30 days of yoga: Day 23 - bitch slap!

Yoga gets very busy at peak times. I think the capacity of the studio is around 60 people, and when it's full you're actually quite close to the people on either side; there's something like a 10 centimetre gap between mats.

Because some of the postures - eagle pose in particular - involve some rather vigorous arm swinging, the teachers always recommend that we, the practitioners, stagger ourselves. Helpfully, the mats are themselves staggered in the studio, so if your mat is forward, you step forward; if it's back, you step back. Simple really. Well, you'd think so. I always pick a mat that's nudged forward, but on several occasions I've found the person next to me standing right alongside, and they often frown at me disapprovingly like I'm the one that's standing in the wrong place.

Fortunately I sweat rather a lot during class, so if a disapproving glare doesn't do the trick I just splash them with a healthy amount of my salty man juice.

*ahem*

Anyway, tonight's class was going rather swimmingly for me, with the people on either side generally behaving themselves. I think my biggest complaint up until around the halfway point was that the lady to my left kept tickling the back of my right knee with her ponytail during standing separate leg stretching pose. I don't think it was intentional.

However, as we reached the floor series, lady made the heinous error of putting her water bottle at the base of my mat. Outrageous - it's well documented that I detest such behaviour! Despite the no-talking-during-class-rule, I was seriously thinking about having a word. But then something more awesome than I could ever have thought possible happened: the woman next to her slapped her right in the face while swinging her arms up to go into half tortoise!

And it wasn't a half-hearted slap either - it was a full-on, skin on skin, loud cracking noise slap. I Immediately thought about having a go as well - clearly her defenses were down because she recoiled away from her back-handing attacker toward me a little, but in an instant my window of opportunity was gone; the slapper was apologising profusely to the slappee as if the whole thing had been a horrible mistake (yeah right!). Much to my chagrin they didn't even get into a sweaty cat fight.

Suffice to say, though, that as I rolled forward and down onto Captain Kirk's face in an awesome half tortoise, I had a massive grin on my face…