Namaste, y'all

For Christmas, one of my gifts was a 10-pack of yoga classes. (Yes, they make gift certificates for 10-packs of yoga classes at the North Pole. Duh.)

I've been to four classes now and while I am still far from becoming one of those white people who has a sanskrit tattoo, only wears Lululemon clothing and talks about his "chakra," I do see what all the fuss is about.

I've been to one or two of the more traditional yoga classes, the ones in candlelit studios where an instructor uses a soothing voice to coax you into slowly contort your body in ways that you last saw when you watched "The Devil Inside."

But my favorite kind of class is quite different than that. It's called Sculpt and it entails a chipper instructor turning up remixes of Adele and whipping through modified yoga poses very, very quickly. It's done in a studio with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and I always get a kick out of watching my gangly self flailing through the moves as the other students, mostly pixie-like women with unnatural flexibility, seamlessly flow from one pose to the next with no apparent difficulty.

I got interested in yoga because I wanted to improve my flexibility, posture and balance. Whether that is happening, I don't know, but the very tops of my abs hurt, as do my quads, shoulders, lats and basically every tiny muscle group that I didn't know existed, so something is happening here. Something that I like.