My Yoga Enemy

I had a yoga enemy. I know it sounds strange—an oxymoron, yes? But it is true. It was a battle of several years, much to the chagrin of one of my best friends and my yoga teacher at the time. She faced the battle between me and him, maintaining her equanimity and grace (how I see her virtue now).

But let me begin at the beginning. I used to be a yoga regular. I was the kind of woman who went to my yoga classes five to seven days a week. Yoga was my respite from the busy hotel business. For many years, I was rushing in and out, desperate to get my yoga fix, but not really slowing down as much as I could have used.

In those days, the 90-minute class—my phone being silenced—meant at least 90 minutes of catching up on emails and regular day-to-day business. My yoga time was precious. I slipped in near the door, often a few minutes late until one day, an oversized man was in my spot. I say oversized because he was nearly a giant and took up as much space as he possibly could.

I was relegated to a small corner as I tried to unintrusively join the class. Once we would begin, the teacher would try to ask my yoga enemy to move over to accommodate the extra people. He would avoid moving. Maybe he needed extra space to accommodate his extra-long limbs.

I had the feeling of being intimidated by his body. If our bodies met by accident in one pose or another, I would automatically react with a “sorry” or “excuse me,” and he would ignore me. He would move to take up more space the moment the teacher turned around. He even knocked paintings off the walls during “down dog splits” and wouldn’t bother to put them back in their places.

I found myself fuming daily. I battled to take up more space once I noticed he would not give an inch. I made it to class on time to try to get there before he would take “my spot.” I was ready and armored for any annoyance.

He was ready for me too (it seemed). If the room felt warm and I opened the window, he would request the teacher to close the window as the “fumes” were getting to him. (I called it fresh air). My daily yoga became a war zone. I would extend my 5’3” frame to its maximum to take up more space. I would challenge him with the window-opening game. It became so bad that I willed myself to fart, just to punish him.

And I would run into him at my favorite restaurants in our small town. Apparently, we had the same taste in food and yoga. I would say to my husband, “That’s him. He’s here again!” And my yoga enemy would always greet me with his smug British accent with a “He-llo Li-Ly.” Very drawn out.

One day I smelled his body odor during the entire yoga class. I was cursing internally at how disgusting he was invading my nostrils with his smell. When I left the class, the smell was still with me. I was furious until I smelled my shoulder and immediately remembered hugging my husband on the way out from home when he was in mid-workout. This hug left the imprint of my husband’s sweat on my shoulder, and I had cursed the other man for it.

And one day soon after, I decided to move to the other side of the room. My yoga enemy continued to push my buttons, or I continued to feel his presence. I still felt at war. But soon I looked at myself: What was my outrage about? I felt there was a kind of sexist machismo at play, and I was being intimidated by a big male body. And it was my duty as a feminist and empowered woman to fight him for space.

As I dove into my outrage, I soon realized I was losing my power—my yoga, my time. And this man wasn’t mean-spirited, just probably self-involved. This wasn’t my battle or something against me. It wasn’t my job to educate him. It was my job to not take his behavior personally. It was my job to get the most peace out of my yoga class.

With that realization, I became free. I did not “like him,” but I felt no outrage. I felt no personal affront. I didn’t need to feel like I was good and he was bad. And slowly he stopped disturbing me at all. Then the pandemic hit, and I never saw him. Until one day, I saw him at a gallery opening, and he was just a regular oversized man.

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