Soulmates

by Jessica Grose

  On my fourth day at the Homestead I arrived at my assigned afternoon yoga class and saw that Yoni was sitting at the front of the room in lotus pose with his eyes shut. I stopped short, rooted in the doorway, as one of Willow’s friends, Bodhi, and some other non-ordained residents streamed past me. I forced myself to go forward and set up my mat toward the back of the room. The front of the room was reserved for the ordained.

  Bodhi was next to me, and he leaned over to whisper, “I’m a little starstruck, too! We never know which classes the great master will attend ahead of time.”

  I smiled wanly. At least he’d read my fear as excitement.

  Word around the Homestead was that Yoni had studied with the notable hatha guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya in India in the early seventies, which was why that kind of yoga was practiced at Zuni. I had no idea whether that was true. People said a lot of things about the guru—that the Dalai Lama went to him for advice; that he had once cured a woman’s scoliosis through the power of touch; that he and Steven Seagal were best friends. But whether or not he studied with Krishnamacharya, the poses we did were heavy on headstands and shoulder stands, which I was getting better at every day. I liked the lightness in my mind that I felt when I was inverted.

  I managed to relax a little while Yoni was leading the class. Once my initial pang of fear subsided, I could see that he was an excellent teacher. I had been too clouded with rage when I attended his class with Ethan years ago to notice. He spoke slowly and clearly, and he seemed genuinely pleased when people were making progress. “This is good work, Clover,” he said to one woman, who adjusted one of her poses after a correction from Yoni.

  I was in the middle of a headstand, a brand-new skill of mine, when Yoni came up behind me. His footsteps were so light and I was concentrating so deeply that I didn’t realize he was there until I felt his hands on my hips. “I want you to come out of this pose and try again,” he murmured.

  I brought my legs down to the floor and tried to listen to his words as if I were any other student. Above all, I didn’t want him to see how scared I was.

  But Yoni didn’t seem to notice. “You need a strong foundation with your neck and shoulders, like this.” He adjusted me so that my hands were cradling my head and my elbows were a little farther away from my head than they had been previously. “Good, good. Now try going back into the headstand from this position.” I went into my headstand from this base. He was right—I wobbled much less this way. My back was less arched, and the whole structure felt firm.

  Yoni stood back and examined his work. “Very good,” he said. Then he knelt down next to me and whispered, “You’ve come a long way.” He stood up and said to the class, “Slowly and gently come down from your headstand. When your knees are on the mat, leave your forehead down and shift into child’s pose.”

  I tucked into child’s pose, the good feeling I’d gotten from the adjustment to my headstand totally gone. How did Yoni know I’d come a long way? Did he recognize me from the class I had attended with Ethan years ago? That seemed impossible. Thousands of people had come through his classes since then. Did he murmur words of encouragement to all his new acolytes, as a way to get them to stick around? Or had he been talking to Lo, who might have told him my inner child work was going so well?

  Whatever was going on, I did not want to draw attention to myself. When Yoni said, “It’s time for savasana,” I rolled onto my back like everyone else. I closed my eyes and heard Yoni bang a gong three times.

  “I would like to tell you a story about a wild donkey,” Yoni said. “The donkey was a few years old, and just starting to come into his own. He told his mother that he had to go and seek his destiny on the road to the Yarlung. She tried to stop him. ‘You are such a young donkey,’ she said. ‘And you have never left our village. How will you find your way?’ The young donkey reassured her. He had received a prophecy in a dream that told him to seek a waterfall.”

  Yoni took a long pause, so long that I wondered if the story was over. But at last he continued, “At first, the donkey was afraid. He encountered many pitfalls on his journey. He got a nettle stuck in his hoof. He was bitten by a serpent. His coat became drab and itchy. But he was not deterred, because he believed in the destiny set out for him. And his persistence was rewarded. The donkey arrived at the Yarlung Valley after a season of travel. He found the hidden waterfall that had appeared to him in his dream. It was shrouded in shadows and tucked behind a hairpin turn, but a kindly fox showed him the way.”

  Thinking that the story was over, I opened my eyes. Yoni looked right at me. His face was stern and disapproving, and I squeezed my eyes shut. “Though his mother did not hear from him again, she was at peace. The same waterfall appeared to her in a dream, and she trusted that her little donkey’s destiny was fixed.”

  When Yoni stopped speaking we all lay in silence for several more minutes. I didn’t dare open my eyes again. I tried to figure out whether Yoni’s story was specifically meant for me—had he discovered that I was Ethan’s wife?—but I couldn’t fathom how it applied.

  Finally Yoni said, “Namaste,” and left the room before students could approach him.

  I sat up, dazed. I was just being paranoid, I told myself. There was no way Yoni could know who I really was. He was just being a good teacher, giving a new student a bit of positive reinforcement.

  A few nights later, Willow finally invited me to hang out with her friends. “We’re having a drum circle, and then a rap session,” she said. “We’ve decided you should be included.” I had all the rhythm of a wind-up toy and I was already in a baggy T-shirt and leggings, ready for bed, but I knew I had to go. I put on a pair of flip-flops and left our room with Willow. I figured it was okay to wear shoes, since we weren’t doing an official activity, and Willow didn’t say anything to me, though she went barefoot.

  Willow led me down a series of paths to a clearing in the brush. I tried to orient myself as I followed behind—left at the yurt, right at the cluster of three cacti—but dusk had fallen and I doubted I could find my way back without a guide. The temperature had dropped about twenty degrees with the disappearance of the sun, and I hugged myself to keep warm, squeezing the goose-pimpled flesh of my upper arms.

