I arrive 10 minutes early and the class is already packed. Yoga mats are squeezed up against each other, just a hand’s width apart. Five in each of what looks like seven or eight rows.
“Hi sweetheart,” the instructor, Susie, says to me as I carefully enter the room. “Find a sticker and center it at the top of your mat.”
The only empty spots are at the front now, right in front of the violinist who is the reason for so many attendees in the first place.
Ari Urban, her name is. She sits tall, wearing a black and white patterned two-piece set, her dirty blonde hair piled half up and half down. She sits tall, her eyes fluttered closed. She is flanked by two violins on either side, two sound bowls, an electric violin and a digital soundboard in front, and about 30 electric candles. She looks like a vision.
I carefully set up in front of her to the left, unrolling my mat and going to the back of the room to find a blanket and a block, playing an inverted game of the floor is lava.
The plan, Susie has been telling us for the last two weeks, is for Ari to play while we do our practice, and then to take a 30-minute savasana so we can simply enjoy her music.
For some reason, I’d envisioned classical violin, a different vibe from the usual yoga music that plays in most classes.
But when Ari starts to play, I realize that’s not what this is going to be at all.
She starts with the electric violin, the small soundboard playing ethereal noises in the background, and her eyes remain closed the entire time she plays.
She’s not playing a song that already exists. She’s free composing. She’s feeling. She’s flowing the same way our bodies are through each position — child’s pose, down dog, plank, up dog, down dog, front of the mat, flat back, fold, rise up, hands by your sides, hands at your heart, swan dive fold.
The music enhances the practice in a way I didn’t know was possible. Having my mat so close to her means the vibrations of the violin run through me.
When we finally settle down for the 30-minute savasana, I am ready. I cover myself in the blanket and let myself relax fully into the mat.
Ari begins with the sound bowls, moves into — is that a gong? It feels like there are more sounds moving through the air than she could possibly be capable of playing, and yet. Then she takes up the violin, and my mind travels and retreats and settles, following where the music moves me.
As Susie brings us back to life, she says, “Feel the vibration that is you.”
After we seal the class with a final om and bow in gratitude, she tells us to be gentle with ourselves, because the music and the vibrations can bring up more than we realize. “Plus the planets are aligned and it’s almost a full moon, so, you know.”
I roll up my mat. I return my block and my blanket. I thank Ari and Susie. And then I set back off into the night.
Writing With Abandon 
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