Couples Yoga

On Friday night we tried out something new: couple's yoga. A co-worker does yoga at the Samadhi Yoga Studio in Capital Hill (very near downtown) and they just started offering a couple's yoga class every other Friday night. She was planning to go and thought we'd be interested. I was totally excited (so much so that I had trouble concentrating all afternoon - but it was Friday and I always have trouble concentrating on Fridays).

It turns out this studio is in the heart of Capital Hill - hard to get to and hard to park at - but we still managed to get there in the nick of time and get calmed down before the start of class. Our heart rate went back up however when the teacher came in, did a few back flips, then had everyone sit in a circle and say what their involvement in yoga is (there were about ten of us). It turns out that most everyone in the class did yoga more often than us. A lot more often. Then we did the warm-up: three or four salutation to the sun series, then some backbends (!) and handstands (!!). I'm proud to say I managed a headstand, and attempted a backbend but didn't quite get there. I tried a handstand with the teacher spotting but almost pulled a muscle.

Then we started doing the more complicated poses, involving two people: a "base" and a "flyer" - where the base would lift up the flyer. These actually turned out to be not that bad. There were various levels of each one, and we eventually paired off into groups so that we would also have spotters (sometimes you needed more than one spotter!). The only hard part was that we paired off into a group with two other bulky heavy dudes so I always ended up lifting the Studly Hubby, who is about 30 lbs heavier than me (but the lightest one in the group), and my Studly Hubby got conned into lifting the heavy dudes a few times (one was 230 lbs). But the heavy dudes made great spotters, so that was good. These poses really get your adrenaline pumping (especially when you're the flyer) - sometimes when I came down out of a pose I would turn into a babbling idiot for a few minutes, and for at least an hour after class I was experiencing some sort of weird high.

One really neat thing was that there was a Singing Satsang group (hosted by Gina Sala) that meets at the same time in the studio next door to us that does meditative singing and chanting - it was beautiful and at the end of our class we sat in a circle and joined in with them.

What an unusual Friday night! It was really fun.