Yoga is supposed to make us feel like our bodies are perfect as they are: powerful, useful, and also entirely temporary. Well, we are no more than five seconds into our spirited squat and I am already panting and perspiring uncontrollably. The magnitude of my leg and abdominal pain registers all at once. I’m taut as a banjo string. My groin literally feels like two ends of a Chinese finger trap sprinting away from one another — the stress and the tension, pulling, on the verge of snapping in half. But as my inner thighs feel like they’re the victims of a prison shanking, that searing pain recedes and takes a back seat to a different, unidentifiable flavor of anxiety.

With a rumble, something stretches the threads of my abdomen thin and fine, crevices leveled smooth and leering down from a great depth, a hidden life beneath the surface roils. I part my lips for a heavier exhale but a shriek of rage and sharp, hot pain emerges from my very core, somewhere deep and troubled. I’m fairly certain that I’m hitting a breaking point, perhaps the early stages of an epileptic seizure, mounting, then… nothing.

I transition to child’s pose and…

PPPPPFFFFFFFTTTTTTT!

An uncontrollable release. This is disgusting. I’m disgusting. Sensing my palpable embarrassment, the instructor reassures me that, “it’s perfectly natural to flatulate during yoga. This is a judgment-free space.”

Why did you phrase it like that?

And I’m calling bullshit — there’s no such thing as a “judgment-free space.” We live in a society of shame.

Krystyl, I see you over to my left, flashing that “WTF?” face at me, as if I just spartan-kicked your Pomeranian off a bridge. I see you leering at me with your downward-turned, disappointed eyes, the apples of your cheeks reaching skyward while your brows corrugate into small, bowl-shaped caterpillars. Do you think you’re better than me? I can’t wait to scroll through Instagram and see a new pic of you out with your girls so I can passive-aggressively undermine your self-esteem with a comment like, “So cute. And your arms don’t even look that fat!”

The instructor shifts her weight forward and pauses for effect as if to deliver some grandiloquent, emperor-has-no-clothes soliloquy: “Time for crow’s pose.”

As I push the weight of my body up, holding, I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth in an attempt to fend off an embarrassing, mid-class dry heave, which normally hits me whenever an attractive woman catches me eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in public. I am wheezing like a donkey with the black lung, which makes it especially difficult to hear the instructor’s uplifting one-liners and pivotal directions. I don’t know which way to contort my legs. Everyone else is somehow gliding upward, transcending like they’re Jerry Garcia, which makes me suspect I missed a pre-session psilocybin sesh in the lobby. Then my hand slips and my body collapses on top of itself in an epic face plant, and I reach a new level of despondence.

Not sure if this beats crying at SoulCycle every week.

As my flattened cheek rubs against the mat, a faint light seeps into my periphery and I’m greeted with a flurry of update banners popping into my iPhone screen. Three emails from my boss. What’s the update on the monthly report? Your campaign idea is three days late. Your PTO request was declined.

Damn, I forgot to feed my cat this morning. Great. Now I need to add Kitty Smalls to the infinitely expanding list of “Those Actively Plotting to Shove Me Into a Wood-chipper.”