I had spent
years at a keyboard, staring, blinking funny, trying to
string together a series of nouns and verbs and pretty
little descriptive doodads, trying, honestly, to image what
on earth would win me the Nobel. Or at least the Pulitzer,
to start with. Really, something that would tell the world
“this is a woman with good stories in her.”
As I hit my fourth decade, I had (mostly) given up the
ghost on publishing my little stories. I had tried to
publish InnSanity, with resounding failure.
After going through a freakishly quick succession of health
scares (e.g., pre cancerous calcifications in my right
breast, scary lumps in the left, ovarian cyst and, last but
not least, abnormal growth in my cervix -- I did all that
in three weeks) I decided to, again, give yoga a try.
I had tried yoga again and again as I liked the concept of
yoga. I hated the practice of it though, as I’m just a
stiff non-athletic pear-shaped gal. I had heard about
Bikram’s hot yoga, and thought I’d surely hate it as I
really disliked heat and stretching.
But, out of nowhere, sort of like suddenly finding out you
can pull a strip of bacon from your elbow, I fell head over
heels in love with Bikram’s yoga.
So much so, that I went to Bikram’s teacher training yoga
college: hot yoga twice a day for nine weeks.
I sent out a little daily email to friends, a blog if you
will. I realized that my precious mother-in-law, Margaret,
was my only off-line friend and so I printed out a copy of
the emails for her. But then they didn’t make total sense,
so I added some filler bits, sort of like a quick dab of
mayonnaise to make sure the lettuce doesn’t fall out.
Now Margaret, she’s a hard-core reader. And she wrote to
say that she couldn’t put it down, my little booklet. Only
thing she didn’t like was that she didn’t know what the
postures looked like. So I dug up a fabulous illustrator,
Teresa, and she brought me to life.
Voila! A fun and funny memoir about finding and losing and
finding myself with the help of Bikram the yoga and Bikram
the man.
Enjoy!