New Year’s Resolutions: write more, drink less, go to the gym, don’t fart during yoga.

Kicking off the New Year, I’m writing again (albeit non-fiction for paying clients), but writing is writing. I’ve also given up my one true love–red wine. A lot of folks are doing dry January in an attempt to reset from all the over-indulging over the holidays. There’s a huge uptick in gym memberships. The mainstays at my local Planet Fitness call it the New Year’s Newbies. While I’m technically not new to the gym, I might as well be for how infrequently I went in the fall.

I’m sure I’ll go back to enjoying the occasional glass of Zinfandel, and it’s unlikely I’ll keep up my January gym commitments, but I hope I keep up the steady stream of writing and my weekly yoga practice.

In the mean time, I’m sharing a story I wrote about yoga and embarrassing bodily functions that was published by Alien Buddha Press in their introvert anthology: Alien Buddha Skips the Party Part 2. A print copy is available on Amazon. Enjoy and don’t sweat the small stuff!

Radiant Heat

by T.L. Tomljanovic

You always remember your first time.

You’re in downward dog, head down, ass up. Infrared baseboards are blasting heat and the room is a convection oven of half-baked turkeys sweating out toxins. Hot yoga instructor Kiffy is calling out commands in a Bob Ross-like voice that is meant to sound soothing, but your heart races when she says, “Swing one leg up high to sky, open that hip, bend the leg into three-legged dog, and breathe.”

You feel an opening and it’s not your chakra.Mentally, you start to chant happy trees, happy trees.

Kiffy continues, “And swing the leg down between your hands into a low lunge.”

You clench your Lululemon-clad buttocks and pray to Valhalla that Kiffy timed her Viking drum music to play at the exact moment you lunge.

She doesn’t. That cold-pressed juice drinker is playing Shallow and it’s not even the good version with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. It’s the quiet stripped-down country version. There’s nothing shallow about your body anymore. Baby made sure of that. It took months for your abdominal muscles to knit themselves back together and let’s face it, all the yoga belly breathing and half-hearted attempts at Kegels in the world aren’t going to bring that pelvic floor back to her glory days.

Air escapes your nether regions.

The only course of action is denial. Remember your high school training. If a fart escapes, deny and do not make eye contact. You study the mandala on the wall with a single-minded determination you never once demonstrated in school. You power through, lunging, and reaching your arms up. 

But it’s not over. Queefs run in packs like wolves.

You helicopter your hands up and out into Warrior Two and another puff of air escapes. Shit!

Maybe no one noticed. 

“Try going deeper into the pose. Everything our bodies do is natural and part of the universe. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” The instructor smiles without the slightest trace of mockery.

Thanks, Kiffy. At least, the radiant heat dial is set to 105 degrees and your face is already tomato red because if the rest of the class didn’t notice your bodily indiscretion before, they sure as hell do now.

Is black-bike shorts giving you the side-eye? Who is he to judge?

You turn your head forward and stare at your reflection in the mirror.

You bargain with your vagina: please, please stop. I promise to start regularly using that pink pelvic-floor trainer I bought off Amazon last year. I will squeeze and release a river of lotus flowers, a hoard of gems, and a kaleidoscope of butterflies. I will reach level 1,618,034 on the Pelvifit app. Just be quiet!

Your vagina knows you’re a liar. You turn to face the long side of the mat and fold in half, your legs spread wide.

“Bend into goddess pose,” Kiffy intones as she demonstrates an unearthly wide squat, her hands pushed together in prayer.

Noooo… you moan inside.

Yessss… your vagina smirks back and belches one final reminder of who is really in charge.