For the active urban "athlete," there is a rarely spoken but widely understood dating rule attached to working out together. It goes something like this: "If I like you enough and date you long enough and then bring you to my gym, it's only with the stipulation that if we break up, YOU are the one who must leave." Sure, it's fun to have your honey lifting weights close by, but if and when the day comes that you've moved on," that same person is the last human being on earth you may want to see when you need to get a sweat on. The "rule" gets complicated in the yoga room.
For instance, it's difficult enough to pull off a decent "standing bow" without worrying your ex is trying to check out your rear from the back row or even worse, throw an unresolved hate your way via the side mirror. Bikram followers have a very different problem than gym members might experience. If you're focusing on yourself and your practice, no one else in the room exists and that includes the prior relationship that just won't go away quietly. In theory, his or her presence shouldn't matter...in reality, it's a serious drain on some much needed tranquility. George Strait moans that all of his exes live in Texas, but all of my exes also seem to want to hang out in the yoga room.
During the past three years of practice, I've handled it several ways with varying results. The straight up text message, of course, is the most distinctly un-yogi-like: "Please find another studio before I slash your new Breathe mat to shreds." An approach with a little more compassion might be suggesting that another Bikram studio has cheaper membership prices or much hotter instructors. The best way, though, to handle a stubborn ex is to lay down the law in the first three months of the relationship or "dating probation." Prince Siddhartha (Buddha) probably didn't worry about the "red flags" most of us look for when we meet someone new. Believe me, if he had, he'd have told his potential partners that his ashram was available to them only until the day he might change his romantic mind (and the lock on the door.) I guess I could avoid bringing them to the studio all together but since I'm there so often, my partners eventually show up out of a sense of quiet desperation.
Honestly, if we were all as enlightened as we hope one day to be in our yoga practices, we'd be living more in the present moment with current thoughts of our own practice such as why the temperature in the Bikram room is feeling like the seventh circle of hell in Dante's Inferno. But, since we're all still striving, the truth that I've found is that some days I'm centered and some days, I'm not. I can feel frustrated and resentful and tired and angry and still have a great class because it's a simple choice that I make each time I pull up in the parking lot. Bikram says, "It's never too late to start over" and I guess that needs to include my attitude of forgiveness toward ex-boyfriends who just might need the class as much as I do each day.
