Namaste, dude

Patrick Presley counts himself “the world’s most unlikely yogi,” which makes him the oddest man out in a place of few men.

Presley, 45, says he came to yoga as a broken-down bundle of bad habits and worse knees, willing to try anything to feel better.

“One ankle surgery,” he counts, “four knee surgeries, a long battle with back problems,” and a slump that his doctor diagnosed as “terrible bum shoulders.”

He reports himself mended by yoga, but only after he came to terms with a situation that whipped him on the first try.

“I was the only man in the entire class,” he testifies, “and my ego was far past being challenged, my equilibrium was rocked.”

He with the dark eyebrows, the flat-topped hair, the Tony Stark/Iron Man beard, had discovered a trend:

Here and nationally, true ever since yoga escaped the confines of India, mostly women do yoga. That is, take up this ancient system of physical and mental exercise.

Yoga teaches controlled breathing and the ability to stretch and hold body positions called poses. Poses have names of the sort that men just don’t bandy around: Cow Face, Downward-Facing Dog, Half Lord of the Fishes.

In the United States, yoga caught on especially in the 1960s as “part of the youth culture’s growing interest in anything Eastern,” according to the American Yoga Association.

Hippie chicks did yoga.

Yoga Journal’s latest (2012) figures show 82 percent yoginis (women) outnumbering 18 percent yogis (men) for a total of 20.4 million on the mat. An article posted on the Yoga Journal website asks, “Where are all the men?”

And for the new guy in a class of women, the next humiliation is apt to be that women do it better.

“I could not believe that women 10, 20, even 30 years older than me could do all of the postures with ease,” Presley says, “and I could barely walk after some of those classes.” OW!

No man is alone in his accumulation of aches from all manner of sports and weightlifting, in his sleepless nights and the sluggishness of too many cheeseburgers.

But in going to yoga class? — yes sir, pretty much alone.

Yoga Journal, Om Yoga and other magazine covers show almost entirely pictures of women — women looking serene, looking upside-down, acrobatic in stretch pants, women shaping themselves into pretzels.

Men do pretzels with beer, not on pink floor mats. Men are not the market for yoga’s accessories of toe rings, silk eye pillows and tinkly bells.

Presley’s first try was 10 years ago. Finally, “the macho side won out,” he says, “and I returned to the gym more hard core than ever.”

His aches only worsened, to the point that he listened to his wife’s recommendation that he give yoga another try.

By suggesting that he might be able to keep up a little in a beginner’s class, “she played me to perfection,” he says. His powerlifter’s competitive spirit kicked in.

Back he went, back to same-as-before situation of a room full of women — back like a cowboy to the same saloon where he got thrown out the last time — back with a new determination to stick with it.

And here he is, barefoot and limbering up in the tranquil surroundings of dim light, whispered voices and a trickling fountain at the Blue Yoga Nyla studio in North Little Rock.

OM!

Something to meditate on: Men invented yoga long before they invented the avoidance of yoga.

Thousands of years back, men and only men taught and studied yoga in India. Yoga went with Hindu thinking. Body control was a means to better meditation: mental focus.

Taken all the way, the goal of this way-back belief is to free the soul. But as yoga spread outside of India, people took it up for other reasons.

Women embraced the gentle philosophy of yoga, its promise of a lithe body and calm spirit, the yoga studio as sanctuary: all the touchy-feely, incense-smelling aspects that sent men to the sports bar instead.

The Beatles were big on Transcendental Meditation, a form of yoga that influenced their songwriting, but who else ever got to be a Beatle?

More common was for athletes to add yoga to their exercise regimens the way some will try anything to gain an edge. When it worked, they were even more secretive about it. But now, it’s an open secret.

OOF!

Fayetteville yoga instructor Andrea Fournet leads a preseason yoga class for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team.

Other clients she might convince of yoga’s strength-building benefits, but not these guys.

“They’re already strong,” Fournet says. “For them, it’s about stretching.”

Even so, men are the minority at her studio, the Arkansas Yoga Center in Fayetteville.

“I think they always will be,” Fournet says, although she went as far as offering men’s-only classes. “You get such a small turnout.”

If ever a class assembled more men than women, Fournet says, “I would take a photo and post it on Facebook.”

Meantime, her regular students include 67-year-old Richard Danielson, a retired cross-country truck driver. Thanks to a year and a half of yoga, Danielson says, he can ride his motorcycle longer without feeling stiff the next day.

Twenty years of truck driving left him with “leg issues and back pain” that yoga soothed away, Danielson says. If it meant being the only man in class, “a novelty item,” he hardly noticed.

Encouraged by his yoga-teaching wife, Stephanee, he keeps up a regimen of three to four classes a week, “and I love it.

“I enjoy seeing the ladies,” he says, “and talking with them, and finding out what’s going on in their lives.”AHA!

Presley says it took “a cosmic uppercut” to make him give yoga another try.

“I had been having the kind of back issues that made me walk like a beat-up old man,” he says. “It was noticeable and humiliating.”

“He struggled,” yoga studio owner Stacey Faught says, and to Presley: “You came in with a competitive nature. You were a completely different person.”

Presley’s Tuesday night teacher, Steve Kirk, says men like Presley commonly start yoga with the self-conscious sense that everybody is watching them. But athletes expect to be watched.

“You have to lose that ego,” he says. If the class is well run, people are paying attention to their own practice of yoga. By Kirk’s measure, a person in class should not be able to say even what the next guy was wearing.

In Presley’s case — a loose black T-shirt, gray pants and big grin, reporting how the last year and a half of yoga brought down his blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and made him nicer to be around.

Weightlifting competition, he says, “never made me want to be a better person.”

For expert corroboration, Presley’s wife agrees.

“I’ve been with Patrick for 21 years, and I’ve never seen anything make such a difference for him,” Lela Delgado-Presley says.

“I just kept telling him, ‘If you don’t do something, you’re going to wind up in a wheelchair.’”

Once he got over the idea of yoga being a girly-girl thing, once he stuck with it, really bought into it, he gave up red meat. He lost 25 pounds.

“He went from a stocky build,” his wife says, to — well, wow, square-shouldered and flat-bellied, no way the look of a guy who works with numbers behind a desk.

But enough of pitching yoga to men, Presley says. The last thing he wants is to go around yapping about what other men ought to do.

“Yoga has a way of making you want to live a better life,” he says, “and in the process play a role in improving others’ lives as well.

“And that very last quote is exactly the kind of soft or new-agey quote that, 18 months ago, would have driven me away.

“Oh, the irony!” ***

This email came from Andrea Fournet in Fayetteville just before this article went to press: “We had 50 percent men in one of our yoga classes tonight! A first.”