July 17, 2013

Sorry I Touched Your Boob – A Yoga PSA.

I’m just gonna jump straight into this.

I touched a boob.

Specifically, a stranger’s boob.

No, it was not on purpose.

Yes, it was a full grope situation.

And no, neither of us enjoyed it.

Internet, I’m going on my third year as a yoga teacher. I currently teach anywhere from 4 to 7 classes a week. I’m far too lazy to do the math, but let’s just say I’ve taught somewhere between 150 and 250 classes. Many classes. If not necessarily enough to have mastered teaching and all it’s nuances, enough to not be terrible.

Certainly enough to not be getting to second base with a middle aged woman in the middle of a sequence.

If you don’t know anything about yoga and / or have never been to a class where a teacher has given you an assist in a pose, it may be hard for you to conceptualize how… uh… in your grill the assistor has to get for some of the really juicy adjustments.

This video will give you an idea.

At some point he’s literally sitting on someone who’s figuratively bent in half.

So anyways, I was teaching a 35 person class the other day up at the university.

When you teach a class, you are, in effect, a juggler with a whole lot of balls up in the air. You must be simultaneously aware of what sequence you are currently teaching, what the next sequence will be, your music, your timing, your energy level, your body language, and whether or not anyone in the class is about to seriously injure themselves.

I noticed a middle-aged woman doing a pose pretty decently wrong. She was all hunched over and in pain and it was just a scene.

Here is a helpful photo.

She’s not farting. That’s the lower back pain radiating from her.

So being a stellar teacher, I ran over to adjust her by puling her torso up so she wasn’t so contorted. Usually this adjust works by aligning your hip with theirs, grabbing onto their extended wrist with one hand, and using the other to gently guide their ribcage into place.

Except that I got distracted at the last moment, aimed a little too high, latched right onto this poor woman’s free-floating, braless boob.