Yesterday some guy walked into my Bikram class and looked to be in even worse shape than I am- bigger beer belly, dorkier yoga wear, frumpier demeanor. It, of course, makes me feel like there's an even more inflexible, easily tired, and sweaty male out there. Naturally, three poses in, I look over and he's bending himself in all sorts of ways I could never imagine. D'oh.

Which reminds me of a class I took a couple of years ago. It was this funky class in which you actually didn't do any poses, you practiced getting into the poses. It was the ultimate in yoga-ness, no moving, just "being." Whatever. Anyways, the teacher was supposed to be this Master Yoga guy and everyone's waiting for him cause he's late. Then some guy walked in, longish hair in a pony-tail, tie-died t-shirt, weather-beaten face, and one big-ass huge Buddha belly. Turns out he's the teacher. He looked like the kind of guy you'd see propped up on the corner of a sports bar going onto his sixth hour of football watching. He didn't look like he could bend over, let alone do a Warrior Pose.

Oh, but he could. It was amazing. Here was this short, rolly-poly guy with a huge beer-gut getting all bendy all over the place. I wouldn't call him graceful, only because you usually don't associate guys who look like Homer Simpson graceful, but he was graceful in his way. The weird thing, though, was how he moved. Like his gut was the hub of his body and his body spun around the hub. The belly stayed the same, never moving, but everything attached to it moved. I wondered, in fact, if the beer gut was the center of his power.

Still, all I could wonder was this- if yoga is supposed to be so healthful, what the hell was this guy doing with a huge gut?