Namaste. Damnit.

As I teetered my way clumsily across a narrow concrete curb the other day, avoiding the relative safety of the broad sidewalk (and risking ridicule), I thought this was how a twelve year old boy must feel (minus the risk of ridicule) on a quiet summer afternoon, skipping stones by a lake. Alone but not lonely, joyful but not overly so. Teetering across a narrow concrete curb -- my version of a happy dance.

There has been a noticeable change in my gait since a relatively new friend set me straight a few weeks ago. "Aha!" We had been practicing amateur psychology on each other for several hours, and were heading back to our cars. I felt like I do when I emerge from an afternoon movie, blinking and confused by the harsh assault of daylight. As we prepared to disappear back into the solitude of our own heads for the rest of the day, our conversation moved to lighter topics -- the indignity of lactose intolerance, the joys of going gluten free -- the innocuous yet inescapable minutiae of life in the third millennium.

And yoga. My on again off again passion, the unlikely discipline that once kept me afloat, then made me feel trapped, and then, only recently, began to buoy me up again. I had confessed to my new friend that I felt a bit intimidated in that morning's class. It felt like extreme yoga, or, I suppose, yoga for extremists. I was surrounded by overachievers: a sinewy specimen to my left wearing paper thin tights that gave the illusion of being full leg tattoos, a fearless fireplug on my right who kept going upside down and toppling onto the wood floor with a reverberating thud. Forty minutes into the class, I was still struggling with the simplest poses, trying to convince myself that an inability to completely straighten my left knee did not make me a bad person. Oh, how I envied the overachievers, how I pined for the good old days of hyper extension.

Aha? I expected a bit more empathy from my new friend, who seemed well versed in the feelings of inferiority that plague us women as we forge deeper into middle age, the era of all sorts of pauses. "I am better than you are at yoga!" I could swear she had told me only moments earlier that she sucked at yoga. My inner goddess was withering; I wanted to punch this woman, wipe the serene smile off her face, reclaim some ground on the superiority scale.

She elaborated. "I suck and I don't care!" I felt ashamed, tempted to turn in my Lululemon professional discount card. She was right, more right than she could have been had she stood on one hand and folded both legs into a perfect lotus behind her ears while she sipped at a cup of green tea. She is better than I am at yoga, if there is such a thing as being better at yoga. All the lessons yoga had taught me, the words I have pretended to live by, that I have passed on to others, they were all coming back to bite me in my flexible ass. What happened to non-competitiveness and non-comparativeness and being present in the moment? My own moment, that is, not somebody else's.

Days have passed since that walk of shame with my friend, and I have tried to be present and non-judgmental and enjoy as many moments as possible without wanting anything more or less. I shrug the small stuff down my back with my shoulders, and I celebrate even the most minor victories.

This morning, in a hot and overstuffed holiday yoga class accommodating the dedicated yogis for what would have been three classes on a normal Monday, I teetered my way into a balancing pose, one that usually requires little effort. I was hesitant, trying not to fall. "Nice, Lisa," I heard the instructor say. She could not possibly have been talking to me, as shaky as I felt, but, then again, maybe she was. I sucked, but I just didn't care.