Two newbies. Three yoga classes. One weekend of spiritual bliss.

Yoga. I used to think it was all blonde Californian moms with too much leisure time floating past wrinkled, leathery men wearing leotards two sizes too small, as tie-dye-clad hippies exhorted me to just connect to the universe, man. I had always fled these ethereal figures of yoga-ness, having no real desire for someone to come up to my mountain and vinyasa my downward dog.

But this past week, I sought to challenge my conceptions of this alien activity. My preconceived notions, unprepared for actual yoga in any way, were not only challenged, but were also completely obliterated.

My journey along the path of yoga began at an (allegedly) beginners’ Ashtanga-Vinyasa session in the dance room in the basement of Whitman. I was expecting a relaxing hour and a half of calm.

When we spent the first few minutes learning to breathe through our noses by way of the backs of our throats, I should have been alerted to the ass-kicking that was lurking in the wings. But I remained naive. I had been trying to breathe like Darth Vader for years; this was nothing new.

Then the instructor gave us a little pep talk, and the vibe ratcheted up a notch. “The story you tell yourself is the story that is true,” she said, adding that when we felt pain, we just had to tell ourselves a story in which our pain was actually kind of nice. I figured I could do that too, having suffered through years of soccer practices in my youth. But then the yoga began.

We began by working through some sun salutations, which were surprisingly hard, but not impossible. At first my warrior pose was crisp, my vinyasa swooped appropriately and my stance was firmer than the Great Wall of China. I felt pretty good and mentally mocked yoga for thinking it could defeat me with a few paltry salutations. Even the word “salutations” sounded bush-league. By the fifth cycle, I could feel my arms trembling just a bit, and the sweat began to pop out of my pores. But I wasn’t nervous yet. I could handle this.

After these wrapped up, however, the class really took off, and everything turned into a blur of straining muscles, screaming tendons and general pain. One moment I was a solid warrior, and the next I was a ballerina, folded over my leg with my foot on the dance rail and my hamstrings in full revolt.

Then I was attempting to hold myself up and throw myself backwards between my own legs with just my arms so I could get into a position from which I could swing back forward through my legs.

From here I had to fold myself into various flavors of pretzel, an agonizing effort that ended with me rolling around the floor to the music of my classmates’ laughter.

But I knew that someone else was authoring my yoga story when I found myself folded up trying to link my arms around my legs and behind my back in order to leverage my heel up my ass, alleviating the pain by “relaxing into the pose,” aka helping my foot along in its journey up my colon, and “contracting my anus if it hurts.” Not a tale I ever expected to relate.

At the end of the hour, however, I felt surprisingly good. I had just gone through calisthenics that would make Gumby proud and had had a great hour-and-a-half of exercise.

It wasn’t until the next morning when I awoke feeling like Frankenstein’s monster that I realized I really should’ve taken it easy for my first-ever yoga class.

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In contrast to this marathon of yoga-tastic struggling, the beginners’ yoga class I went to the next day was more peaceful.

The most difficult part was working through some of the balance poses, one of which included an attempt to hold ourselves up in a kind of squat on our elbows, but after the general cavorting of the day before, this was downright relaxing.

I discovered the joy of child’s pose, the chillest way to do nothing that I’ve ever come across. I reveled in the meditative minutes in which I think I actually became a bit more enlightened.

Our instructor urged us to lay back and just feel the contact between our bodies and the mat. Feel the mat? I was the damn mat. And I loved life in mat-world.

Immediately after the class ended, I signed up for the six-week beginners’ yoga series on Sunday afternoons, which will be much more peaceful than they used to be.

Whereas I had once imagined that the figures of yoga-dom inhabited a conflicting, dangerously ambiguous universe, in the course of actually doing yoga, I learned that there is no conflict in yoga-land. Moms, crazy hermits and hippies can all find a comfortable place to belong. And that’s the truest joy of yoga as described by my beginners’ yoga instructor. You can meet yoga where you’re at, when you’re at, how you’re at. It can be as peaceful or as strenuous as you want it to be.

Either way, you’ll be learning something about yourself. Or you’ll be ramming yourself into your own orifices. Which counts for something, I guess.

-Trap Yates

Last Sunday, as I lay on my back engaging in the final “breath of fire” exercise, I was struggling deeply with both my yoga experience and my deepest yoga question.

My yogic path started one month ago, when I became aware of the phenomenon The Daily Beast calls a “yogasm.” When I first saw this word I thought: What is this? Why? And most importantly, how do I get one?

To answer my first question, apparently many people in recent times have come forth to confirm that yes, yoga, in its riveting, sweaty, spandex culture could generate posture-induced orgasms. The Daily Beast article explained this was a phenomenon solely relegated to the female population. I knew this couldn’t be true. In a karmic universe, men could not be rightly denied the fruit of yogasm.

To follow my intuition, I decided to sit in on Wilson’s Kundalini yoga class. As Sanela, the instructor, guided us, she said that she would be incorporating some important Taoist techniques into the normal Kundalini regimen. Though I found that I wasn’t experiencing anything but a minor tingling during the breathing and meditation exercises, I knew that my yogasm would be found.

“Now I’m going to teach the Taoist technique of self-massage. I find this to be an amazing practice because it teaches you how to feel.” When Selena spoke these words, I smiled widely. This was the secret; they weren’t even trying to hide it. The secret she explained was that when you touch yourself — on your arm, thigh, anywhere — your body is also “touching back.”

As I placed my hand on my shoulder, I was immediately disappointed in my ability to feel myself. What does she mean by touching back? Why am I bad at this? Do these shorts reveal my tan line? Oh shit, I have to write a paper tonight. I came to terms with my yoga impotency.

The class only became worse as my incredible inflexibility required that I sit on an obnoxious purple pillow in front of the class. I wasn’t finding my “happy place,” despite pretending to be comfortable by closing my eyes. As the class winded down, I found myself having PYD — Post-Yogasm Depression. The worst part — I got all the depression and none of the yogasm.

As I went to sleep that night, I was struggling again to accept that women were truly better at achieving yogasms. Since I, a yoga novice, couldn’t reach yogasm, certainly no other man could. While wrestling with these thoughts I shifted into cobra pose to try to fall asleep. I quickly realized how soft my bed was, how bright the lights were, how warm my room was, how — [yogasm].

-Nick Ellis