Tales from the Yoga Studio

by Rain Mitchell

  “Have anything to drink?” Phil asks.

  “Water, juice, and, if you make it yourself, coffee.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Sorry. I finished the last of the milk with my Cheerios this morning.”

  “Oh, I get it. Still on the wagon.”

  “I’m an addict, Phil, and yeah, aside from the very occasional joint, I’m happy to say I’ve been sober for two years now. Your move to Seattle didn’t send me rushing for bad stuff.”

  “Jesus, Katherine,” Phil says. “I know you think I’m a big loser, but don’t pretend you’re not happy to see me. Just a little bit?” He sidles over to her and presses himself against her suggestively. “Just a little bit? Not Romeo and Juliet, but we had a few good times, didn’t we?”

  For her, the “good times” they had together served pretty much the same function as the drugs—a way to numb out any thoughts or feelings she didn’t care to deal with. And one or two hours of Phil’s lean and hungry charms, if you could call them charms, certainly did make it near impossible to think of anything else. It was when she realized she actually could deal with the feelings, live through them and get past them, without any substances or distractions, that she stopped returning Phil’s calls.

  So what does it mean that she actually invited him here tonight?

  “You look so fucking good in this skirt,” he says, sliding it up higher and running his hands up her thighs. “Oh, man, I forgot how smooth your legs are. Silk,” he whispers into her ear.

  Katherine’s a big girl and she knew what she was getting into, but she didn’t exactly know how she’d feel about it when she got it. She backs away from him a little and says, “Speaking of cleaning up, Phil, I’ve got some towels in the closet outside the bathroom just in case you want a shower.”

  He lifts his arm up and sniffs. “Got a little sweaty walking up here, huh? I thought you liked that.”

  “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

  She leads him toward the bathroom, past the guest room that she’s emptied of furniture altogether and made into a little yoga and meditation room. Her mat is in the middle of the room and there are some pillows against the wall. She’s in here every morning when the sun comes through the windows and warms up the floor.

  Phil struts into the room and stands on the mat, folds his hands into an approximation of prayer. “Namaste, baby,” he says.

  “Don’t, Phil. Just don’t.”

  “Hey, what? Am I insulting your spiritual trip? I thought fucking was your religion.”

  He lifts up his right foot, trying for something like tree pose, and falls out. Not pretty. It looks kind of pathetic, really.

  “To hell with it,” he says.

  When he’s in the shower, Katherine faces it head-on. Having him come to the house is more or less the same thing as using again. Go numb, don’t deal with it, block it out. She shouldn’t have lit up the joint, either. It was all part of the little pity party she’s been throwing for herself the past couple of weeks. Poor Katherine can’t deal with a little accusation of financial misdemeanor. Can’t deal with a decent, respectable guy showing some interest. Can’t face the possibility that he might disappoint her or, way, way worse, that she might disappoint him. She didn’t really think he’d hook up with Graciela, but seeing them together made her realize he belonged with someone like her, some sweet girl he could bring home to his family, someone who was guaranteed not to have any skeletons popping out of her closet or showing up in her shower at the most inconvenient times.

  Except really, brushing off Conor is just the coward’s way out. The old Katherine’s way of dealing with things. Or not dealing. Trying to control everything when in fact she’s just being out of control in a different way. And it isn’t as if she’s been able to get him out of her mind anyway.

  She goes into her meditation room and looks out at the lights of the city, benign and gentle from up here. All those people going about their lives, making their own mistakes, angry or happy or lonely. Funny how there’s really only one person she wants to be with right now, and he isn’t in the shower. She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her skirt. At least she didn’t delete his number. She’ll call. She’ll be a grown-up. As soon as she gets rid of Phil.

  He comes out into the living room, conspicuously naked except for the towel he’s using to dry his hair. “Great shampoo. Tea tree or some shit like that?”

  “Phil,” she says. She takes the towel out of his hands and wraps it around his waist. “I don’t know how to say this to you, but . . .”

  “Aw, fuck me! Are you gonna tell me I came all the way up here for nothing?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s been kind of a strange year for me, and I’m trying to keep myself together.”

  “Spare me the therapy session, okay? You really are messed up, Kat, you know that?”

  “I do know that, Phil. But I’m working on it.”

  “Whoopee shit.”

  “Your clothes in the bathroom?”

  “Yeah. ‘Here’s the door, what’s your hurry.’ You could at least suggest we watch TV.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What a bitch.”

  She knew they’d get back to that sooner or later.

  “You owe me, Kat. I’m taking the rest of that fucking shampoo. It’s the least you can do.”

  When he goes back into the bathroom, Katherine hears footsteps on the walkway outside. And then her bell. Lee sometimes drops over at this hour, on her way from the studio.

  Except it isn’t Lee, it’s Conor. Not his usual grinning self, but stern in the yellow glow of the light beside the door. Katherine feels a wave of calm disappointment wash over her. She has the worst timing in the world. It’s always been this way. Maybe she could dash out of the house with Conor. But no, that wouldn’t work.

