A Yogi Horror Story

I couldn’t get rid of the pain in my neck, so I thought I’d do a handstand and gently rotate my head to loosen things up a bit. I turned it one way, then the other. But I overdid it on one side — I kept twisting for so long that my head came right off. Not only that, it dropped to the floor and rolled under the bed.
“What now?” wondered the head.
“Call for help quickly, while you can still talk without a body.”
My wife came running, saw what had happened, and, with admirable presence of mind, screwed my head back on while I was still upside down in the handstand.
“Good grief, your head is heavy,” she said.
As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, I decided to calm myself down afterward with some Wim Hof breathing. You know the idea — for it to work properly, you’re supposed to combine it with cold exposure. So after the breathing exercise, I went to take a cold shower.
My neck still hurt a little from all the twisting and reattaching, but since it seemed to help, I started rotating my head again in the shower.
And wouldn’t you know it — the exact same thing happened again. My head twisted right off and tumbled into the bathtub.
This time my wife was already on alert. She rushed in immediately and started screwing it back on. But something was wrong. It didn’t feel right at all, and there I was, completely and literally out of my head.
At last my wife gasped:
“Oh no — I’ve been turning it the wrong way!”
She can never remember which direction things are supposed to screw on or off, so she always turns them the opposite way. In a strange way, it actually made sense. When I was upside down in the handstand, she got it right immediately, because her instinctive “wrong way” became the correct one. But standing upright, she nearly finished me off.
So what’s the lesson in all this?
If you exercise, it’s good to have someone nearby to help. And before you begin, it’s wise to practise together how lightbulbs are screwed in and unscrewed.
And above all — never lose your head.