A woman at the studio practices twice a day, almost daily. Her body seems as mobile and free as that of a child. Constant practice washes away the injuries and insults of life, reversing time, and it conditions the muscles, ligaments, and fascii, maintaining them in the elastic state of the young.

The particularly flexible yogi is nicknamed a “Gumby,” after the toy with limbs that twist in any direction. I imagine the body as a different toy, perhaps Silly Putty, or maybe taffy, or a marshmallow. Knead these, and as they warm up, they become pliant, stretchier. Just so, yoga kneads the body. It gets warm from the effort of the poses and the heat of the room, then becomes more pliant. The more it stretches, the stretchier it gets. Practicing daily creates elasticity and then preserves it as a constant.

In the locker room, the regulars all comment that missing a few days means feeling stiff. I call it turning into cardboard. It’s like putting the Silly Putty away; it gets dense, ornery. My postures are less deep when I am delinquent. Most days, I can almost manage or really manage standing forward bend, but if I miss a few days, on my return, locking the knee is as far away as the tip of Mt. Everest.

In Saturday evening classes are usually only regulars–the Gumbies and the rock stars, the ones who practice almost daily. Once the teacher said, ” I can see you are all feeling juicy.” I loved that–as if the body doing daily yoga is a plump orange and its sweat a sweet juice.

Bikram’s idea of an inspirational image is the expensive car, the Lamborghini, Ferrari, Rolls Royce, the top quality body. I like to think of the artist”s eraser, the elastic kind used to wipe off charcoal and pencil. After it has erased the wrong lines and distorted shadows, you ply it and knead it, and then the stains it wiped off vanish. The eraser is self-cleaning. Perhaps with yoga I can erase all my mistakes, stretch away all wrongs.

Namaste,
Yoga Lily