becoming a yogini.(Column)

Byline: Sally Singer

This past year I developed an oxymoronic and slightly base ambition: to acquire a Yoga Body. Yoga, a philosophy that obliterates all Cartesian distinctions between the physical and the mental, is notoriously not about getting flat abs, lean thighs, and a certain swanky litheness. But on a visit to Los Angeles, I constantly encountered these attributes-poolside at the Chateau Marmont, in line for green tea at chicly organic cafes in Venice-on men and women toting the giveaway rubber mat. And I wanted to be like them: calm, nimble, and apparently ineffably superior to gymgoing neurotics like me, with our antagonistic captivity to rep counts and cardio time blocks and our ugly partnerships with machines. Gymgoing was all about strenuous awkwardness. Yoga was about grace. And if being graceful meant looking like Gwyneth Paltrow or Christy Turlington. . . . Well, yes, please.

It had been five years and three baby boys since I had

downward-dogged with any regularity. For a demi-decade I had simply not had the time to set aside the minimum of two hours that most yoga classes involve (a 100-minute class, fifteen minutes to get changed and claim a spot, five minutes to shower and grab a taxi); and dashing into the gym for a quick fitness fix had been ideally convenient. A second deterrent to returning to yoga had been the slightly unnerving prospect of having to stage a kind of comeback; much easier, in a way, to embark on something brand-new-trapeze, anybody?-than to seek to recapture a proficiency that one has possessed but lost. Nonetheless, all this shilly-shallyingly gave way to a suddenly overwhelming imperative: to narrow the gap between my body and Gumby's.

So off I went to Om, one of New York's top studios, which specializes in its own mix of dynamic vinyasa yoga (in which one posture flows quickly into another) and Iyengar yoga (in which the static perfection of alignment is paramount). The goal was to get into that shape in six weeks, training Monday to Friday. "It's not competitive," Om's owner, Cyndi Lee, assured me after our first of three private sessions, as she wrote out my yoga homework (planks and dolphin poses for arm strength, crow setups for agility, and headstand preps for confidence). But it was slightly disconcerting at my first (intermediate) class to overhear my whole row chattering about the yoga classes they would be teaching at other studios while warming up with casual lotuses and terrifying supine pretzels that were, I could only surmise, variants of the sleeping thunderbolt (supta vajrasana).

The first week was physically difficult, too. I wobbled through the standing asanas-even the lunging postures reduced my gym-conditioned (and lunged-to-death) legs to jelly- and failed utterly at anything involving flinging my feet skyward. It seemed inconceivable that I would ever manage to stand on my hands, or even forearms. And for all the flexibility and peace of mind that yoga promised, the business of adhering to a regimen of lengthy punctual classes stressed me out and consumed what little slack my work and family commitments allowed me.

After three weeks everything magically changed. It's a well-known metamorphosis that never loses its enchantment: the moment you realize that you have passed into a new world of competence. Now others wobbled during inverted triangle. Now I warmed up with a knowing hint of ardha baddha padma paschimottanasana (half-bound lotus forward stretch). The fundamental transition, however, was not the achievement of yogini insiderdom. What felt so good was the feeling that I no longer ...