Bend Me, Shape me - Giving Yoga and meditation for couples a try

By Josh B. Wardrop for the Weekend's OUT THERE Column

MARLBOROUGH, MA- My girlfriend was grinning at me with a gleam in her eye. And, that's never a good thing. Usually, a gleam like that involves discussions of ice cream, diamonds or her beloved dog (and crazed eating machine), Chance:

" I came up with a great 'Out There' for you to do," she said.

I immediately felt relieved. I'd been wracking my brains trying to think of a suitably interesting "Out There," and I knew that my girlfriend's suggestion - whatever it was - would meet my main criteria: low risk of radical dismemberment; After all, it's in her best interests to keep me healthy, therefore ensuring that the garbage gets taken out.

“Cool,” said I. “What is it?”

The next thing I knew I was in a room full of strangers, my face pressed into the floor as my girlfriend sat on my buttocks.

Before the more prudish among you reach for your quill pens and fire off letters of complaint, let me explain. We were at Earthsong Yoga Center in Marlborough, participating in a special partner yoga class led by instructor Helen Garabedian. The class was a beginner level session teaching basic yoga exercises and meditation techniques for couples.

“Beginner-level" is the operative word here, you see, as I haven't stretched anything besides the truth in the last six months. While my girlfriend has been a devoted yoga student for the last year or so, the closest I've ever come to achieving a higher level of consciousness involved a couple bottles of NyQuil, side one of "Dark Side of the Moon", and a party size bag of Fritos.

Mind you, I like to think I’ve always had an open mind about yoga. I know some folks (mostly men, sorry guys) seem to think that to take part in a yoga class you have to be a bleach-blonde, twig-eating nitwit named Starshine who comes to class with a purple robe and Nikes.

However, as I sat on a blue mat, looking around the room at my fellow students, I was reassured that nothing could be farther from the truth. The people in the class were ordinary, everyday couples of all ages, shapes and sizes. There were husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, even a mother-daughter pair, all of them intent on getting the most they could out of the experience
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My own apprehensions about taking yoga were really about my body’s flexibility – or lack thereof. Now, I’m not exactly as brittle as Strom Thurmond, but I have been prone to unpredictable bouts of excruciating back pain since I hurt myself playing baseball when I was in high school. Given that a strong, poorly-timed sneeze has been enough to put me in traction in the past, I was understandably a tad nervous about putting myself in the “extended child” pose – the aforementioned “face on the floor, girlfriend on buttocks” maneuver.

Sure enough, when I first started my yoga session, my body made a few noises that human bodies really shouldn’t make – there was more snapping, crackling and popping going on than in a bowl of Rice Krispies. But, as the 90-minute session went on, I found myself rather pleasantly surprised at the realization that the only pain I felt was that ever-elusive “good” pain – the sensation that you’re pushing your body to do something productive.

My body’s flexibility may have been more than what I anticipated, but my sense of balance managed to live down to my grievously low expectations. When Helen called upon us to enter the “tree” pose – in which students stand on one leg and place the sole of their other foot against their thigh or calf – I found myself resembling a tree only in the sense that people to either side of me were yelling “Timber!” (They have those comfy yoga mats there for a reason, you know.)

After a good 75 minutes of contortions, stumbling and a stunning personal lack of grace and equilibrium, Helen asked us to all get rolled up cushions to place under our legs and soft, pillowy masks to put over our eyes. It freaked me out a little, because I was acutely aware of how much trouble I was having doing the yoga poses with my eyes open.

As it turns out, there were no more games of physio-spiritual Twister to be played that day, though. Instead, we spent the last 15 minutes of class lying on our backs, while Helen chimed a bell and led us into a relaxing meditation. She spoke to us about relaxing our arms, our legs, our hands and so on, and by the time she was through, I was so mellow I could hear the entire collected works of Bread playing in my head. Wow. It was great.

So next week it’s her turn to join a part of my world. Here's hoping that our day of football and wings at Hooters is as rewarding to her as my day at yoga was to me.