Yoga Farts

Before last year, I considered yoga to be an activity for the super calm, super limber, and super latte-toting soccer-mommish. I, being none of these, stuck with my irregular regime of gut wrenching jogs and dates with Denise Austin Pilates. Whatever. The most elevated my heart got in two years was probably during my at home renditions of Flashdance – but that's another story altogether. Basically, my stubborn will refused to succumb to some yuppie yogic trend. I denied dancing visions of myself riding a rusty bike all over town in hemp shoes with a mat tied like a California roll over my back, consuming only soy products and forever swearing off gelatin, gluten and Milk Duds.
The change in my thinking occurred during my time in New Orleans. My belief system about everything was changing, and yoga became the best complement to my increasing compassion toward myself and others. It was also a highly valued source of movement when all motion was held at a premium. Each pose was almost a gift in that I was alive, awake and moving at that moment.
There is such an active mind component to yoga that is visible on the changed faces of all who leave class. My teachers here say, if you can breath, you can do yoga. I've been in classes with them all. Pregnant women, 70 year old men, football players, heavy people, skinny people, injured people. And yes. We must get down to it. Smelly people.
Honesty time. Now, I like getting into the "yoga zone" as much as the next yogini. Sometimes however, I buy it about as much as I buy inexperienced method acting. Maybe I'm just too much of a naïve neophyte still. Maybe I'm just too downright freaking judgmental. Or maybe, I'm just human. Here's all I know for a fart. I mean, fact. Yoga will make the air move through the body.
One night, in a more intense class, we all went to raise our legs into navasana, or Boat Pose. Clear across the room, someone cut one like I couldn't believe. Now, this wasn't the petty, child's play, whistling, hissing, refugee type of fart. This was a full fledged, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three, reverberating, rattle the cork floor, flatulence. As if the kind deliverer was raising their legs for the exact purpose of setting it free.
Now, it appeared that everyone else was still in afore said, "yoga zone". I, on the other hand, with the gas humor of an eight year old boy, dissolved into a shaking fit of inconsolable church giggles. Just when I thought I had finally recentered myself, the odor had finally wafted over in my direction, causing the travesty to replay like a sound-byte in my head. Navasana became SmartAssana. It was over for me.
It happens all the time. I wish I could say I've gotten better at handling myself. I have gotten more compassionate with myself when I dissolve into the giggle fit. That's what yoga's all about for me anyway. Accepting where I am in that moment. Even if it is surrounded by a slew of 80 year old cheese-cutting senior citizens. I know it's really only a matter of time before I get my due and I'm the ripper.
At the end of class, after savasana, or corpse pose, everyone comes to easy sitting. At this point, we all say Namaste, to honor the light in each other and ourselves as we honor it in all things. Well, to end this, I would like to add my own NamGaste. I honor the gas in you, as I honor it in all things.