Let’s Go on a Meetup Yoga Hike!

After my brief foray into online dating this Summer, I decided that meetups were a better way for me to go. Most meetups have the advantage that they are random groups of couples and single folks, friends, and strangers, all with some interest in common. I went on a couple of meetup bike rides, and a meetup hike with dinner after. I met some cool people. They met me. 

Since I am allergic to anything with Singles in the title, I have not joined any singles meetups yet. There is a singles meetup dance on December 29th. I am trying to get up the courage to think about considering possibly perhaps going. Maybe. Or not. It could be that I drive there, sit a while in my car, and then drive home. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, once you join one meetup group, the Meetup app seems to think you want to be bombarded with emails about every single group and activity within a hundred mile radius. Thus it was that while I was preparing to go in to one of my patients yesterday, a message popped up on my phone: New Meetup Group: Yoga Hikes. I was a bit distracted, thinking about my dying patient and all, but still I had to grapple with this concept for a minute. Yoga hikes? How can you do yoga if you are hiking? Conversely, how could you hike if you were also, simultaneously as it were, doing yoga? Do you hike to the yoga? Yoga, then hike, then more yoga? I am also kind of allergic to yoga, but I know enough about it to understand that the concept has a lot to do with staying in the one place and centering yourself. And hiking? It’s all about striding around and going somewhere. I quickly gave up trying to understand this strange marriage of hobbies, and went in to see my patient.

The yoga thing: I tried it. Everyone was banging on endlessly about how it changed their lives. So I went to a few different classes. I tried hot yoga. I tried cool yoga. I tried really really gentle zen yoga where most people fell asleep. I tried really annoying yoga where a 25-year-old instructor ruined my shivassanas with her 25-year-old life advice. I kept thinking how I really didn’t like yoga. But who doesn’t like yoga? It’s like saying you don’t like the Dalai Lama. So I kept trying. Because people kept telling me it was just that I hadn’t done enough of it. I didn’t like it in the beginning, they would assure me, usually with more than a hint of smugness, but I finally got it. And now? It’s changed my life!

Finally, I decided that I really like my life the way it is. I feel perfectly grounded and centered, and it’s completely okay if I don’t like yoga. I don’t much like being told where to put all the different parts of my body, or for how long. Nor do I like being told to inhale through my nose then open my mouth and exhale slowly making a HA sound. I don’t want to make a HA sound. And I really hate downward dog. I like the Dalai Lama though, so we’re good there.

I also like hiking, so after work I had to check out the yoga hiking meetup thing. Turns out you hike somewhere and then, just when you’re having a really great time swinging your arms and chatting with your meetup buddies, marching along and taking in the view, you have to stop at a flat place, unroll your yoga mat and start...doing yoga. Imma skip that meetup.

I do have a pretty bad yoga confession, now that you’ve got me started. I’m all about live and let live. If other people want to do yoga, go right ahead. But there’s something about seeing people walking round town in their LuLu Lemon yoga pants with their yoga mats slung over their shoulder that just sort of irks me. Usually when I see them I’m driving off to visit my first patient. I’ve just spent an hour setting up my day and making sure nobody died overnight. I’m on my second coffee and playing music, and I’m feeling pretty good. And then I have to stop at every pedestrian crosswalk in Fairfax to let the yoga folks cross. I know they’re about to spend 75 minutes on the clean wood floor at Yoga Mountain clearing their energy and aligning their chakras. And I really want to just let them. But sometimes, I also want to rev my engine while they’re in the crosswalk, see if they drop their yoga mats.

It’s the same at my gym. If I walk in and there’s a dance class going on, that’s cool. The music is usually some sappy Hawaiian thing, and I long ago gave up trying to follow dance instructions (I am really bad at this, see yoga complaints above), but I’m happy to stick in my earbuds to drown out the crooning and get on the treadmill. But if there’s a yoga class going on, I immediately feel annoyed. I have to pass through the class to get to the spa and changing rooms, so I can’t avoid hearing at least thirty seconds of yoga instructions before I shut the changing room door on them. 

It’s not so much what they say. I think it’s hugely important to connect with your inner stillness and feel yourself root into the earth. It’s the tone of voice. Yoga instructors generally seem to think that their instructions won’t sink in unless intoned in a cloying, fake-spiritual sort of voice. It’s the kind of voice I have to shut a door on and go get in the hot tub. I almost always connect with my inner stillness in the hot tub.

As well as being a failed yoga practitioner, it may not surprise you to hear I am a failed meditator. This is the subject of another blog post, but I just want to mention a great video I found on the Internet that did help me meditate for a bit, even if I was constantly giggling during the experience. It’s called F*ck That: An Honest Meditation, and it’s by a guy called Jason Headley. Gradually let the horseshit of the external world fade from your awareness, he intones, in exactly that fake spiritual voice I was mentioning. My kind of guy. Maybe if he was on the yoga hike, I might give it a whirl.