Touch Yoga

My yoga teacher is taking us through a lying down pose, a twist. “You’ll meet your neighbours tonight,” she laughs, meaning that because we’re all so close to each other there’s liable to be touch. To my left is a young man and to his left is a young woman. As we twist he gets perilously close to touching her rear end. Just a stretch of his fingers and...and...and he does. He touches her.

In the muted amber lights I watch as the young woman responds by reaching back to tug playfully at the young man’s fingers. Of course, they are together. We roll over to stretch our other side and I say hello to the elderly woman on my right as my fingertips brush her shoulder. Here in my yoga class this kind of touching between strangers is alright, it’s part of the yoga, just as the breath is.

After class my pal and I stop to chat with our teacher who tells us that she overextended herself this past week and is tired today as a result. She doesn’t seem especially tired to us but then she halts in the middle of her narrative to explain that that’s how she manifests her fatigue: too much talking. We laugh and then she talks some more: a story about the price one pays for letting one’s logical mind override one’s intuition.

My friend and I head out into the cool night air. We butt each other playfully then settle into talk. I tell her about my own progress in acting from my intuition. “Perhaps I will even learn how not to regularly overextend myself,” I conjecture. My friend pats my head in the quiet of the pre-spring night and all seems right with the world.

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photo by Scott Baker
profile pic by Aaron Schwartz