“Not a week of my life goes by without somebody urging me to try yoga,” my friend Nyla wrote in her Facebook status update. Somewhat predictably, underneath the update, people made smartass remarks how they feel the same about crystal meth. Doing either a lot seems to be life-changing so there are some similarities but  I doubt the drugs get pushed half as often and as diligently as does the art of bendy. And, of course, unlike crystal meth yoga is good for you, legal and you get to wear stretchy pants. If anything, it’s closer to that other feel-good scheme, religion, although, unlike religion it is somewhat uncool to talk badly about yoga so it was slightly shocking to see my friend’s update. Sacrilegious, sure, but so refreshing.

I live in a big city. Big cities, especially in North America, do yoga. Or, rather, the population is divided into yoga doers and yoga non-doers. The causal yoga doers belong to the yoga-doers group, in case you’re wondering. It is almost exactly like religion – some people go to church regularly, some only go during the holidays, some go once a year and some enter the convent. In the pool of yoga doers among my friends there are yoga teachers, serious yoga priestesses – complete with daily quotes sent out daily even to non-believers – and the once-in-awhile yoga enthusiasts who wouldn’t know half of the stuff I happen to know about chakras only because I once dated a sweet yoga guy.  What I’m trying to say is that some of my best friends are yoga people.

I tried yoga twice. Interestingly, the first time I tried it I was going through a very rough breakup. Interestingly, because now, in retrospect, it’s clear to me that I was looking for help. I was looking for religion to stabilize me in the chaos. I’ve been known to invite the Jehova witnesses to my house and once got the Latter Day Saints crew to help me move. I’ll try and believe in anything once.

I went with my friend Megan, another non-yoga person who wanted to try it (I think she was in between relationships at the time). We went to the big gym centre downstairs in a big mall. It was a gym so it smelled of sweat and disinfectant. We had to use the gym-provided mats. We huffed and puffed as the extremely perky teacher encouraged us to touch toes and so on. I have heard of the “downward dog” so I was looking forward to doing that one. I kept getting it confused, in my mind, with doggie style and it was good to clear up that misunderstanding. My favourite part was the pose where you lie down and just lie there. In the end, I thought it was okay, what we did on those mats, Megan and I. Upstairs, over coffee and date squares, we talked about how it wasn’t so bad, perhaps feeling slightly ashamed of our ease of joining in, like we just paraded in the Stations of the Cross and actually found it fun.  I never went back.

Years later, I was sent on a press junket to Whistler. There, I attended a yoga class as part of the junket and it was a yet different experience than the first one. This yoga session was held in a lovely room with huge windows looking out onto snow-covered mountains. The teacher was neither perky or too relaxed, just perfectly poised and happy to be there. And the people! Unlike the first time, this crowd was something to take a notice of. First of all, there were a lot more men. Beautiful men. A few younger ones without shirts. Golden-bodied snowboarders. I swear I caught a glimpse of Ryan Philippe’s doppelganger or maybe it was Ryan Phillippe himself – that’s the kind of a place that was. Even the older guy in very tight pants who purposely but self unconsciously nosedived in front of me (balls) didn’t ruin the experience. When I did the exercises I really got into them, the breathing parts and the stretching parts. Afterwards I felt good, too. But I never went back there, or anywhere else for that matter.

When I tell some people that I never do yoga, I sometimes encounter what my friend Nyla encounters. They encourage me to try it. They say it will be good for me. It will help me with everything from digestion to sleep to alcohol cravings. I’ve been encouraged to do it with my baby, with my partner, by myself, to get the tears out and to laugh. A friend claimed she wept for hours after some intense yoga sessions, another friend talked about having a spiritual orgasm, whatever that means.

Both religion and yoga require extra effort. You have to buy stretchy pants, the books with quotes; you have to get a mat, and the mat bag, and a cross, and you have to join a praying circle, and you have to enlist your dog to join too. Then when the tears don’t come, or when you don’t feel the presence of a higher power, you feel stupid so you end up telling people you felt something, maybe even that you had a spiritual experience and you can mediate enough to levitate. But the thing is, you do in fact start feeling better because exercise and sticking to your commitments make you more mentally fit. It’s biology of psychology. At this time, I’m happy to stay my lazy, unstretched, toxic, atheist self. I exercise and I have commitments I adhere to and that’s as much of self help as I need in my life. So for now, I say, ____ yoga.