Om and All that Jazz

I'm reacquainting myself with yoga. I'm inherently skeptical of practices that are too self-centered and yoga is certainly that. My father believes it to be a form of self-worship and therefore un-Christian but I think that would have to be a conscious choice. I think it's one thing to listen to your body and figure out what feels good, what feels awful, and it's quite another thing to worship yourself in some way that displaces or replaces God. And for someone like myself who has always had issues of self-worth wrapped up in her body, I think yoga is a balancing activity, one that allows me to see how strong my body can be and how precious a gift it is (one that I should maintain with more care than I presently allot), not unlike the temple God would like it to be, right?

All that being said, yoga is weird. I love the class I go to which has a mix of rest poses and super-intense poses that make my arms and legs and abs feel like jell-o afterwards. But good jell-O. We end the class with a set of three "om"s, exactly the type of thing I would crack up over if I were not actually in a yoga studio. Stephanie can't hack that, she sits to the side and listens to the "oms" but doesn't join in. I respect that. I always feel more than slightly foolish doing it and I think I grin sometimes. It's supposed to be a meditative practice but in my head I'm thinking, "this is such a hippie, treehugger thing to do...Rob would die if he saw me right now." Rob (aka Roberta...being my little brother I get to refer to him with childish, teasing nicknames for the rest of eternity) is my little Republican brother who enjoys pointing out my obvious leftist craziness (Peace Corps, environmental law, yoga...) and would probably never let me live it down if he knew I actually sat cross-legged on a mat with my hands on my knees listening to Enya and saying "om" three times with a dozen or so strangers.

It's odd, the things we do to feel comfortable in our own skin.