Barefoot and Posing

I’m an absolute beginner in yoga.

I’m a beginner in Buddhism, too, but at least my dalliance with Buddhism has gone on for a long time.

Even if I’ve never seriously meditated I’ve read books by people who do. I’ve contemplated a lot of their philosophy and to some extent begun trying to live by it.

I do have a sustained practice in the form of therapy. I watch my thoughts, but I also say them out loud to someone who has taught me what it might mean to live the questions (as she pointed out that Rilke said) and shown me by her own actions what openness and compassion can look like.

Over years of talking, things happen—the thoughts shift, they lose their substance, one’s ways of responding to the world become a little less fixed. That may be similar to what happens with meditation.

For me, anyway, the Buddhism and the therapy have been complementary. Buddhism taught me I could sit still and bear the miserable thoughts and feelings that were coming up in therapy.

Therapy gradually taught me that many of the thoughts I was most convinced were true were little more than a barrier against any experience of life I didn’t think I’d be able to manage.

At this point, I’m pretty much an absolute beginner in life.

Although in some ways I feel like a very physical person, all my training has been to lead with my mind. I’m sure that if you spent years on the cushion Buddhism would be a physical practice, but it’s less so if you read a book and then go sit for 15 minutes every now and again.

I’ve dabbled in yoga for years, too, without treating it as much more than a source of calm and exercise. It seemed too religious to get into at any depth, I suppose. My favorite parts were the various forms of lying down and then the deep rest at the end.

I wandered into the local yoga center to meditate, feeling guilty that I came so often for free, but resisting the invitation take classes at a place that I’d remembered visiting years before and finding too strenuous.

Eventually, though, something clicked. C. said, “You should come practice with us,” and I heard the word practice.

Practice. I could take my emotion practice and my watch-my-mind practice and toss in a body practice and see how they all came together.

Fireworks, is how.

Relatively speaking, I don’t think the classes are all that hard. Still, for me in the early weeks the physical effort was so overwhelming it was as if I’d lost touch with my mind entirely.

I went back to the time when I was ambidextrous, and I couldn’t tell right from left. I heard the words but I had no idea how to translate them into what to do.

I felt about five years old, disoriented and vulnerable—but this time trying not to worry about it.

With my thinking disabled, I had none of my usual defenses. Once at the end of class, I almost started to cry. There were moments of grief. I had tiny moments of feeling I could play. Sometimes I walked home nearly floating on my own sense of sunniness.

I had to go into therapy and talk about it all.

I suspect I was a little bit unnerved, because in the early weeks it seemed like I kept coming close to various kinds of accidents. I nearly crashed my bike. I practically set my house on fire.

I had this idea that I was trying to injure myself so I could get out of it.

Then I started to enjoy getting stronger. I’ve had tiny inklings of what it might mean to relax while feeling you were doing something that was way beyond your physical capacity.

I’m learning to visualize.

Some days I can almost balance. The next day, it’s hopeless.

The whole experience reminds me of learning to drive a car. The first time I ever tried to change lanes at 55 miles an hour was on Route 17.

Keep foot on the gas, look, signal, check the mirrors, steer, and not panic my father? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could put together the dozen things one had do get from one side of the road to the other in the tiny space of time allotted.

Once I stepped blithely into a lunge and now I’m only halfway through my checklist of body parts by the time the time the pose is over.

Still, I haven’t quit. Yet.

I’ve always done yoga with my eyes closed. I loved that that was an option—it helped me to black out my own self-consciousness.

I liked yoga the way I like swimming—you’re doing something in close proximity with other people, but you can pretend they’re not there.

It’s not like that this time. My eyes are still closed, but it’s not just because I’m shutting the other people out.

Somehow, this feels like a community. I really like the people, both the teachers and the students. There’s laughter. The classes are often a great deal of fun.

All of this is a whopping five months old.

I can see already that there’s a way to do yoga what would require a serious commitment. I bet you don’t really know anything for years and years.

It’s probably not for me.

Still, I’m intrigued. I’ve just started reading B.K.S. Iyengar. I like how many images there are when people talk about yoga. I like a spiritual approach that gives the body its due.

I found myself thinking I should keep my own yoga journal, because I can imagine myself being continually fascinated by experiences and ideas.

If everything that occurs to me now seems impossibly stupid a month from now, oh well. If perchance I stick with it, it might be interesting to see what I learned along the way.

Or not.

Okay, I’ve had the thought. Now let it go.

A Buddha and a Beer

For the truth is, however admirable mindfulness may be, however much peace, grounding, stability and self-acceptance it can bring, as an experience to be shared, it’s stultifyingly boring.

It is selfish, undoubtedly, to want to hold onto the ragged edges that make me feel genuinely connected, not perhaps to humanity, but to the people I love.

