On a mission to find the right yoga class — just keep it light

Wanted: Someone to train my Downward Dog.

Must be kind, patient, and blissful.

Not too hot, not too intense, no public humiliation, please.

ncense optional.

Call it a yogic crisis.

On the modern stress continuum, finding just the right place to lay my yoga mat lands somewhere between locating the perfect summer rental and sussing out a decent eyebrow stylist. About a 6.5, depending on how tense the old back is feeling.

So far, The Great Yoga Class Search of 2004 has been a lot like shopping for a new church.

Yoga is, after all, a spiritual pursuit. Despite all the attention we’ve been paying lately to the gloriously sinewy “yoga bodies” phenomenon, yoga is supposed to prepare you physically to do something spiritually.

Often deciding on a religion itself is easier than finding the house of worship that suits you best.

Judaism or Baha’i? Taoism or Islam? Buddhism or Christianity? The choice is simple enough, compared with the next step of figuring out which denomination, branch, school of thought, or philosophy within that religion to call your own.

Take Christendom, for instance. Catholic or Orthodox, Lutheran or Unitarian, American Baptist or Southern Baptist, Conservative Baptist or Missionary Baptist, Church of Christ or Church of God in Christ, Presbyterian USA or Presbyterian Church in America, Evangelical Free or Evangelical Covenant, United Methodist or African Methodist Episcopal?

What you choose is a matter of need and taste.

Even when you settle on a denomination, you still have to pick a congregation.

Where to strike a pose

So, after a brief flirtation with rowing in the Lincoln Park lagoon, a fiscally taxing relationship with Pilates — we got along fine, but the $50 per hour price tag was hard to support — and a multiyear hiatus from regular yoga practice, this prodigal daughter decided recently to return to the asanas of her youth.

In hindsight, that decision was easy.

This dawned on me as I was lying on my stomach in the middle of a yoga studio earlier this week executing an admittedly rather poor cobra pose, while the instructor kneaded my lower back with her hand and the rest of the class stood around me in a semicircle, staring, I’d imagine, with a combination of ennui and disgust.

“You’re clenching your butt,” the instructor told me. “Relax your muscles. Release your butt.”

“I thought I did already,” I grunted, as she gave my sacrum another jostle and the woman next to me with the painted toenails shifted her weight, in a display of what I imagined was contempt for the novice with the tense tushie.

And to make matters worse, I needed to, ahem, “toot,” if you will, an unfortunate side effect of new migraine medication. You can imagine my mortification.

“You’re still clenching,” the chatty instructor said. Again. (“Lady, you have no idea,” I thought back at her, unblissfully.)

Instead of listening to my breath, calming my mind and unclogging my chakras, I had a flashback to eighth-grade gym class and a tragic attempt to climb a rope. I was living through one of those naked-on-stage-while-the-audience-laughs nightmares.

A bad dream come true

It was the yogic equivalent of visiting a church for the first time and having the pastor point at you from the pulpit, say you need prayer, and dispatch a bunch of people from the pews to lay hands on you, while the rest of the congregation waits.

The gesture may be well-intended, but for this aspiring yogi, the result was the opposite of yoga bliss.

So I left, halfway through class. A yoga dropout. “Loser,” one of my unsilenced inner voices taunted.

My bad. I’d picked the wrong denomination, it would seem, or at least the wrong congregation. I should have done more research.

I had chosen the ill-fated class because it bore the same name as a class I’d enjoyed greatly a few weeks earlier while visiting a friend in New York.

Apparently, the practice of Anusara yoga, which literally means “to step into the current of divine will,” varies greatly from place to place. Just like many religious affiliations do, I suppose. When the sign on the door says “Episcopal,” you can’t be sure whether what’s going on inside is a sung Eucharist with bells and incense or a swinging charismatic worship service with raised hands and speaking in tongues. Until you go inside.

Refusing to allow my born-again yoga-ness to be squelched by one bad experience, I did some more research and headed out to an early-morning Ashtanga class at a different studio.

Ashtanga is widely considered to be the most physically challenging of modern yoga practices. It’s the one Madonna does. “Bring a towel,” one Ashtanga Web site cautioned. “Be prepared to sweat.”

They weren’t kidding. A few years back, I took a couple of Bikram yoga classes. Bikram is also known as “hot yoga” because its asanas, or postures, are performed in a room heated to 100 degrees or more. My Ashtanga experience was almost as sweaty.

The studio was quiet, meditative. The instructor was quite helpful and blissful. And the other students were very serious. I stood in the corner, happy to be performing the Sun Salutations with some familiarity, while many of my classmates wrapped their feet behind their necks and stood on their heads.

It was a bit daunting. Like jumping into the middle of Eastern Orthodoxy if you’ve never before set foot in a church of any kind.

I may return to the Ashtanga class, but I need to work up to it.

Which is how I found myself not quite 24 hours after the yoga-butt debacle lying on my sticky purple mat at the local health club, hoping for the best.

Back on the mat

“Vinyasa flow” is how the yoga class, one of several that the club offers in addition to step aerobics, spinning and kickboxing, among other athletic endeavors, was described.

As best I can tell, “Vinyasa flow” is a hybrid of several yoga styles, including Ashtanga and Iyengar, a popular discipline that focuses on precision and symmetry in poses, and Viniyoga, which pays a lot of attention to integrating the poses with breathing.

Kind of nondenominational. Like Willow Creek.

It was pleasant. Not too hard. Not too hot. Challenging without being scary. Not enough incense. Almost right.

But I don’t want to get attached because yoga instructors at health clubs are like itinerant preachers. They have a tendency to move around a lot. And one instructor’s Vinyasa could be another’s Iyengar.

In the meantime, that yoga-for-morons-type guidebook I bought will come in handy as the search continues.

Namaste.