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Wilted Lotus Pose
"Baron Baptiste points out you've got to feel to heal, so when you get that it's very liberating," Jersky says. "Stress, you learn, becomes your best friend. Allows you to appreciate freedom."
A woman in the back row struggles to do a headstand, gravity dragging her legs down, as Jersky assumes the pose, rock-solid. Even Ivey's pink tank top is dampening, and a V of sweat seeps through the lotus flower on the back of her yoga pants as she walks around the room coaching:
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Wilted Lotus Pose On a sultry, stifling day, this yoga class turns up the heat and inhales deeply. |
"As you come into this place of fight or flight, learn the power of staying!"
The theory, Ivey explains as she glides among her students, correcting their positions, is that engaging your body will allow your mental and emotional sides to expand. It's about being willing to go someplace uncomfortable, Ivey says, letting your breathing take your mind off the physical exertion.
Like that famous yogi, Yogi Berra, said: "It ain't the heat, it's the humility."
The wall indicator is showing 95 degrees, with 60 percent humidity. If you plugged these numbers into the National Weather Service heat index calculator, it would read 113 degrees.
"Find a pose you'd like to buy into," Ivey says. "Go, Brian, go!"
She cheers a sweat-drenched man in T-shirt and shorts who is flopping on his belly, struggling to grab his ankles behind him in the basket pose. "It's so cleansing you don't need to get facials this month!"
Now it's 97 degrees, with 66 percent humidity. Heat index: 126 degrees.
"Work your elbow to the middle of your thigh and find your breath!" she tells them in the middle of eagle pose. "Your mouth is closed, while you access your ujjayi. Exhale! Inhale!
"This is not a water break, guys -- keep the fire burning! Handstand -- five, four, three, two . . . one. Open your mouth, let a sigh out -- "
Amazingly, none of the students executes the head-butt-the-teacher pose. They just blow exuberantly, obediently filling the room until it feels like the inside of a hot air balloon. All that breath has a faint loaminess. All that sweat, surprisingly, has no stench. All that hair is drenched and limp.
"It's not about being pretty," Ivey tells you. "It's about trying."
Ivey has her students down on the floor now, rocking in the boat pose, then finally, lying on their backs in shavasana, which is, appropriately enough, the corpse pose.
This is the best part, of course -- transformation by perspiration.
When the students step out of the studio, it's 92 degrees, and the evening feels cool.
