Like a lot of people my age (my true fans know how old I am, but for those of you who are not my mother, I’m 52) I’m starting to feel my age. I may not be able to feel my hands or my feet, but I sure feel my age.

At any rate, in a desperate effort to stave off the ravages of Father Time I have looked to the mysterious East for guidance. No, I don’t mean Louisiana (although Louisiana is pretty mysterious, if by “mysterious” you mean “people who eat alligators and actually like accordion music.”)

I am referring to the Orient or, if you are more politically correct than I, Asia. Taking my cue from the wisdom of the ancients, I have recently started doing yoga and meditating.

Yoga is a form of physical exercise in which practitioners, typically sitting or standing on a mat on the floor, contort themselves into pretzel-like poses. This is supposed to improve flexibility – great news for the do-it-yourself proctologist.

The wise men who developed the system centuries ago named these poses for what they saw around them in the natural world. As a result we have poses with names such as Mountain pose, Eagle pose and Tree pose. They also called one the Corpse Pose. These guys may have known a lot about physical fitness, but their marketing skills were for squat.

If yoga was being developed today, and the yogis were naming the positions after what they saw around them now, we might have poses like the Starbucks, or the iPod, or maybe the Hummer. In the Hummer pose, you’d have a mat that was three or four times as big as it really needed to be, and you’d hog up way too much floor space. Plus, you’d be talking on your cell phone while doing it.

I’ve also just begun meditating – or at least I thought I had just begun. I went to a lecture on meditation and the speaker described the meditative state as one in which the mind goes completely blank. So, apparently I’ve been meditating for years, because that happens to me every time I walk into a video store.

Practiced regularly, meditation is supposed to calm the mind, reduce stress and, in some extreme cases, confer almost magical powers, such as the ability to levitate. This is really exciting because I could sure use less stress in my life, Plus, I figure I’ll save a fortune on transportation.

For maximum benefit, the guy said, you need to turn off your mind and not think about anything. He recommended doing this for at least 30 minutes a day. I thought, 30 minutes? Piece of cake; I can do that for eight hours at a stretch – typically Monday through Friday, between the hours of 8 and 5.