I come from a long line of "closet" farters. We DO NOT
EVER fart in the company of others. My family are also very polite belchers. We hide our time gaseous esophageal eruptions behind a closed mouth with a dainty hand in front of our lips. And we always say, "Excuse me."
Should anything monumental start rumbling from stomach to mouth or
God Forbid! - churning and threatening to escape from our bowels, we run like the wind to the "closet". I kid you not! I don't even recall my nephews farting or letting loose a rip-roaring burp in front of me even when they were the age that farts and burps would've been hysterical!
Fear of public farting brings me to the reason for this post. In my never ending effort to get fit, I started doing yoga. Have y'all ever done yoga? When watching professional yoga practitioners, the movements are graceful and fluid. Those yogis have no body fat, no jiggly bits and have perfected inner peace. They also, apparently, have a spiritual way of controlling their farts. I believe that this last part is the most important thing I must learn.
While I know that flatulence is natural, I'm unable to get to the point where it feels fine to let one rip in a roomful of people. Especially strangers. Yoga tends to stretch and bend the body in a variety of unnatural positions. The accomplished yogi looks beautiful doing these
gruesome healthful postures. I, on the other hand, look like the Michelin Man after Thanksgiving dinner. My muscles rebel, my ligaments scream, my diaphragm contorts, my brain doesn't know what to do with all the blood rushing into it, and my intestines twist and turn, threatening to expel whatever gas may be lurking in there out into the atmosphere of the room.
All the while I'm pretzeling myself into, "child's pose", "down dog" and "half-moon", my butt cheeks are tightly clenched. They are locked together even during my favorite pose - "corpse pose", just in case.
I'm able to
let go of the day and
get the tension out during the class. I'm able to stretch and release different muscles, albeit with some difficulty, but I'm NEVER going to be able to
let go or
release a public fart. Should one escape, despite my best efforts, I can always take Zumba.