I love Essentrics a lot. For those who don’t know it, you should try a class! It’s inspired from ballet, Tai Chi and physiotherapy. It’s not postures like Yoga, you’re constantly in movement, always trying to go further in length, which leads to interesting comparisons to Inspector Gadget and means that when you leave the class, your arms and legs feel at least 6 feet longer than they were coming in.
You could compare an Essentrics class to disentangling your headphones’ cable. The process is painful and involves an uncommon amount of groaning, sweating, and laboured breathing, you start with a unusable bunch of rigid, unmovable knots and you finish, happy and relaxed, with everything smooth and loosened.
When I started, years ago, I was so spectacularly bad at it that it must have been quite painful to watch. My body was the equivalent of that box of old cables we all keep in a closet somewhere, you know the one… At some point, as you needed to extract a particular cable from this box, lifting the whole mass in view, you realized you’d need pliers to get at anything, and sadly sighed “And yet, I spent so much time rolling all those cables carefully!”
Needless to say, it took years, and although I still have a long way to go, I’m quite proud of the progress I made.
That’s what I was explaining to Muffin. She looked puzzled and slightly worried, gripping her yoga mat and apprehensively watching the varied animals coming in and greeting us joyously. As the Essentrics instructor – a beautiful Doe – came in and happily asked “Good evening everybody, how was your day?”, she nervously jumped, and grimaced at the same time. From what I understood, she was still in a lot of pain because of the TRX class – not surprising, as I told her, I was sometimes sore myself after a good class.
She looked at me sideways.
“You say it as if you liked being sore”, she said suspiciously.
-I… I think I rather do like it. Is… Is it weird?
-Duh!!!”
And she openly judged me. She would have said more, but the class was starting. As she was behind me, I couldn’t see how she was doing. I only heard the occasional grunt (nothing strange about that, Essentrics can be surprising the first time) and some half-muttered swear words which I could only hope were not addressed to me but to the world in general.
“How did it go?” asked the Doe at the end of the class. I was glad she did, as I felt more and more the weight of Muffin’s disapproval on me.
“Well, said Muffin, I didn’t think it would hurt that much – you know, especially the bit for the glutes…
-Oh, you did very well!! It is difficult, but you’ll get used to it!
-I honestly thought my buttock was going to explode or something!
-As I told you at the time, giggled the Doe, you cannot die from the butt!
-You were right, though, it does feel like a lobster was pinching me down there….”
We laughed. The Essentrics class lends itself to very picturesque comparisons, and the Doe has a lot of vivid expressions to describe the different positions or gestures, from the aforesaid Inspector Gadget, to butt-pinching lobsters, going through some more mundane cleaning a table, or sweeping a floor kind of situations. Sometimes we have “not very classy” postures, like the peeing dog (one of my favourite). Always very entertaining.
“The Doe is very nice, said Muffin on our way home.
-She is the best, I concurred. I’m glad you liked the class!”
She “mmmph” in a non-committal way. My heart sank within me.
“Oh Muffin, you didn’t like it at all, did you?
-Well, I mean, it’s not that I didn’t like it, Blue, it did me good and all, I can feel it, it’s just… You know…
-Not your thing?
-Not my thing.”
We walked in silence for a while. As incredible as it seemed, I could see she didn’t like the Care Bear studio as much as I had wished. I mean, I guess it can happen sometimes. It’s like when someone doesn’t like chocolate, or kittens. I had to get over it, and not go too philosophically deep on the thing. “She’s your friend, I said to myself, and even if she doesn’t like puppies and sunshine, you’ll help her and love her. You’ll love her even more because of it, if you can!”
So I gritted my teeth and slowly said:
“Why don’t you try something different and more social, like playing badminton with the guys?
-What a good idea!!” she exclaimed.
I let out a trembling sigh. I wasn’t so sure it was one…
* Those are direct (though translated) quotations of my Essentrics coach by the way, and they may be copyrighted!! 🙂