Tibetan yoga... in France?

My second attempt at being a joiner happens the following day when I finally get up the guts to go to a Tibetan yoga class. After spending two months in India volunteering with Tibetans, teaching them English, living with their families, seeing the Karmapa and the Dalai Lama in the flesh, I am intrigued.

The class is held in a building that sits mere footsteps away from the gendarmerie, the French national army. I take this as a sign—I’m not sure what kind, but a sign nonetheless.

One thing I detest is loud, heaving breathing. And I am in a forest of it.

To my horror, almost everyone is once again…old. Despite a thirty-something pregnant woman with blond ringlets and a mid-twenties girl (who I plan to force to be my friend sometime soon) the others in the class are middle-aged, white women. The one older Asian man with flexible limbs and a long, gray ponytail holds some interest, if only for the mere fact that he has an accent and must be a foreigner like me. But otherwise, I have not found the secret to everlasting friendship. At least from what I can tell right now.

Pierette, our teacher, is dressed in brown velvet pants and a black ribbed sweater. Her thick red-framed glasses saddle themselves between streams of coiffed, shoulder-length auburn hair. For someone who’s about to teach us about visualization, meditation and Tibetan mantras, she sure doesn’t look like a hippie to me. She looks like a Midwestern mom.

The room is freezing. It’s nearly 60 degrees outside, but for some reason, the inside temperature has fallen below 50. I look around the room and notice that all the night’s participants are dressed in thick sweatshirts, sweatpants layered over tights and woolen socks. Once again, I am reminded of my days in Marseille and have to ask the question, why are the French so reluctant to turn on the heat?

“Vous avez froid?” Pierette approaches me with a whisper midway through the class, as my knuckles turn purple and the ample hair on my arms stands on end. “Oui,” I whisper back with a faint smile.

She returns and drapes a navy blue blanket—like the one I am lying on—over my whole body. The blanket has a funny smell, a mixture of perfume, body odor and carpet. I go through the rest of the class like this.

Tibetan yoga is not at all what I expected. I had come for a little stretching, a little relaxation and a chance to test out the friendship waters in the Perigueux hippie community. What I ended up doing was lying on my back doing a series of intricate hand movements, swinging my legs around in circles and imagining myself inside blue and red spheres of light.

We put our hands in the shape of an egg and place it first on the top of our head at one chakra, under our ribcage at another chakra, and on our lower belly. Each time, we are instructed to breath with our mouths open.

One thing I detest is loud, heaving breathing. And I am in a forest of it. Every time someone takes a deep breath, which we are supposed to do with every movement, somebody yawns, producing a domino effect of crackling lips and sighing. Soon, even I am joining in…because that’s the thing about yawning. You just can’t help it. We put our hands into a traditional praying position, palms flattened together, and curl them towards our bodies, making swift circles up towards our faces, then over our heads. Our legs follow, making loops around our bodies, feet stuck straight into the air, as we picture the energy swirling around us in clouds of harmony.

Somebody farts.

It’s either the old, gray-haired woman next to me or the pregnant girl across. Apparently, someone is straining just a little too hard here. I suddenly become very aware that I better not tighten my glutious maximus too hard or I will be next. I get a flashback of the 6th grade when I reached down to pick up a piece of paper from my desk and let out a loud toot. I never lived in down.

My preoccupation with my gastrointestinal status hinders me from fully enjoying my leg lifts. Or maybe it’s my full bladder, exacerbated by the frigid air in the room and the fact that every time I take a series of deep breaths, I have the impression that I will pass out. I thought yoga was supposed to help asthma, but every time I take a class, I hyperventilate.

Pierette finishes the class with a visualization exercise. It is supposed to be useful when interacting with aggressive people who make you uncomfortable. Gosh! Where on earth will I use this information?! I almost cry when she tells us to close our eyes and imagine a red stream of light shooting out from a point on our forehead and encapsulating us in a protective sphere.

In this bubble, no one can enter without our permission. Unless the sphere is blue, it’s a no-go area.

“There is a difference between saying ‘no’ when you are uncomfortable about someone entering your space, and when you feel protected,” says Pierette, “if your boss asks you to do something you don’t want to do, you can say ‘no.’ Not angrily, just…’no.’ And they will know that you mean it and they’re not going to challenge it.”

How has Pierette read my mind? My throat chokes up, just for a moment, because this class is what I’ve been needing for so long, and here it had been just five minutes from my house.

I leave the class in a state of calm that I haven’t felt in weeks. Ready to face Adam and the world, I go home and don’t turn on the TV for the first night after getting it installed. As my Indian tabla music spills from my computer, I relax in the settled comfort of my soul.