Yoga is hard.

This week the ladies in my neighborhood had a "yoga night". Yoga has always been one of those disciplines which I dismissed as being too much of a cliche for me to do. The ladies in my old town love yoga. They walk around with their yoga mats while breathing from their cores and sipping organic chai lattes made from the milk of free range sloths. It all seemed too precious for me.

I also thought it was easy. In fact, I may have even uttered the phrase, "How hard can it be?"

Now, knowing that yoga night would probably be a bunch of ladies sitting around and breathing into their chakras was not super appealing, but since the first idea had been zumba night I figured I was getting off easy. I would participate in it all in the name of trying to make friends, because honestly, there is no better way to make friends than to mock their silly exercise practices.

I arrived promptly at 7pm in my yoga pants. Yoga pants are the only part of yoga which I never ever dismissed. Those pants are for real.

I knew one person who was going to yoga night. My pal V, who insisted that I come though she would not actually be doing any yoga herself. What kind of friend is this you may ask? This is a friend who knows a thing or two about yoga. While I made my way downstairs with all of the stranger ladies, she stayed upstairs and drank wine.

I was loaned a mat and the instructor began by teaching us how to breathe. Guess what? I rock at breathing! I've been doing it my whole life in fact! As I did my breathing I smugly thought to myself, "This is exactly the sort of nonsense I always thought about yoga. I am right! I love being right!" It went like that for about thirty more seconds and then it all went very wrong.

Suddenly I was being instructed to balance on a hand and a leg while my ass was perched in the air  while doing the magic breathing, which was suddenly not so easy. You know what I learned from downward dog?

I learned that I hate yoga.

We were ten minutes into the class and I knew that I needed to formulate an escape. My arms were trembling. My leg was wobbling. I was in serious danger of a public fall in front of ladies I barely even know. I had an out of body experience as I saw myself the way the person behind me was seeing me- a woman on the brink of falling and becoming injured as the result of yoga! Yoga! Something which was supposed to provide some sort of bullshit relaxation and spiritual renewal was going to cripple me.

It was at that very moment that I heard someone's iphone beep with a text message. Reader, I knew that it was not my phone, but I saw as opportunity and grabbed it. I stood up and looked at my blank screen and then hurried up the stairs as if I had an important call to make. There I found V sitting with a large glass of wine, undisturbed by the cruel rigors of yoga.

She fetched me some wine and told me about the medicinal properties of ants. "They're clean because of their piss you know."

I always find the weird ones.

I drank my wine and the ladies emerged from the yoga den. I told people the story about my coffee ants and V told me all about ant soup. Then I went home, comforted by the knowledge that I will never have to eat ant soup and will never have to do yoga again. Sometimes that's got to be enough.