—Judith Warner (both quotes from “Being and Mindfulness," a post on her New York Times blog, March 5, 2009)

The other day in therapy, I was (in my own stultifying way) exploring my own ambivalence (which is not unrelated to Warner’s) about my continuing journey through the places that scare me to the path with heart.

“Loving-kindness, blech! I am sick and tired of being sincere, I’ve had it with being wholesome and life-affirming, I want 13 glasses of wine and 6 cigarettes!”

“Maybe you can have both,” B. says, in her patient way.

“So anyway,” I tell her, “I was walking to your office, I was thinking all this, and then I pick up the Voice to look at Rob Breszny’s astrology column. And listen to this!”

I unfold the paper as theatrically as possible, and begin to read:

“TAURUS: Your key theme for the week is "Healthy Obsessions." Not "Melodramatic Compulsions" or "Exhausting Crazes" or "Manias That Make You Seem Interesting to Casual Bystanders," but "Healthy Obsessions."

I roll my eyes, making sure the long-suffering therapist is catching that Mr. Free Will Astrology is talking directly to me. It appears that she is. The oracle continues:

“You will have to take really good care of yourself as you concentrate extravagantly on tasks that fill you with zeal. This may require you to rebel against the influences of role models, both in your actual life and in the movies you've seen, who act as if getting sick and imbalanced is an integral part of being true to one's genius.”

Oy! I toss the paper up into the air. (Thankfully, it’s now stapled, so the pages don’t fly all over the room.)

Okay, so maybe I’m stuck with the consciousness and the spirituality and the community and all that gunk. But I don’t want to lose the ragged edge, either. I go off on a long, hyperbolic rant about why my friend who just the other day was rooting for the Dow to drop—“Come on, baby, 300! Do it for me!"—is frequently more appealing than people who talk about love all the time.

If you move toward mindfulness, how do you tell a joke? Can you really not gossip anymore, ever? How can you possibly practice criticism?

Although on the other hand, I can think of two people right away who seem funny, edgy, quick-witted, endlessly good-spirited and supremely alive. In both cases their virtues seem to arise from an apparently effortless practice of observation—or attention, as they might say in the mindfulness trade. They are so alert to the world—so present—and they are so generous in offering it up. I like this! You might like that! Look at that! Isn’t that interesting? There’s nothing mushy—or ragged—about it.

In my earnest moments, I declare that I have realized that when I act out of my own fear and habits of self-protection, I can cause other people pain, and somehow, finally, I just don’t want to do that anymore.

In other words, I guess, I want to open my heart, and to try to bring love rather than hurt into the world. This is where it starts to feel icky. Who am I, Pollyanna? And where does this line of thinking end?

If I start thinking about pain, I find myself saying, I have to include the animals. It starts with the dog and moves on to the birds, and before you know it it’s chickens and cows. You’ve read about industrial farming, you finally (after years) let yourself absorb what that is, and now what are you going to do? Sometimes it makes me think about all the people who had inklings of the Holocaust. How do you know what you know and turn away without acting?

“I want a burger and beer!” I yell to my therapist.

There’s no particular resolution to this thing. Okay, I think at the end of the session, I’ll stick with this path. Later, I go out for dinner with a friend who is so kind as to treat, and I show no hesitation in consuming her out of a big chunk of her income. I have a Scotch at the bar. Then I order a huge steak, medium rare, with frites. We both drink three glasses of wine.

By the end, I do not feel well. I am just at the edge of that point where things start to spin. Luckily, I have almost two miles to walk. If the police stopped me, could I walk a straight line? For a while I follow the sidewalk cracks, and then I veer into a crust of snow.

I look up into the crisp night, see twinkling stars, and then feel an urge to just close my eyes. Lurching, I open them again, this time taking in the soft green of the traffic lights glowing along the planks of the park benches. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to just lie down?

No, not a good idea.

I make it home, guzzle water from my new eco-friendly metal bottle with the elaborate plastic sip top, and collapse into bed.

It’s not a great night, what with a car alarm going off for hours, but when I wake up, it’s not so bad. I’m grateful. More water, a muffin, some coffee, a Tylenol. Geez, why did I want to poison myself?

I walk to the yoga center. I should feel bad, but on the other hand, sometimes there’s nothing like a hangover. Life gets too stimulating, and right now it feels good to have energy for nothing beyond climbing this hill.

When I get to class, my body does what it is asked to. It is so forgiving, so much better to me than I deserve, I could cry. Leaving, I feel as if I have been granted a reprieve. I walk home feeling solid on the earth and once again bouncing like helium balloon, buoyed by something that feels really good and clean. I want to go deeper, I want to be mindful, I want to live!

Ah, well. It is what it is.