I do yoga every morning in my bedroom as soon as I get up. It stretches my back and loosens my creaky joints so that I can walk pain free. I’ve been doing it for years and highly recommend it.
Until this morning, I’d only had one unpleasant morning yoga surprise and it took place in Baja Mexico where I was living two years ago. The house had cockroaches. Big cockroaches.
They frequently made me jump in the middle of the night when they’d jump up at me from the drain in the bathroom sink.
But I decided we had to move out when one yoga morning I felt and heard a huge crunch underneath my right heal as I stretched my foot down into the yoga pose called down facing dog. I screamed and called for my husband to dispose of the cockroach (have I told you that I’m squeamish about such things as half-dead animals/insects/whatever?).
Fortunately, and for some wonderful reason that I do not understand, we don’t appear to HAVE cockroaches in San Juan del Sur. At least not that I’ve seen.
But we do have a healthy population of scorpions.
How this one got into our bedroom and under my yoga mat this morning while I was doing yoga I will never know.
But I do know that while I was sitting with my butt along the short edge of my mat and my legs extended in a V off the mat that something black caught my eye emerging out from underneath the corner of the mat. I thought it was one of our frequent housemate ants and I tucked the mat back over it and continued on.
It wasn’t until I was finished and lifted the mat by it’s corner to roll it up that I felt a soft squishy body where there should only have been a hard rubbery mat.
I screamed and ran for John, afraid that I’d accidentally maimed a friendly gecko.
It was not a friendly gecko. It was a scorpion. Almost two inches long. And very dead.
I killed a scorpion. During yoga. Without even knowing it. No crunch. No squish. No nothing. That’s the value of having the yoga mat between me and it.
And don’t feel bad for my husband. Like opening jars for me that I can’t open, I think he likes the added job security which comes with us living in the tropics.
And you know what? I’d choose beautiful clean scorpions over dirty multiplying crunchy cockroaches any day.