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"Oh and if you feel emotional in camel pose that's very good. The reason is you are opening and stretching your heart muscle." This was a text I received from a friend after telling her I was going to my first Bikram yoga class. I've practiced yoga very little, maybe four or five times. But for the longest time, I've heard people describe this intense euphoria you feel upon finishing a Bikram session. My yogi friend/Bikram acolyte has an uncommonly healthy outlook on life, and is in better shape than anybody I know. Euphoria? Health? Happiness? Who wouldn't want these things. Thirsty for that triple-threat on top of the world feeling, I caved and booked a class.

Bikram yoga is a specific kind of practice in the greater yoga universe, which is far more complicated than I care to understand. It was created in the early '70s by Bikram Choudhury and unlike other styles, Bikram consists of the same 26 poses, or postures, each time. Then there's the other thing, the very important thing, the heat. Bikram classes are always practiced in rooms in excess of 100 degrees. Even in the throes of a polar vortex, that is an unwelcome temperature.

Ah, there's one more thing, Bikram sessions are ninety minutes long. So I needed to prepare myself to bend in all directions, for eighty-five minutes longer than I am accustomed to, in insane heat. Great.

Like many people, I prefer to ercise with as few spectators as possible. This means early mornings. With that in mind, I booked a class for 8:00 AM on Sunday, relying on hangovers across the city to keep the studio as sparse as possible.

But the locker room was fairly crowded, which is never a good sign, especially knowing I was about to be in a very hot room with these people. From the reception area I could see maybe twenty or twenty-five folks in the studio, but still plenty of room to breathe. Charly, the instructor, introduced herself and told me that for my first class, it's really about adjusting to the temperature. "How bad could it be? Onward! We ride north, to Bikram!" I foolishly thought. Proudly, I entered the studio. Some interior dialogue:

"Jesus Christ this room is fucking hot."

"Everybody is half naked, should I be half naked?"

"I should stretch, that girl over there is stretching, I'm gonna stretch."

"I'm really glad I cut the sleeves off this t-shirt this morning, pro move."

"I'm just going to lay down now, everybody else is laying down."

"If I don't take my shirt off now, I can't do it later. It's now or never. But I'm too hairy to do that, I should've shaved my back. Jesus."

The class hasn't even started and I'm pretty intimidated. Charly enters the room to begin and rather impressively names_ every_ single student in the class. It's obvious that I'm the new guy, because a) I'm the only guy still wearing a shirt and b) I was introduced to the class as the newbie.

To ease into it, Charly suggests that I follow along for the first few reps of the postures and use the other students as a guide.

The first pose was all about breathing, which I never knew could be fairly strenuous. From what I gather, yoga is heavily focused on opening your body and there's a lot of moving in coordination with your breath. It's a lot more complicated than it sounds, and towards the end of this ercise, I found myself pretty strained. After tiring myself out from basically just standing there and breathing, we took a moment to dedicate that day's practice. This ritual is a little different for everybody, but I closed my eyes, focused hard on a specific person and told myself that whatever was about to go down, was all for (or in spite) of them. I won't in a million years tell you who I dedicated my practice to, but let's say focusing in on it certainly makes things a bit easier. I did that and then decided to let go of some menial bullshit I was hanging on to including but not limited to unanswered texts, standard post work week stress and some passive aggressive tweets. The heat was really starting to affect me now and we were barely in the thick of things.

I won't get too into all the details, postures and stretches because they have wild and crazy names like " Ardha Chandrasana" and "Ardha Matsyendrasana". You know about those, right? The class went on, the heat went up, the sweat literally flowed like water everywhere.

Honestly, at some points, there were things that my body simply couldn't do. (The fact that you can't drink until twenty-five minutes in made it harder.) Half the time, that was because my skin was so sweaty that I would just glide off myself (strange words to type) whenever I tried to balance and the rest of the time was just beginner's fear or inexperience. My thoughts persisted, mostly swirling around the heat and sweat. But, that's what I was there for I guess, to sweat out all the toxins, let go of some crap and yogacise with the people, the hot sweaty people.

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When the class ended, I wanted to streak through the freezing city streets. But, before I could expose myself to lower Manhattan, the whole room gave me a round of applause for completing my first class. Normally, my gym routines are based around sheer competition, never this sort of supportive group mentality. It was nice and a welcome change, we were all in this early Sunday thing together, after all. When you practice yoga, you feed off the energy of everybody around you, so that outwardly positive expression is important for vibe maintenance. To their clapping and encouragement, all I could reply was, "It's so hot in here. Oh my God. I didn't believe anybody."

Back on earth, I floated down the street back to my apartment, hydrating all along the way. That mysterious euphoria I mentioned? It exists. When you sweat that much and stretch yourself to the breaking point, you're bound to feel that way. In fact, I felt so good that I felt the need to capitalize on it right away, so I called my parents. You see, I have this philosophy that if you're in an uncommonly good mood, you should call home—there's assurance that it will be a mostly pleasant conversation. That transcendent feeling followed me all morning and into the evening.

I just sort of melted into everything, like butter onto bread. Don't you want to feel like butter?

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