Too Much, Too Many

Thoughts and Sensations

Relaxed, Naked, Held-in, Hugged, Tight: Lululemon’s new Engineered Sensations come from an unprecedented partnership between science and art.

Mindfulness: a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.

In my new Lululemon Wonder Under or whatever it’s called, my mind is everywhere but where it should be: The here and now of my early morning yoga class. Instead, it dances from one fleeting thought to another:

• Just as advertised, the four-way stretch fabric hugs me tight, so tight the sensation is unabashedly sexual.
• Do other girls feel the same way? Or is it just oversexed me?
• The girl on my right…I forget her name…She always puts her yoga mat right next to mine; but when I try to be friendly, she never smiles, just gives me a Selfie-like Duck Face.
• Lots of people here I don’t know. The class is getting too crowded.
• Crowded: Can you imagine what it must be like as a poor immigrant trying to get to Europe, packed together with so many others you can hardly breath.
• Drown on the Mediterranean. Suffocate in a cattle car. To be left to die packed in a refrigerator truck on the Austrian Autobahn. Some of the dead were babies.
• The Duck-Faced Woman probably has a bunch of kids. I’ll never have any. Bad for me, good for the planet.
• Maybe that explains everything. All the crazy, horrible stuff that’s happening: ISIS beheadings, American police shootings, terrorist massacres, human smugglers, sexual slavery, epidemics, starvation. There’re just too many damn people. The earth’s too small to support us all. So crazed we run amuck.
• And how small I must feel, affluent and self-indulgent, in the cocoon of a yoga class trying to be mindful and overcome my attention-deficit issues. My tiny mind races.
• Focus, I tell myself, focus on my breathing, focus on the sensations I feel. It’s all about MeMeMeMe. Me. Meme. Forget the “starving Armenians.”
• Relaxed, Naked, Held-in, Hugged, Tight: Lululemon’s new Engineered Sensations come from an unprecedented partnership between science and art — or so I’ve been brainwashed by the brand.
• Namaste.

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And while we’re on the subject, here are 5 yoga moves for better sex: http://www.self.com/fitness/workouts/2015/08/yoga-for-better-sex/

Namaste. Yes.