  “Mr. Ross,” Katherine says, resigned to the disaster about to occur. “Passing through the neighborhood?”

  “I just saw Graciela,” he says. “Since you wouldn’t return my calls. To try and figure out what happened here. Are you going to let me in?”

  “Let me call you tomorrow,” Katherine says. “It’s not the best moment.”

  “Come on, Brodski. Let’s get this settled.”

  That’s when Phil walks up behind her, hair wet, shirtless, holding the bottle of shampoo. “Not tea tree,” he says. “It’s black fucking walnuts. Who’s this guy?”

  “I rang the wrong bell,” Conor says.

  Lee has never had the teaching equivalent of stage fright. She’s never lost her place in front of a class or found herself wondering what it was she wanted to say. Still, she feels a mild, low-grade anxiety about her upcoming class at YogaHappens. It will be the first time in a long time she’s given a class off her own turf and the first time in a very long time when she will be, she knows, evaluated as she goes along.

  She’s made detailed notes on the flow she wants to use, the physical focus of the class, and the way she wants to introduce a short, deep meditation. But somehow it all feels forced and false to her, and sitting at the table in her dining room, with the kids wrestling in front of the television, she keeps tearing up her notes.

  Lee was twenty-four the very first time she took a yoga class. She was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a rambling prewar apartment that was officially rented to someone who hadn’t lived there in almost a decade. There were four bedrooms—five if you included the little maid’s room in back that was about the size of a closet—and eight people sharing the place. They deposited their rent checks into the account of a woman who, rumor had it, was living in Berlin and was supporting herself largely on the profits of the sublet. One bedroom was shared by a girl whose name Lee can’t remember and a guy the girl barely knew. He worked nights and she worked days and the two roommates rarely crossed paths, even in the kitchen. Someone lived on the sofa in the living room, and there were usually two or three people visiting from out of town who overstayed their welc
omes and had to be asked to leave.

  Initially, none of the discomforts of the place (there were only two bathrooms, for starters) had mattered to Lee. Her life, her real life, was lived in the lecture halls and on the floor of the hospital where she had labs and volunteered so she would get more exposure to patients. Everything else she did was preparation and study for those classes or recovery from the rigors of sleepless nights related to them. What did she care about how long she had to wait to get into the bathroom or how little room there was in the refrigerator? She had never felt quite so alive or quite so clear about where she was heading. She’d been dreaming of becoming a doctor since she was a kid, and she had buried herself in premed classes for most of the time she was an undergrad at Wesleyan University. Even the constant headaches and the stomach problems related to all the studying she was doing in med school didn’t bother her. It was all in the service of something that mattered deeply to future goals.

  But somewhere in her second year at Columbia Medical, something began to change. All the praise she’d received her whole life for her studies began to be meaningless to her. She was turned off, nearly repulsed, at the way the human body seemed to be reduced more and more to chemistry and science, with less emphasis on human beings, on whole human beings, on people. Healing was a completely fragmented study here, in which specialties had to be chosen and referrals made to other specialists, until all sense of a person and a life was lost. The doctors she met kept talking about the pressure to reduce their time with patients, to run the minimum number of tests, prescribe something, and be done with it.

  It all seemed so far removed from what she’d been planning for her whole life, she began to feel completely lost. The magical world of the classes and rounds began to feel like protracted torment. For the first time in her life, she began skipping lectures. She started smoking, and, with a combination of confusion and despair, more or less stopped eating. What was the point?

  Lee tries not to think about that period very often, but when she does, she thinks mainly about the horrible cold she always felt. Even when she was in the big, overheated, overpopulated apartment. When her weight dropped below one hundred pounds, it was as if there was nothing between the raw wind and her insides, and no matter what she did or how many clothes she piled on, how many cups of chamomile tea she sipped, she could never get warm. The more she felt herself slipping away, the less she cared what happened to her. If anyone commented on her pallor or weight, she’d turn on them with the ugly defensiveness of someone who understands she’s in the wrong. And yet, underneath that, she had an inchoate longing to be rescued.

  Rescue came in the form of Jane Benson. Plain Jane, as the roommates in the apartment called her, a Columbia Law student who was so ordinary and unmemorable, people pretended to forget she actually lived there. One Thursday afternoon when Lee was folded into a ball on the living room sofa nursing a cup of tea, Jane asked her if she’d like to go to a yoga class with her. Lee had known some dancers who did yoga, or claimed to, but the word still had a slightly exotic and esoteric sound. When she thinks about it now, Lee can hardly believe that she went with Jane, and she doesn’t know what motivated her to do so. It seems as if fate lifted her up off the sofa and pushed her toward the door.

