My Yoga Class Made Me Need Glasses

I had a very odd experience yesterday. As I posted last week, I’ve been making some changes to my lifestyle, including starting several exercise classes, adjusting my diet, and working on a few other aspects of my life. I suppose I’ve been reading Robin Brande’s blog so much it’s rubbed off on me.

Anyway, one of the things I’m doing is taking a class in Yoga Nidra, which is a type of meditation. I thought it would be a good idea because my favorite part of my regular yoga class is Shavasana (I hope I’m spelling that right) at the end. I actually blogged about that last winter. I’m not very good at it, but I love it. So when I walked into this sample yoga nidra class a few weeks ago, and the instructor announced that it was “the dessert of yoga” and we could all lie down and shut our eyes, I signed right up. Nap time! Fun!

Except… weird. The instructor admitted that the first time she attended at yoga nidra class she thought it was B.S. That made me relieved, because I’m a pretty skeptical person in general, and I was kinda thinking that myself. So she talked a bit more about the practice and I’m sitting there under my blankets with my little eye pillow over my face and I’m thinking I don’t even need the instructions, I’m already falling asleep. (Yoga Nidra means Yogic Sleep.) So then she starts talking about how my hands feel heavy and my feet feel heavy and etc. and then it’s an hour later and I don’t remember a thing. So I think: I fell asleep. And the people around me are totally snoring, which reaffirms my theory that I was asleep.

But the teacher says that’s “not unusual” and that we won’t always remember what happened until we become more experienced in the practice, blah blah blah. And of course, all along, my B.S. meter is going off and I’m convinced I fell asleep. Still, I sign up for the course and I go a few more times and each time it’s like BAM! Asleep. BAM! Asleep. BAM! Asleep. Except the weird thing is, that I do wake up when she’s telling everyone to start waking up. So maybe she’s right about there being this continuum between awakeness and asleepness, because I remember how I used to totally fall asleep on public transportation (like the Metro or Metro North or the bus) and I would still wake up at my stop, as if I somehow knew.

Anyway, Monday afternoon I go to the class and I get all set up and I’m thinking to myself that I wonder what happens when she talks to us when we’re all asleep or in a meditative trance or whatever (and of course, the storyteller in me is thinking “Manchurian Candidate,” right?). So we start, and since I’ve been working hard on my revisions and all the other stuff going on in my life, my head is totally full of that. Weddings and Amy and unicorns and all of it. I can’t seem to even concentrate on what she’s saying. But I do remember being able to hear her instructions and follow them on a conscious level for much longer than usual, since I had to keep forcing myself to pay attention to her. But then the next thing I remember is her talking as if we were all sitting up in cross-legged prayer pose. I’d totally missed the part where she tells us all to start waking up! So I shoot up off my blankets and I open my eyes and…

I can’t see.

I mean, I see shapes and colors and stuff, but it’s all completely blurry. I can’t focus my eyes. So I try not to freak out and I “Namaste” with the rest of them and then start folding up the blankets while the next yoga class comes in and the whole time I can’t see. I keep bumping into people and I’m trying to see the writing on the far wall or the face of the clock but it’s all blurry, blurry, blurry….

And I stumble into the changing room and the instructor is there chatting with the other students and I’m all, “Hi, I can’t focus my eyes, is that a problem?”

So we chat for a while and her theory is apparently that I was very deep into my yogic sleep trance and came out of it too quickly (which, in retrospect, duh me) and that in the future, I shouldn’t feel required to match the rest of the class. So it was sort of the equivalent of one’s foot going to sleep, except it was my eyes. Still incredibly scary. And after a few minutes (in which the instructor and I chatted and did little exercises to wake up my brain such as describing the shoes in my closet (quoth the yoga instructor: “wow, you are a writer! Listen to those descriptions!”), I could see again.

But it’s made me nervous about continuing the practice. I don’t know if I like that these sorts of things can happen. They’ve never happened in regular yoga class. I just get flexible and energetic with the deep breathing and such. And of course, the fact that having my eyes stop working for a few minutes scares me a heck of a lot more than having, say, my foot stop working has not escaped me. Clearly I rely on my eyes much more. My editor would kill me if I couldn’t see her edit marks. She might even hunt down my yoga nidra instructor.

So I’m going to read more about yoga nidra, and I’m going to think about it. What do you all think? Anyone have experience with this kind of thing? Eatrawfish, any advice from young Bogie? Robin, you were a yoga instructor?

In other news, I got a sneak peek at my newest cover. V. Exciting, as certain Brit chick lit heroines would say…