Hot Yoga Is Not for the Weak of Colon

I should’ve canceled.

My stomach had already been growling like a demon with a tambourine before I unrolled my mat. But no—there I was at 9:45 a.m., front row, because I still believed in healing. And because David teaches Tuesdays.

David. Sixty years old. A silver fox with the voice of a sleepy cult leader and a body like a dehydrated Greek god. Always shirtless. Always glistening like he’d been lightly basted in coconut oil and personal failure. The kind of man who says “notice the story your body is telling you” while your intestines are writing horror.

We’re only twenty minutes into class when it starts.

The gurgle.

Not a cute gurgle. Not a little “oops, tummy’s talkin’!” This is seismic. This is the prequel to Pompeii. This is my rectum playing jazz through a megaphone. The woman next to me side-eyes me like I just farted and blamed it on her dog. I mouth “sorry” and go into Standing Separate Leg Stretching pose, which in this context feels wildly inappropriate.

David—fucking David—is walking around the room, talking about “flowing through resistance.”

And I’m like—David, baby, the only thing flowing is about to be me.

I clench. I beg. I pretend to meditate while making a list of public restrooms within sprinting distance. My hands are shaking. I smell patchouli. I sweat from places I’ve never sweated before—like behind my knees. Every twist, every pose is a betrayal.

And then. The drop.

The drop is not metaphorical. It’s real. It happens in Wind Removing pose, which is already a cursed pose for someone with bowel issues. Legs up, back down, ass to God. I feel it. Something moves. Something leaks. I am now praying not to a higher power but to the mat itself. Please absorb me. Become quicksand. End me.

I bolt. Mid-class. Mid-pose. No one even says anything. They hear it. My ass makes a noise like someone slowly dragging a boot through wet gravel.

Bathroom. I make it. Pants halfway down, I don’t even turn around. I don’t check for toilet paper. I don’t care if it’s clean. I let go like my soul is exiting through my lower intestine. It’s not one explosive release. It’s waves. Tsunamis. It’s audio. It’s surround sound. The tile amplifies everything. I am a fucking Bose system of disaster.

And then… a knock.

“Hey,” a voice calls softly.

It’s David.

David, the man I’ve imagined doing terrible things to me in the back of his Saturn, is now ten feet from me while I diarrhea so violently I think I blacked out.

“You okay in there?”

Am I okay?

David. I am dying. I am shitting myself to death while your sculpted calves wait patiently outside the stall.

I try to speak. All I manage is, “I… need a minute.”

A minute, as if there’s a timer on gastrointestinal collapse. As if I’m not actively making sounds that would get me banned from a zoo.

He lingers.

He says: “We’ll be here when you’re ready.”

I’m never ready again, David.

I wipe. I weep. I wrap the remains of my dignity in single-ply paper and flush it into the abyss.

When I leave the bathroom, the class is in Savasana. Dead still. Peaceful.

I walk out. They open their eyes. They know.

I don’t even roll up my mat. I leave it behind like a body. I didn’t say goodbye. I walked straight out of that room and into a new life.

Do I still do yoga?

Yes. But I moved states. Changed my name. Joined the witness protection program. My new teacher thinks my name is Janelle. She doesn’t know what I’ve done.

And David?

David still teaches Tuesdays. Drives that same beat-up Saturn. Probably still says things like “let the discomfort rise”. But not about me. Not anymore.

I left my old life behind.

And my mat.

And part of my rectum.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer