Last night I went to yogi dancing. This is basically yoga with a deejay, and then a “freestyle” section where you “just dance” for 15-20 minutes and feel like you are in a nightclub rather than a sandstone church in Paddington with a bunch of hippies.

What to expect at a yogi dancing class

1. Upon arrival, place your havaianas in a room full of havaianas. I positioned mine next to a dead cockroach for reference.
2. Enter the church. Inside it is eight hundred degrees and there are four thousand hippie backpackers sitting on the floor. They are all surprisingly attractive. Make awkward small talk with some of them. There is a pile of glow sticks at the front of the room and flowing light projections on the ceiling. There is one toilet. Behind the organ.
3. Meet the yogi, Angel. She is wearing a microphone headset and what I suppose you could call shorts. She has a glow stick in her hair. She is the nicest person you have ever met.
4. The yoga begins. Angel takes you through each routine, then leaves you to do it in your own time. So she’ll show you how to draw circles with your heart, then leave you to continue drawing circles with your heart on your own, while the deejay plays Sigur Ros and sways at the front of the room.
5. The difficulty increases unexpectedly. The poses pretty much go from swinging your arms from side to side to a headstand. You sit down on your mat, defeated. “This is bullshit,” you comment to the Irish girl next to you. She doesn’t respond though as everyone has their eyes closed.
6. Angel asks you to put your mats to the side and come into the centre of the room. She shows you some basic tribal-esque dance moves. The lights go down and the class pretty much turns into a rave, complete with glow sticks and smoke machines, but without any drugs. Then you just dance, frantically, for twenty minutes. (This was an issue for me, as ordinarily I do not dance unless I have a gun to my head or a blood alcohol level greater than 0.1). You are all sweating buckets. The hippies fucking love it.
7. The dancing stops and you are told to do a few “cool down” laps around the room, introducing yourself to everyone you walk past. You meet River, Ariel, and Clover, and shake their sopping hands and then you stop caring.
8. Everyone does some wind-down poses to Sufjan Stevens or whatever. Angel walks around spraying eucalyptus or something over you.
9. You discover a puddle on your mat and glance up towards the ceiling before realising it is your own sweat. You smell pretty bad.
10. You all lie in the corpse position for 5 minutes. Someone farts and nobody reacts except me, because I think it’s funny. Anytime anyone ever farts in the world is very funny.
11. Angel asks everyone to come onto her mat so we can pose for a group photo. She tells us to tag ourselves in the photo when she puts it on Facebook, so that we can all become friends.
12. On the way out, Angel gives everyone a kiss on the cheek. You feel a slight buzz as you leave, but that could just be due to the fact that you are severely dehydrated and inhaled quite a bit of that eucalyptus stuff.
13. This all takes just over 2 hours.

Actual helpful advice:

• BYO mat. You don’t have to, but this is a very sweaty, full-on class and you might get pregnant if you don’t.
• Take a towel too.
• If you’ve never done yoga before, take a few beginner classes at a yoga centre to familiarise yourself with some basic poses (like downward facing dog, warrior pose, salute to the sun, extended angle pose.)
• Make a booking. Classes are pretty popular. It’s $25 a pop. Deets here. That is also where I stole the above image.

Me: You should write me some blog posts about being a lawyer.

Keira: Why? They would all say the exact same thing: ‘So then I reviewed the documents and then I wrote some letters and then I sent the letters, and then I got a response, and reviewed that, and can you believe they deny liability? Ha, so anyway I wrote another letter.’

• my friends will want to go to the Tav tonight and I will flatly refuse, as since I have moved to the city, I have grown out of getting shitfaced at dirty bars in the Hills.

CORRECT – in honour of the Tav’s famous night club re-opening, my school friends were extremely keen to pay $15 for the pleasure of reliving our youth by chugging breezers, dancing on a podium and getting fingered in the carpark.

• a few hours later, I will be standing on a table in the beer garden at the Tav doing shots of sambuca.

INCORRECT – I went to my parents’ house, watched an episode of Studio 60 and then went to bed. I am so boring.

• I will yell at a taxi driver and pass out in the study at my parents’ house.

INCORRECT – I was able to sleep in my old room, as the lesbian couple who has been staying there was away for Christmas.

• Mum will knock on the door at 8am tomorrow morning and ask me if I want to go to church. I will pretend not to hear her.

INCORRECT – the woman is learning.

• My brother and I will wake up 5 minutes before my parents come home from church and pretend we have been up for hours.

INCORRECT – I got up early and went for a run, then made avocado on toast and read a weight loss magazine. Oh the shame of it.

• My mother will give me a Bryce Courtenay book, which I will never read, and I will give her a scarf, which she will never wear.

CLOSE – I got a novel by Philippa Gregory (an author I liked around 2001) and a Jamie Oliver cookbook, which I will never open because I am in no way gifted when it comes to food preparation.

• My brother and I will hand each other cards containing $50. Sometimes, we just pull out our wallets and exchange notes.

INCORRECT – we have developed a new arrangement where we request very specific gifts and nobody is disappointed. I am hoping to work my mother into this system for 2011.

• My mother will drink a glass of champagne while she’s preparing a dip plate, then have a hot flush and retire to the lounge while my father finishes all other food preparation for the day.

CORRECT

• Our Christmas lunch guests will be church families and awkward singles, because my mother believes that the days surrounding Christmas are for catching up with relatives and in-laws, but Christmas Day itself should be spent with her spiritual family.

CORRECT – this year’s line up included some people who were our neighbours during the 80s and an elderly woman with severe dementia who stared at a blank television screen for most of the afternoon.

• My brother and I, faced with the prospect of a long lunch with our estranged childhood Sunday School friends, will begin putting away beers as though our lives depend on it.

CORRECT – I don’t remember much after 5pm.

• Lunch will include a lot of seafood, which I will remind my parents I do not eat. (“Oh how nice of you to provide for everyone. Thank you so much.”)

CORRECT – but my mother also made a ham, which was the cause of many arguments but tasted delicious.

• I will start a fight with someone about Christianity, get shut down by my mother, sulk for the rest of the meal and then leave the table as soon as is vaguely socially acceptable.

INCORRECT – however I did make several racist jokes which were met with awkward silence and a lot of throat-clearing.

• I will sit for half an hour with my cat and then fall asleep on the couch.

INCORRECT – I partied all day and drank cocktails in the pool. Obviously the cat decided to spend Christmas Day hanging out with all her loved ones (ie. herself.)

• I will wake up after all our guests have left and my dad will make up a fruit platter just for me. We will sit in front of the fan and watch a documentary about Hitler.

INCORRECT – after a drunken stumble to a BP station to purchase microwave popcorn, my brother’s girlfriend and I watched Ricky Gervais’ Science and then I passed out around 10pm.