Shwami Shimon's father died this past week and he is sitting shiva for seven days, which is how I found myself at a cold yoga class last night. It's not that I couldn't live without yoga for a week -- because I could surely live without exercise forever -- but in true teenage fashion, everyone else was going so I went too. Actually, I wanted to find out if one could actually do yoga in a room that wasn't 105 degrees.
The short answer is yes, you can do yoga without feeling like you are stranded in the Sinai desert in the noon sun in summer. The longer answer is that it just doesn't feel like you have worked hard enough if the sweat isn't streaming off your body by the bucket load. Cold yoga is very civilized and everyone leaves the class looking pretty much as they did when they entered. After hot yoga you look like you just spent an hour and a half in the oven at 350 degrees.
As an aside, one of my friends asked me after the class why I did yoga at all. "You look like you were really struggling," she said. I wanted to punch her in the face but I did the mature thing and simply agreed that I wasn't the most flexible person on earth. I also added that Swami Shimon said that if I kept it up, I would eventually become more flexible.
If I gave up on everything I tried but didn't do well, then I might as well just sit on the edge of my bed and stare off into space all day. I am very good at that. Actually, I think you could fairly call me an expert in this category.
Back to yoga. Based on the remarks above you can reasonably assume that hot or cold, I didn't execute the moves with any finesse. Apparently temperature has nothing to do with my lack of balance or general yoga ability. I actually thought I was holding my own quite nicely in cold yoga until the editorial input from my "friend" after the class. The teacher didn't have to run to my rescue on a minute-by-minute basis the way Swami Shimon does, so I took that as a sign of improvement on my part.
When I asked the other hot yoga chicks if they preferred cold yoga over hot yoga I received a very enthusiastic and consistent "no way". That doesn't mean that they didn't have fun because who wouldn't have a good time doing pretty much anything with 13 friends? Plus, if you aren't comfortable bending over to grab your ankles and in the process sticking your rear-end in someone's face, then they really weren't your friends to begin with were they?
Also, one thing that cold yoga had that hot yoga never has was an apres-work-out meal of real Nepalese food. Compliments of the cold-yoga initiator, we had the most delicious vegetarian meal I can remember. I would tell you what I ate if I could, but I can't. All I could easily identify were the peas and the basmati rice. There was something mushy in a brown sauce and something else more mushy in a red sauce. Both tasted amazing. And all the dishes were spicy which gave me the added advantage of going home almost as hot as if I had gone to a hot yoga class.
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