Fashion Wire Daily 3/7/04

Some Like It Hot Yoga: See You On The Other Side

BAPTISTE POWER VINYASA COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE. OR END IT.

For all the OHMing, not too many yoga classes really deliver a spiritual experience. Most of the time, soul-wise, there's not much difference between an hour and a half of yogic posing and an hour of cardio core burn or whatever. One could even argue that the extra half hour you gain in taking a step class instead of a yoga class is time that could be wisely invested in personal reflection, reading theology or, say, volunteering with God's Love We Deliver. But I had an actual, real-life spiritual epiphany while taking the Baptiste Power Vinyasa class last week at the Some Like It Hot Yoga studio on the Upper East Side.

I think it was at the point when we were flowing from chaturanga dandasana into urdhva mukha svanasana for the kazillionth time. I saw the white light. A voice was calling me to come. "It's happy here," the voice said, "all the pad thai you want and it never goes to your thighs." But something, some eternal life force, kept calling me back... In other words, I almost died.

But in a good way! A kickboxing class might work your muscles just as hard, but there really is nothing like yoga for forcing you beyond yourself. And as ably conducted by Some Like It Hot instructor Paige, Baron Baptiste's series of poses forces you to reckon with every undernourished muscle in your body, and push them to work in ways a Western god probably never intended. Even if I hadn't been on a two-month yoga hiatus prior to taking this class, I still think I would have found it the most purely challenging yoga session of my young life: It's conducted in a hot room, which (ironically) was the cool part for me, since I have a Bikram background; it flows Vinyasa-style, which was tougher for me, because I have a Bikram background; and more than that, Paige required everyone in the reasonably-sized class to hold every pose correctly and long enough to make the relevant muscles quiver. And then, after 80 minutes of that: crunches. I'm not kidding. Crunches. After the class was over, however, my body was relishing its several brushes with total collapse: I felt looser all over, open and refreshed, and confident that if the ab workout at the end of the class hadn't done me in, nothing short of a mack truck could.

Some Like It Hot Yoga is currently the only studio in the New York offering classes in the Baptiste style; Paige is one of five Baptiste-trained instructors in the city. The snug, sleek studio also offers Iyengar, Ashtanga, plain old Vinyasa and core-centric classes in its hot room, as well as standard Bikram classes and a shorter version, Bikram Flow, which combines the traditional Bikram series with Vinyasa's movement.

Some Like It Hot Yoga is located at 206 East 63rd Street, Suite 3.

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