Janet Hommel Mangas
For the Daily Journal
It’s quite obvious that I am not a model yoga student.
Oh sure, I can follow Vara’s instructions and pull-off a decent down dog, cobra, locust and warrior 2. Even hidden in the corner of the back row my twisted crescent lunge and eagle pose are not atrocious.
But I realized last week in class that I may not be fully embracing this whole yoga practice like the other normal students in the class.
I do enjoy how it syncs my body and mind. Many times at the end of class I find myself praying to God in meditation.
But my first clue that I might not be focusing as well as the other in-tune students came when I decided that my favorite pose was the corpse pose at the end of class. The corpse pose, also called shavasana, is where you lie on your back with your legs straight and arms at your sides — your hands are about six to 12 inches from your body with your palms up.
Your eyes are closed and you breathe naturally. This posture rejuvenates the body, mind and spirit while reducing stress and tension.
Well it does for my classmates anyway. Perhaps I’ve been watching too much crime television or who-done-it shows, but while everyone else seemed to be rejuvenating their minds, I began to daydream about the cast of “Law & Order” walking into the yoga studio and finding me in corpse pose.
Detective Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay) would be the first to discover me not moving and say “Yep, we’ll have to investigate this as a homicide.”
Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer) would devise some conspiracy theory since there was no blood or bruising.
“She’s a perfect corpse,” he would say, “someone must have poisoned her yoga mat, maybe because she took their spot in the back row.”
Detective “Fin” Tutuola (played by actor Ice-T) would simply state: “Well this is awkward — I think she’s breathing.”
I won’t bore you with the minute details, but while everyone else in class was meditating I was also visited by the casts from “CSI,” “Monk,” “Psych” and “Mannix.”
Goals for next week: Work on that rejuvenating the mind part and try not to laugh during shavasana.
