Excerpt: Growing Up

The instructor began the class by sitting, hands held palm-up, index fingers and thumbs joined to form an ‘O.’ “We must practice our breathing,” he said. “Breathing is the foundation for all of our movements. If we lose our breath, we lose our focus, and then our positions mean nothing.” This was followed by several minutes of fairly loud inhales and exhales.
Oh, God, Allison thought, I don’t think I can stand an entire hour of noisy breathing. But just as she had regretted her decision to attend the class, the instructor prompted them into progressively more impossible poses. Allison, who could no more balance on one foot let alone the Twister disaster the instructor seemed to be coming up with, wobbled this way and that. In what seemed to be an innocuous pose – “downward dog” – in which Allison was instructed to shove her butt into the air and stand with her feet and palms on the floor, the instructor passed behind her to “help” her with her pose. He not-so-gently moved Allison’s backside so that she thought her arms might just break off at the shoulders, and that is when “it” happened.
Allison, who would more likely die than let her husband think she was human, passed gas. It was not, unfortunately a silent but deadly event; this was both audible and odorous. It was loud enough that most of her classmates lost their balance, came crashing to their knees and splayed out on their exercise mats.
The instructor, through a veil of stifled coughing, said, “It is a perfectly normal function of our bodies. We should not take anything for granted. Once we take things for granted, they begin to disappear. Let us all be thankful for the miracle of our bodies.”