Yoga as sensual domination

I am having fantasies about my yoga teacher. Concentrating on how she moves my soul when I should be focussing on my breath moving past my solar plexus. But at least they are enlightened fantasies, with me imagining that she is pure bright light.

To protect her innocence and ensure that she doesn’t become too popular to be able to continue her house calls to me, I’ll call her Dora. Dora means gift, which is apt because she is a big blessing in my life.

Every week she arrives in delicate yoga finery that highlights both her beauty and her yoga goddess body. It is so easy to feel drawn to her.

Perhaps it is my own doing, perhaps I set myself up to be smitten. After all before she came over for our first class I made a fire, lit candles and prepared fresh cucumber water. I set the mood for one hell of an intimate yoga class. A good yoga teacher must be wooed.

I invited my friend Rose to take the class with me. Years ago I developed a crush on Rose by laying in the grass next to her while we did yoga. I have decided that yoga and women and me mix nicely. Perhaps it is the blissfully bended bodies and bated breaths.

Walking into the class all wild and rowdy from our busy days, it only takes a minute for Dora to have Rose and I quiet, with hands pressed together in prayer position. We are immediately wound in wonder to her.

Dora’s classes always begin with a gift. One week she brings in a book of passages on love. Rose and I each pick a number. Dora adds them up and reads the passage on the sum’s page, our lesson in love before our lesson in limber limbs.

As if reading us love poetry wasn’t incentive enough, one week she begins class by breaking off big dark hunks of chocolate. She has us lie on the floor and lets the mounts of chocolate melt in our mouths while we meditate on the textures and sensations. Plying us with aphrodisiacs, the foreplay to excite and open us.

All of this is the vanilla part of the fantasy. Class opens with the courtship of a rose, but Dora’s teachings are her thorns. Darling that she is, Dora does make us work our derrieres off. We downward dog until we’re dizzy, thinking we’re in the depths of delusion.

“Please hold the pose,” she says sweetly, pulling politely on our hips and pushing our threshold for pain. There is no fooling Dora; she knows how to fondle your flexibility. She listens to your every breath, breathes with you, becomes one with your body and helps you break it in.

I can’t get away with anything. She knows where every gasp of air is in me, what each muscle feels like, which bones are bearing what weight, what my body will or won’t do. I work up a strong sweat. If I stray she snaps me back.

Suddenly the dominant woman fantasy makes sense to me. Breathing in I am calm. Breathing out I surrender to my submissive sensibilities.

When she puts her hands on me and adjusts my position she makes me feel like I’ve achieved utopia just by coming to yoga class. She is thoughtful and nurturing, and will meet my every need.

Last class, with my back against my gardenia fabric-covered wall, my legs split open – one flat foot on the hardwood floor, one reaching foot resting on Dora’s shoulder – I began to sob. Tears, falling down my face, my whole body flooded with release. I could not speak, I only cried.

As Rose later agreed over tea with cheesecake and raspberry compote, “those hip opening poses can be quite emotional.” Dora, gift that she is, held me in breath until I was calm and smiling again. We spend the rest of the class on breath-work, breathing beautifully, together.

We end every class with relaxation so deep it’s as though we’re drifting into the damp darkness of the earth. Dora tucks us in under the duvet, covers our eyes and lets us drift in delight.

It is strength, it is soul, it is soothing, it is searching and it is sensual. Yoga class is the sexiest thing in my spring schedule.