I finally did it. I took a hot yoga class.

My mom has recently become addicted to hot yoga so I asked her to show me the ropes while I was home last weekend. The class we took wasn’t technically Bikram yoga. From what I understand, Bikram is yoga practiced in a 100+ degree room during which you cycle through a series of the same 26 poses twice each class. The class I took in the ‘burbs didn’t follow that formal structure. The teacher took us through a bunch of different poses, but the room was still really hot. 112 degrees to be exact. Hot.

I realize I’m coming pretty late to the hot yoga conversation, especially when a good handful of people I know practice Bikram regularly (Blue!) but I also didn’t get a cell phone or an iPod until everyone else I knew already had one. This shall not be different.

I enjoyed the hot yoga class very much. It was, indeed, difficult, but not in the way I expected it to be. For me, the hardest part about it was the mind-over-matter of enduring the heat. Otherwise it felt like a magnified experience of practicing yoga in a normal temperature room. Not only could I stretch farther, move more fluidly and feel my muscles more acutely than usual, but I also wanted to quit more often and had to remind myself to simply be in the experience more often.

On the flipside, there were moments when I couldn’t have been anywhere but exactly in the moment if I wanted to be. I felt my brain trying to escape toward that mental chatter of grocery lists and afternoon to-do’s, I felt myself wanting to take a mental hiatus from the moment and “go away.” But I couldn’t. In the heat, my thoughts felt like molasses and a grocery list became “I need to buy eggs and – ugh, forget it…zzzzz….” It was so nice to be forcibly disconnected from that chatter.

I had terrible balance in the heated room. I was falling over left and right. Also, I could barely understand a word the teacher was saying. I couldn’t shake my mind clear enough to interpret his directions. Everything felt foggy, but when I gave into it, rather than fighting it, I felt a sense of relief. Every once in a while, my body would adjust to the heat and I’d forget I was in a manufactured desert. Then 30 seconds later I’d think, “Hey. It’s f**king hot in here.” At the end of the class, I felt like a hot zombie. My face was beet red and I was drenched. I also felt the most ravenous hunger I’ve felt in months.

My friend Blue posted on her blog a couple days ago that the Bikram Yoga NYC studio is having an open house this Saturday, so I signed up! I’m going to be taking a free class that afternoon and I will have the opportunity to sign up for a 30-day pass for $30, which is a great deal.

I can’t wait to walk into that hot room again. It sucked and it was awesome.

To me, practicing mind over matter is one of the most impressive things the human spirit can attempt. One can endure almost anything for X amount of time.