipping out on the overload.
A colleague recommended Headspace, a guided meditation app I enjoyed greatly because it contains funny, animated vignettes, and a guy with a cockney accent narrates. Nothing like getting life insight kicked off with an “Elo, Guvnah!” Headspace provided an incredible theoretical framework for combating negative thoughts. You don’t hide from them; you look ’em dead in the eye to release them into steam and watch them float away. In application, my negative thoughts were more motivated than spawning salmon. They kept finding their way back upstream.
Headspace teaches you to forgive yourself when your mind wanders and just gently redirect it back to your chosen focal point. But I ended up sounding like an auctioneer. “Come back here……back here….back, back, ba, ba, ba, back here…..back here!” My moments of correction so dramatically dwarfed my milliseconds of thoughtful reflection…upon further thoughtful reflection, I stopped mediation. I know this is a copout, but if I had mental fortitude, I wouldn’t need the yoga.
So do yoga. And lest you harbor lingering doubts on the Satan axis, just invoke the words of the Lord: “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
Just don’t look at me when I’m in Warrior One. I still don’t have it down yet.
[i] Forty-six percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Just like this one.
