The studio is on Divis, and even though it’s on the second story, you can hear all the street noise. I love that. The room has incredibly high ceilings and huge windows and a beautiful wood floor. It smells exactly like San Francisco to me, the smell I missed so much when I was living in Boston. It’s a little bit of mold and mildew and fog, a little bit of good old wood, a little eucalyptus, and a lot of whatever it is that continues to make this city magic for me. I could live in that room. I love feeling my body warm up in there, and then cool down at the end of class, when we’re in whatever that pose is called where you lay like a dead person and breath for an endless amount of time. You pull a wool blanket over you then, and it’s heavy and probably has other people’s sweat on it, but it’s perfect.
According to my friends who have gone to this instructor for a long time, she does a lot of hip work. I don’t know exactly what that means since everything in my life feels like hip work, given that I have a bum right hip/butt, but I am told that since ladies hold lots of tension in their hips, this is a Very Good Thing. Whatever this hip work is feels magical – I leave class with the very tiniest muscle tremors all over, a feeling like exhaustion but also like the happy tingliness of a massage.
That’s enough gushing – blame it on the hip work. I am an incrementalist in all things, so as much as I love this class I’m not going to become a yoga-head anytime soon. I will, however, be bringing my mother to class when she visits in a few weeks, and I think that is going to be something to see.