I’ve been lifting weights since I was 12 years old—long enough to have calluses older than some of my students. My loyalty has always been to iron, not incense. And yet, twice in my life I’ve flirted with the cult of yoga. First from 2005 to 2008, when Power Yoga made me sweat like a sinner in a sweat lodge, and again recently, from 2023 to 2024, when something primal in me remembered the bliss of holding Warrior Two while the room turned into a personal rainforest.
But iron always calls me back. Resistance training, especially kettlebells, is my native language. It’s the blunt poetry of movement: swing, squat, grind. There’s no chanting, no ambient whale noises—just the thud of steel against gravity and the holy ache of delayed-onset muscle soreness. Still, yoga lingered in my subconscious like a forgotten lover with a very flexible spine.
Then came the dream.
I was living in what could only be described as a monastic exercise gulag perched high in the Swiss Alps—imagine if The Sound of Music were choreographed by a CrossFit cult and everyone smelled faintly of magnesium chalk and regret. My cell was a minimalist slab of concrete, colder than a Russian novel and just as unforgiving. There I was, hammering out kettlebell swings with the grim dedication of a prisoner serving a life sentence for crimes against rest days, when it hit me—not just a muscle cramp, but a full-body epiphany.
I missed the sweat.
But not just any sweat. Not the stoic, industrial, man-against-iron kind that kettlebells demand. I missed yoga sweat. That slow, creeping, mind-liquefying ooze you earn by holding Crescent Lunge for six minutes while your brain gently transitions from “I am one with the universe” to “I am dying alone on this mat.” It’s the kind of sweat that doesn’t just leave the body—it evacuates your ego with it.
The sense of FOMO hit me like a rogue medicine ball to the face. I wasn’t just missing out on yoga—I was exiled from it, cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and tight hip flexors. The regret was theological. Yoga wasn’t just an option anymore. It was a spiritual ventilator.
In the dream, I staggered from my training cell like a sinner leaving the confessional. I entered my quarters—bare except for a desk, a lamp, and the faint scent of despair—and rearranged it like a man staging his own resurrection. Then, with the urgency of a convert and the shame of a backslider, I Googled yoga poses. Warrior. Triangle. Pigeon. All the old apostles.
I wandered the grounds like a deranged prophet in compression leggings, possessed by a holy compulsion to evangelize. I whispered gospel truths: “Downward Dog is deliverance,” “You are your breath,” “Meat is a distraction.” People followed. Of course they did. We began practicing together, flowing through vinyasas with cult-like synchronicity. We ate vegan three times a day, spoke only in Sanskrit-inflected aphorisms, and achieved a level of hamstring enlightenment most people only dream about.
It was utopia, with better posture.
Then I woke up.
Still in a fog of sacred revelation, I marched to my computer, opened my long-neglected list of yoga sequences in Google Docs, and committed to the third phase of my yoga life: twice a week, no excuses. Five days of kettlebell discipline to keep me grounded, two days of yoga to unlock whatever transcendental weirdness lives in my hips.
Because as much as I love kettlebells—and I do—they’ve never given me that hallucinatory bliss, that euphoric disintegration of self, that only comes from holding Triangle Pose until your consciousness starts leaking out of your ears.
Iron builds the body. Yoga does something else. And I’m not going to miss out this time.
Cinemorphosis 