(From March 2016)

There are plenty of things I know nothing about. Yoga is something I know just enough to be mostly wrong about it.

The thing is I know I’m wrong.

Yoga has come a long way in West Virginia. For years, it was just something on television or maybe a class taught at a college, but over the last decade yoga has seen a lot of growth.

New yoga classes seem to crop up at a steady pace. There’s Hatha, Vinyasa, Hot Yoga and Yogalates, which sounds like something you order at Starbucks.

Toward the end of January, just after we’d decided I’d do a month of Improv comedy, and while we were discussing what to do next, The Folded Leaf yoga studio on Bridge Road reached out.

They offered to host me for a month.

Through March, I could attend whatever classes and workshops they offered; ask questions, bring cameras, and get in touch with my inner yogi or something.

It was too generous an offer to turn down. I called April Woody, the owner of the Folded Leaf, and said, “Sign me up.”

The plan would be to use their studio as home base, but also look into other yoga classes in the area. Go wherever. Get an idea of not just the exercise, but the community who practices yoga, and maybe why?

As expected, my experience with yoga was limited, but worse, for a time, I sort of mocked it.

My first memories of seeing yoga was through a second-hand VHS tape of a show called, “Yoga Kids,” a fairly disturbing program mixing yoga training with animal puppets –kind of like what might have happened if Captain Kangaroo had been run by goofy hippies.

I remember watching the show, sometimes with a beer in hand, giggling, and coming up with rude and inappropriate names for the different poses the lead actor twisted himself into.

I just couldn’t take yoga seriously, considered it at best an alternative to normal stretching –like the good ol’ fashioned kind I’d learned in high school gym class. It was deliberately and pointlessly exotic; the territory of winsome, ash blonds in stretchy, black pants and scrawny, pasty-faced men with ponytails.

Neither of those things described me.

Charitably, I’m kind of an oaf. I’m not a small person, and I do not look good in stretchy, black pants.

Still, over time, my views on the subject evolved. Yoga stopped seeming so weird.

Last summer, one of my co-workers, Rachel Molenda, began working on a certification to become a yoga instructor. As part of her training, she needed some practice running a class, and invited anyone in the newsroom interested to give it a try.

I was looking for something to help stretch out my joints, which had been bothering me a little, after my usual routine at the gym. Yoga seemed like a possibility.

At the newspaper, we did maybe four classes over about six weeks –long enough for me buy a purple yoga map people gave me grief about.

It looked like the kind of thing a giggly preteen girl might prop up in a corner of her bedroom directly below a poster of a unicorn.

I thought it was cool.

The few classes I took seemed beneficial, if sweatier than anticipated. I came out of the company conference room Rachel had co-opted for a makeshift yoga studio relaxed and feeling at least a little better –particularly my right shoulder.

For years, I used to take part in the West Virginia Special Olympics annual Polar Plunge, where every winter I’d raise a few bucks and cannonball into a swimming pool at Appalachian Power Park. 

I did five or six of these, and still have the t-shirts to prove it, but during my second plunge, I hurt my shoulder. After I came up out of the water, my shoulder was sore.

It remained vaguely sore for months and for a while, I didn’t go to the gym. It hurt to put too much weight on it.  

Eventually, it got better, but still aches from time to time.

Those once a week classes helped. My shoulder felt better, but then the classes faded. Rachel’s workload changed.

A few months ago, she moved to Utah.

I tried using a yoga video at home, to see if I’d get the same results. I didn’t get through the 20 minute episode. It’s hard to concentrate on “downward facing dog” while a 15 pound Jack Russel Terrier is alternately licking your face and barking at the instructor on the TV.

My friend Autumn Hopkins, who teaches yoga, invited me to come to her 6 a.m. class at the YMCA.

I declined. I usually have sleep scheduled at that time.

But with some convenience built into taking some classes, learning about yoga seemed workable.

My co-worker Anna Patrick was particularly enthusiastic about me taking yoga. She’s also working on a certification to be an instructor.

She told me, “It’s not just about stretching. It’s not just poses, and exercises. That’s really just the tip of what it’s all about. There’s the breath, and a deeper mental and spiritual part to yoga.”

I nodded politely. I had some idea of that, but really only a little.

I agreed to try to get more out of a month of yoga than just some great tips on stretching my groin.

April at The Folded Leaf promised there was a lot more to yoga than the physical part of it.

There were meditative benefits. It offered techniques for regaining focus, relaxation, sharpening awareness, and who knows what else –but 30 days to fully get what yoga was about seemed like a reach, particularly to April.

“If you learn everything there is to learn about yoga in 30 days, I’m going to die,” she said.

It’s taken her years of study and regular practice to get to where she is and April still works at it.

She told me, “I think you can learn a lot in 30 days, and I think you can get some benefits, but you really have to commit to the practice. You have to commit to doing this every day.”

I promised her that’s what I planned. I wanted to learn all about yoga. Maybe it could do more than help with my touchy shoulder.

So, I went to two classes in a row, and then missed two.