By Elizabeth Yeter

Hot outside, hot inside, I say to myself as I walk into my first morning yoga class. As a school teacher, I have been attending afternoon and evening classes after work, but since school is out for the summer, I now have time to go in the mornings.

Although my mom has practiced yoga since I was a little girl, I have only gone to a smattering of classes throughout my life. Why start now? Well that’s a story for another blog post, one that I’m not sure I’m ready to write. But I digress.

The room is surprisingly crowded for a weekday morning. I unroll my blue mat between two older women laying prone with their eyes closed, presumably meditating. As I begin to recline, I survey the room. Typical yoga crowd. Lots of matching bra top/ Lululemon legging-clad ladies. Gosh that sounds kind of judgy. I don’t mean for it to come out that way. If you’ve got it, flaunt it girl.

But directly behind me is a young man sitting criss cross applesauce as we say in the teacher industry. His eyes are closed and he looks positively yogi. He’s even got a top-knot hairdo going. Man, I think, this guy’s gonna be fierce.

The instructor enters the studio and tells us that it’s time to lay down and begin to regulate our breathing. In through the nose, out through the nose. Make a Darth Vader sound in the back of your throat as you exhale. I progress through the poses of the first ten minutes or so half asleep.

I perk up as we move into a sitting position. Legs straight in front of us, one knee up, then twist your body around to look at the back wall. I catch a glimpse of Mr. Yogi. He’s still laying down in Shivasana. Wow, that sure looks relaxing, I think. I always say I’m going to just sleep through a whole class one day, but the straight-A student in me just won’t let it happen. You go yogi dude, I commend him in my brain.

Another ten minutes pass and it’s finally time for our first downward-facing dog. In this pose, your hands and feet push into the mat and your butt is up in the air. I think everyone looks like big triangles. With my head dropped down, I peer between my legs and behold a sight that causes me to burst out laughing.

Yes, in the calm silence of the yoga environment I am cracking up. I roll into a little ball and stuff my face into my knees to mute the laughs. But to no avail. The image of what I just saw won’t get out of my brain, and it’s tickling me.

Mr. Yogi is now curled into a fetal position with his mat-sized hot yoga towel draped over him like a blanket. He looks like a giant sleeping baby. Nobody else thinks it’s funny. Does he do this every day? I wonder.

Thankfully, my laughter doesn’t wake the resting man, and I finally regain composure. For the rest of the class, I mentally chastise myself for the outburst. I guess the sleeping seems especially weird to me because it’s morning, and I figure that most people have just awakened from a restful night of sleep. But that’s not true. Sleep eludes so many of us in the night. So maybe Mr. Yogi tossed and turned in his bed and only now has found his rest.

I can hypothesize all day about his sleep patterns but all I know for sure is that in this 9 A.M. yoga class, this guy’s body asked for a nap. And instead of fighting it, he gave himself permission to rest. Your body may be asking for sleep during all the wrong times like at a meeting, in the middle of calculus, or while you’re going 80 down the highway. My point here isn’t that you should just fall asleep whenever you feel tired. But I am saying that we get so caught up in our go-go-go lives that we have a hard time slowing down and listening to our bodies.

On the radio today, the DJs were talking about how before the invention of the light bulb, Americans slept for ten hours a day. Now, the average is 6.7 hours. I don’t know anyone who’s even getting that much sleep! Netflix binges, all-hours texting, and scrolling through social media often keep us up late into the night. So perhaps our paradigms of conventional sleep have been changing for quite some time now. I challenge you to look at your daily life patterns and see where you can schedule in a little more rest. And if the only time you’ve got is during hot yoga, well then snuggle up with your towel and enjoy your sleepasana.