Thirty Bucks: Fluid Yoga

30 dollars doesn’t go too far around these parts. Assuming your routine amounts to four bucks in Muni fares, eight in a decked-out burrito, and 10 (we’re playing it low here) in alcohol, that’s like a day and a half in San Francisco. Important things like dental health, physical fitness and fresh produce? Given the choice between one of Stuart’s picklebacks and an organic cucumber, I’ll take the briney, boozy option.

Which is why 30 bucks is an astoundingly low price to pay for (one month) of physical and mental wellbeing at the hands of one of the best Bikram yoga spots in town, Fluid Yoga. The spot is tiny – the women’s changing room necessitates sweaty jockeying for your clothes at the end of a session – and familiar, with a small staff of instructors. Also a plus: antimicrobial flooring, which puts an immediate damper on the smells and textures that result from hours of stretching and sweating in a hot room with 25 others.

Bikram yoga was not, I have to admit, something I expected to enjoy. Bikram himself has this weird cultlike following and tours the world in a sleazy fedora for speaking engagements. The idea of doing triangle pose alongside more well-practiced yogis in a mirrored sauna, essentially, did not appeal.

But I’m pretty addicted. Fluid Yoga’s “30 for 30” deal – a month of yoga for the price of three adequate cocktails – has meant not only a shrinking waistline but shrinking neuroses, the result of an hour and a half of sweating and grasping and focus.

Fluid Yoga
455 Judah Street
[Inner Sunset]

Photo: Fluid Yoga