Last few weeks I've been going to yoga again. Yeah: Opening hips, stretching into my lower back, etc & so on. Fook-aye.

I love yoga, but these recent classes have shone a bright light on what I don't like about it, even aside from the woo-woo stuff—which for the most part I've successfully avoided.

What I do like. Yoga: opens up my spine, makes me feel lighter on my feet and more in control of my bodily affairs. It's great practice balancing and strengthening the muscles that are forgottenly involved therein. It is practice relaxing, breathing, and keeping a cool head when under physical stress (wobbling, thighs burning, sweat pouring from temples, ready to puke). Also sensitivity to the sensation of the muscles, the angle of the joints, the pace and the shape of breathing, the sounds of others, and that damn feeling of resting, the beloved, adorable resting after an ordeal of balancing, crunching and squeezing.

A sensitivity to the need to breathe, and how many different kinds of needs to breathe there are!

It's meditation, in the sense of clearing those bloody memes out of the mind, and it usually comes without much truly crazy spiritual stuff. Most modern studios don't preach that in yoga you're communing with God or following an ultimate true path or astrally projecting—most just help you slip off that cast of thoughts that is like a bad song playing, or the demons of stress that nag & nag.

What I don't like is the shrill voice of some teachers, squeaking, "Go for it!" and "Hold it for 5 . . . Keep squeezing those thighs and pressing your legs back—yeah, why not?, 4 . . . 3 . . . Let yourself enjoy it! [subject collapses] . . . 2 . . . 1!" Bizarre directions: "And while you're balancing with your left foot in the air, just kick your right foot across over your left shoulder, and now stretch your back up, up, as far as you can. Go for it!"

The teacher I've seen now two Thursdays in a row is such a one—like an outcast from some aerobics class doing yoga on the side for a buck. I prefer the incredibly wise direction that I got from one instructor G. in another city many years ago: "Don't blow past it," he said calmly, and I noticed that when you press yourself quickly into the most extreme version of a pose that you can find, you often go past the point where you actually find a stretch, where it feels good or where you're learning something, finding an interesting difficulty in your body. Learning sometimes comes in the middle of an action, instread of at its hot-dog limit.

And, I think, it's true elsewhere in life. For example, I normally don't think about fractions, because I learned how to work 'em so long ago they're burned in. But a few years ago I sat down to help someone study up and discovered she didn't know how to do these. It was fun to think about the basic mechanics and why the tricks we use work. I sure learned more going through that process than just playing with fractions for an hour.

When I learned to sail this past summer, I cockily jumped into a boat by myself after the "shore school"—some people play #2 on a few trips before going solo. And I did fine—I could've capsized but I didn't. And although this built some confidence, it allowed me to get sloppy; I blew past learning some technique that I'd have picked up if I'd gone slower. When I later took a trip with an experienced skipper, I discovered things—ways of rigging the ropes, ways of reading the sail, and things to watch for on the water—that I might never have learned if I'd just coasted on my early solo success.

This season I'm also coming up with lots of new questions about yoga that I want to talk about. Where are the yoga support forums? I demand support forums in all things.