  There were yoga studios in the city in those days, although nothing compared with the number and variety that have arisen since Madonna and Gwyneth made yoga mats and sun salutations trendy. But the class she went to with Jane was held in the drafty meeting room of a Presbyterian church off Amsterdam Avenue. There were maybe six or eight students sitting on blankets on the floor, none of them especially fit looking, and Lee felt too young and physically out of place, gaunt and drained. The teacher herself looked like a glamorous former dancer with long gray hair she had woven into a braid draped across her shoulder. She had beautiful blue eyes that Lee still remembers to this day, and when she first cast eyes on Lee, Lee felt as if she was seeing right through all of her defenses, as if there was no point in trying to hide from her. Lee let her vulnerabilities show.

  She had had no idea what to really expect, but somewhere in the middle of class she felt more challenged than she’d felt in a long time, not because the physical demands were so great but because for the first time in a long time, no one was demanding anything of her, no one was judging her. The teacher saw through her, all right, probably knew exactly what she was feeling, how cold and numb she felt, but she neither pitied her for that nor condemned her. She only asked her to sit and experience herself in the moment. She only asked her to be still and—and here was the most difficult piece—to have compassion for herself.

  It would have been nice if Lee’s life had turned around right there and then. It would have saved a lot of time and a lot of anguish. It was a slow and gradual change, so slow Lee didn’t even realize it was happening until she woke one morning and understood that she had let go of one dream and had started to pursue another.

  She’d studied enough to know that the chemistry and science behind a lot of the claims made by yoga teachers was shaky and insupportable. According to the textbooks, the body and the inner organs just did not respond the way the instructors said. And yet, she herself was experiencing a transformation, born of the connections she was beginning to feel between body and mind and spirit that simply could not be denied. If the holistic attitude toward the body expounded by her yoga teachers made no sense to her brain, it made complete sense to her gut. She felt it.

  And this, she realized, was what she’d been looking for all along—not a science to help people cure their diseases, but a system to help them live their lives in a way that made sense.

  The foundation of everything she does in classes, the core of everything she teaches, is what she learned from that very first yoga teacher—compassion for self, flaws and all. Flaws especially . Everything she has to teach starts there.

  She hears a shriek from the next room and runs in. But it’s just the twins playing in a gleeful way with a big balancing ball. Michael actually helped his brother get up on it and is pressing into his back so he doesn’t fall. Unnervingly atypical, but best to leave well enough alone.

  Plain Jane never commented on how bad Lee looked at the start or how she began to improve, but Lee knew she witnessed it. She went on to finish law school and moved to New Orleans, and then Lee lost track of her. Two years ago, Lee started to look for her online, to thank her for what she did for her. Eventually she learned that she’d been in a car accident and had died after a long struggle. She wished then that she’d hunted her down sooner, so she could tell her how she’d helped her.

  She goes back to the dining room table and takes out a fresh index card and starts all over. She’ll begin with love and compassion as guiding principles. She’ll start with that simple, clear feeling she had at the beginning of that very first class in the church basement. She’ll begin with Jane.

  When Imani first started going to yoga classes with Becky, she was a little turned off by the conversations. “Conversasanas,” as she called them.

  I felt incredibly open in dancer’s pose this afternoon.

  Fascinating!

  I loved when she had us open our arms wide in tree pose.

  Me, too! Only I think those were “branches” we were opening.

  My ardha chandrasana was off tonight.

  Honey, my ardha chandrasana’s been off for years!

  It reminded her of how she feels when people sit around a dinner table and discuss their dogs for thirty minutes. Or when she hears traffic reports in a distant city. Dogs? Love ’em! But what the hell is a follow-up question to a report that Dippy was a little moody this morning? And sorry to hear that the I-95 connector in Denver is backed up. And that’s relevant to my life how?

  And so Imani surprises herself when, over coffee, she hears herself telling Becky, “You know, I really loved the way I felt in utkatasana today.” (What? Who said that?)

  “You’re kidding,” Becky says. “I have ne
ver liked that pose. I always feel so cramped and boxed in somehow. And I hate sticking out your butt like that. My knees go out of alignment, and I feel as if I’m going to tip forward onto my nose and land on my ass at the same time.”

  “I know, but when I tucked my pelvis and dropped my shoulders, I felt my whole back straighten out.” She keeps thinking of how Lee, in that very first class, kept telling her to “knit her pelvis and her lower rib cage together.” It made no sense at the time, but she keeps coming back to the image as a way to better align her body.

  “It was wonderful,” she goes on. “Like when you’re listening to a piece of music and it ends with this chord that pulls everything together. Just . . . click, and . . . ahhhh. It all made perfect sense.”

  “I always feel that way in trikonasana. I love it when I reach, reach, reach and then just lower my arm down. Everything feels as if it falls into exactly the right place. And your thighs feel great! ”

  “That’s the triangle one? I could use a little more practice there.” Okay, she really is having this conversation. These words really are coming out of her mouth. And she even means them!

  “Not that I was noticing, but your crow is just getting so freaking good, I might have to kill you,” Becky says. “Not that there’s any competition.”

  “Hell, no. None. And just FYI, I held that damned stick thing, warrior three, for the entire time. Arms straight out in front of me.”