Heart Full

Having lived in NYC since I was 17 and having passed the bonafide 10-year mark of living here I consider myself a “New Yorker”. I know where to get my morning bagel with my just-right coffee. I felt like I had managed to successfully integrate a continual wonder at living in this awesome city, with the street savvy to remain relatively safe. I’ve been known to boast to my friends all the precautions I take to make sure I don’t get into sticky situations, everything from never leaving with a stranger you just met at the cocktail destination of the night, to never letting your girlfriends leave alone with that stranger either. For the most part my precautions have paid off. Until they didn’t. Coming from Cobble Hill my aunt and I boarded the R train on our way back to Manhattan, and excitedly chatted about our new hair cuts. We were towards the back of the train, but not in an empty car, in fact given it was a weekend / off hours there were a surprisingly good number of people in our car (~10-15). When out of the corner I heard a man yell, ” are you laughing at ME?!!”, I didn’t even register that he was talking to me, even after the second time he yelled it. Only when his bag with sudden violence knocked my-just-right coffee out of my hands, and swung around for a second and third time did it finally sink in. He was hitting me with his plastic bag of trash, and I was paralyzed with fear. My aunt leapt up, pushed him away from me and started yelling at him to leave me the F!#$*!! ALONE! The fog in my mind began to lift with a new fear that he might turn his anger on her — barely thinking I grabbed her hand and told her “we have to RUN!” Not that there was anywhere to go, I discovered after throwing my body weight on the door separating the train cars and frantically turning the knob that the door was “locked for emergencies”.

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By now all of my friends know I’m hooked on yoga. Having heard me rave for months, they ventured to take a class with me. Feeling adventurous I took them to Yoga to the People , which I’d been wanting to try. Although I hadn’t been there yet, I felt confident the class would be good. The pictures on their site were stunning, and the reviews on yelp were glowing.

My friends were apprehensive, they hadn’t been to many studios, and never to a dedicated yoga studio. Having a yogi in the middle of the room demonstrate every variant of head stand, and poses indistinguishable from contortions didn’t really make them feel at home. The vibe was strangely unwelcoming, maybe it was the still and sweaty air, or the simmering knowledge that there was only one bathroom for the 40+ people in class.

I was eager to begin. But not more than 15 minutes into it, my impatience started to grow, and unfortunately it started to infect the people around me. Our (possibly) novice teacher, was continually confusing left and right, calling the poses (asanas) the wrong name, often just giving up and trying to describe the pose. Under normal circumstances this would be fine, except when you’re standing on one (very) tired leg.

Eventually, as we were held in lengthy and irregular suspense, pockets of students began guessing where she was going and would proactively move into the pose. Too bad for us, we were only right half the time. Worse yet, I started feeling a gnawing guilt. I was angry at her for “ruining” my friends’ first foray into yoga, but I of all people ( a teacher in training at the time myself) I should have been able to produce a modicum of empathy.
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