The One Cool Trick All Men Need To Know To Do Yoga

Choire Sicha
The Awl
Published in
2 min readNov 23, 2015

See, there’s one rule of yoga, and it’s that you don’t make any noise at all.

Yeah you just —

It’s crazy, yeah. ABSOLUTELY none. You just keep breathing.

No, there’s no grunting. That’s for picking up dudes at CrossFit. Oh you’re straight, haha, weird, sorry. Anyway like, if you’re straining and it hurts, you should like just stop and chill out. You don’t really do like “strain” in yoga?

Definitely no one’s laughing at you if you just lay there for a few minutes. But they might be if you keep making all these noises, you know what I mean…

So, actually, there’s no moaning either. There’s no “mmmm”ing. There’s definitely no “mmm that’s so delicious” noises, that’s fucking awful. You’re not eating a box of assorted pies in here.

Definitely not any kind of talking, particularly crazy-mumbling to yourself.

Not even sighing, no. You just breathe through your nose the whole time. If you stop and listen do you hear all the people busy not making noise? Is it possible for men to notice when they’re the only one making noises?

You’ll notice when you’re not breathing because you’ll start grunting again.

Sometimes things are just hard, man.

You can laugh if something funny happens though! :)

It’s a pretty… chill situation.

So be chill.

Is it possible for men to go an hour without expressing their feelings in a performative way that is intended to induce emotional care-taking labor around them?

Pretend maybe that you’re in a prison and that you’ll be murdered if you make any noises at all, could be a very fun “mind game” for you to play.

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