"I'd tried so hard to blend in and not make a spectacle of myself, and there I was with everyone looking at me and my third eye refusing to cooperate."

The teacher, a brisk, short, hard-eyed woman in a tight aqua-blue unitard, came in, took my money (scolded me for paying with a check), and sent me to the other side of the room. As other people filed in and took their spaces on the floor, I started to feel dreadful. Once the class began I had no idea what the teacher was doing or how to breathe.

I struggled with every pose, feeling weak, tired, and foolish. At one point, the teacher marched over to me, grabbed my head and pulled it down into her face, rubbing my forehead with her thick, strong thumbs, commanding, "You cannot do yoga with a grimace! Open your third eye." I was dying. I'd tried so hard to blend in and not make a spectacle of myself, and there I was with everyone looking at me and my third eye refusing to cooperate. I was determined to make it through the class, though, and I stuck with it, trying not to grimace as I twisted and contorted my scrawny, inflexible body.

Occasionally, the yoga dictator came over and yanked the hair on top of my head to remind me to stand up straight. Then, just when I was starting to feel like she'd forgotten about me, she called me to the front of the room to help her demonstrate a pose for the class. She stood bolt upright and started tightening and flexing her buttock muscles and rotating her ankles in some bizarre pose. Then she grabbed my hands, placed them on her butt and told me to hold on to her, then slide my hands down her legs to her ankles, so I could feel what her muscles were doing.

Okay. I'm from the Midwest; we don't touch other peoples' butts. Not for any reason. And we certainly don't do it in front of a room full of mirrors and people dressed in black leotards. I was mortified. As soon as class was over, I fled, traumatized (but with better posture). I never went back, and it took an entire year for me to try yoga again.

I realized later that I had let my misconceptions about yoga get to me, and my pride keep me from looking for another class. The fact that the yoga dictator has classes to teach means that some people enjoy and thrive under a strict, disciplined format, but that style didn't work for me.

Before my illness I had always jumped into new situations, able to start in the middle, but that wasn't who I was when I was sick. I needed a different approach. I had to start at the beginning, and I needed basic instructions, patience (from myself and from my teacher), and a minimum of jargon about third eyes.

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