First Things First
I was raised in an ordinary, middle-class, suburban houshehold where the subject of yoga - if it came up at all - was viewed as woo-woo. Yoga was practiced by men in turbans who wrapped themselves into pretzel shapes and chanted "Ohhhhmmmm." Yoga was neither harmful nor an object of scorn, exactly, but it was certainly foreign and weird. You could make harmless fun of yoga, just like you could make fun of vegetarians and hippies.
Back then, there weren't yoga studios on every block, as there are today in a place like Berkeley, California. (Back then - actually, rather like now -Berkeley itself was a woo-woo topic. But I digress.) Yogis and Yoginis would not appear on the cover of national magazines like Time or Newsweek. Neither would anyone but, say, Shirley MacLaine, profess to practicing yoga on a regular basis. Certainly there was no yoga practiced by real men, let alone by an NFL football team.
Today, of course, it's different. Yoga is everywhere. Especially among a certain set - the younger, hipper, New Age set - yoga is a given.
I didn't start going to yoga classes because I woke up one day and thought, "Oh, it's time to go to yoga classes." Rather, I sort of eased into it, going to a few classes here and there, encouraged by the potential health benefits as well as my friends who were proponents of yoga qua yoga.
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