In addition to being somewhat crazy — a shrink once diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, which I thought was a bit of a stretch until I realized that, like everyone else, he just wanted to have a physical relationship with me — I am a yoga teacher. I don’t know what your idea of a yoga teacher is, but should you, recoiling in horror as you read along here, find yourself asking, “But how does someone like this become a yoga teacher?” — the short answer is that I gave a man with a beard and his hot wife $3,200 dollars. The long answer is… well, I’d like to say that it’s because if I hadn’t gotten obsessed with yoga I’d probably be dead because that’s what people always say about things like this: “If I hadn’t discovered writing, I’d be dead,” “if I hadn’t found Alcoholics Anonymous/married my amazing wife/started making autumn-inspired hand-knit legwarmers and selling them on Etsy, I’d be dead.” But saying, “without yoga I would probably be dead” would be, frankly, a little overdramatic. Let’s just say that if I didn’t do yoga, everything bad about me would just be worse, and what is bad is already bad enough.
Now, because you can get something for nothing, there’s a problem. Which is, Yoga Can Be Extremely Annoying. So if you’ve been meaning to get yourself there but have been thinking, “I’m afraid it will annoy me,” here’s some good news: You might be crazy, but as far as this particular fear goes, rest assured, it’s the product of whatever shred of sanity you may have retained.
There’s no getting around it. Yoga has moments of such profound annoying that after I finished Eat, Pray, Love (needless to say, I read the ashram section 100 times) all I could think was, “You wrote an entire book about yoga, meditation, and you never mentioned, ‘Oh, by the way, sometimes you will want to punch these people in the face’?” And this is where I perform my public service; in yoga, we call that a service. Everyone’s always telling you how great yoga is, and that’s true, but then you go there, and maybe the studio smells like onions steamed in cat pee, and it might have been helpful to know about that beforehand! You need to know exactly what will disturb you before you get there, so you can prepare; and you should also know that, even though everyone around you will seem perfectly unperturbed, someone — someone who stayed — feels your pain. Oh, and by the way, I want to underscore that what follows below is what bugs me about yoga; everything else is a glittering gift from Lord Shiva. Namaste!
People will have chive crotch. I developed the term “chive crotch” when, as a mere girl, I was visiting a friend in Oregon and attended a county fair with her. This was my first time on the West Coast. I had smelled body odor before, of course, but never body odor strong enough to make me almost pass out. This was not mere sweat, this was, I said to my friend, the scent of a person who, after carrying around the same bunch of chives in their underwear for an entire summer, had found themselves mid-August with no shower, no clean underwear, and, needless to say, no fresh bunch of chives. This is what about 15 percent of people smell like in yoga class. Look, I will confess to having a mild body odor myself at times. But I believe smelling like a person who showered recently, applied a non-Alzheimer’s causing deodorant or crystal to her pits, and sweated a little in the car is a far cry from chive crotch. The thing that’s really annoying about people stinking is they always have this look on their faces like smelling bad makes them somehow closer to the earth, more spiritual, than evil clean people who have used up precious natural resources and unleashed sodium sulfates into the environment for the mere purpose of not befouling the rooms they share with others.
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