  Willow’s friends Bodhi and Maria were already there when we arrived, and we sat in a small circle. Bodhi had a drum the size of a four-year-old strapped to his chest. Maria had a set of dainty bongos. Willow pulled two tambourines out of her bag and handed one to me.

  “Namaste,” Bodhi said. “We’re here tonight to honor the Egyptian goddess Nephthys. She is the goddess of night, but also the goddess of death.” He began to softly thump on his drum. “I want us to chant for her. As night falls, we want to let our bad feelings and negativity die. When we wake every day, we should think of it as another opportunity for rebirth.” Maria syncopated Bodhi’s thumps with a jaunty beat on her bongos. Willow started shaking her tambourine and nodded to me to do the same.

  Then Bodhi started chanting, “Nam myoho renge kyoooooooo.” He said it three times before Maria and Willow began to chant it along with him. I was busy trying to keep time with my tambourine and didn’t say anything until Willow shot me that death glare. I started mouthing the words, pretty sure I was messing them up. But my effort must have been enough for Willow because her glare was replaced with a satisfied smile.

  We continued chanting for several minutes. At last, Bodhi held the last note of kyooooo for a long time and slapped his drum three times with great force. Then he took his shirt off. A dark forest of kinky hair covered his lanky torso from shoulder to hipbone. His drawstring pants rode so low that I saw where the stomach hair trailed into his pubis, and I tried not to stare. As I averted my eyes from his form I noticed that Willow and Maria had both taken off their shirts. Neither wore a bra, and though it was almost completely dark I was close enough to see that their nipples were hard pink points in the cold desert air. They were both looking at me expectantly.

  I shook
my head no. I was happy to bang a tambourine in the middle of the desert, but getting naked in front of virtual strangers was not part of my agenda. My face burned—how dare they assume that I would just go along with this? As I stood there, wordless, Willow grabbed my hand and pulled me twenty feet away from Maria and Bodhi. “What are you doing?” she spat.

  “I just don’t feel comfortable taking my shirt off,” I whispered back.

  She squeezed my hand so tightly it started to hurt. “Dana,” she said, “I invited you here because I wanted us to connect spiritually. I thought you were ready for it. Don’t embarrass me.”

  I really did not want to do any weird sex stuff. But we were alone out there, and I felt like I had no other choice. I didn’t want to stand out as someone who wasn’t spiritually evolving, or have my reticence gossiped about over lentils. I scowled but took my shirt and bra off. I was so worked up I didn’t feel the cold.

  Willow led me back to the circle, where Bodhi was patting his drum dreamily and Maria was lying down on the ground, looking up at the sky.

  “So glad you are joining us,” Bodhi said. I sat down and didn’t say anything, still annoyed. Maria came up behind me and started petting my hair. Then she started to braid a section of it. I have always hated the feeling of strange hands on me, but I sat there and took it, while rage and fear beat inside my chest in tempo with Bodhi’s drum.

  I don’t know how long we sat this way before they started talking. I expected another chant, another ritual of some kind. But they just began to gossip. It was all about people at the Homestead whom I hadn’t met yet, so I couldn’t really follow the thread. But I did gather that Maria’s favorite thing in the world was to rat out another guest to Janus for breaking a rule. “I caught Coyote and Genesis whispering to each other during the afternoon silence,” she boasted. “Janus was extremely pleased to hear that.”

  Though Maria seemed to take special delight in narcing on her fellow non-ordained, Bodhi and Willow appeared to enjoy a little light squealing, too. Bodhi said, “Did you hear about River? He’s been leaving his assigned yoga classes if Yoni’s not the teacher. He either goes back to his room and hides out there, or goes looking for the class Yoni is teaching.”

  Willow scoffed. “Ugh. It’s so against everything we stand for.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, the first thing out of my mouth since she had snapped at me.

  She turned to me with a simpering expression on her face. “The guru has carefully planned each of our schedules in consultation with the dictates of the universe. Thinking you know better than the guru is the height of hubris.” She shook her head like she couldn’t believe she even had to explain this to me. “Yoni wants everyone to experience him equally, except, of course, for his ‘nymphets.’”

  “Willow, that’s not kind.” Maria tsked. “Yoni’s assistants are very sweet and they’re just doing their job. Everyone wants a piece of Yoni, and he must guard his time very carefully.”

  “Fine,” Willow said. “But no one knows how those particular girls got that particular job. I just think it’s a little convenient.” It sounded to me like she wanted the job for herself.

  Maria looked uncomfortable and changed the subject, so the conversation moved on to their origin stories. That’s what they called their lives before they got involved with Yoni, as if they were X-Men characters. I found out that though they all had different superficial reasons for being at the Homestead those reasons boiled down to the same core: they were running away from something.

  Willow was running from the government. She didn’t seem to be accused of any crime—in fact, it sounded like when she was at home in Marin County, she didn’t leave the house very much. But she was upset about potential government surveillance. She was obsessed with Edward Snowden, whom she called “Eddie.” She did not seem to grasp the irony that she was watched much more closely inside the Homestead than she probably ever was outside it. But perhaps because the surveillance was low-tech—you were being watched by other people, not by drones or video cameras—she was less perturbed by it.

  Maria was a college dropout who was trying to cure her eating disorder through spiritual awakening. She was still painfully skinny after trying several normal rehab programs without success, Maria’s parents were willing to foot the bill for this spiritual retreat so she could possibly find a little peace.

  Bodhi made a lot of money in Silicon Valley and went to Burning Man every year. He came to Zuni to get some space from his ex-girlfriend (though he still called her his “love star”). “And what brings you here, Dana?” Bodhi said. Everyone turned their eyes on me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, it’s sort of like what happened to you. I had a relationship that didn’t work out, and it was hard for me to move on. I’m trying to evolve here, um, spiritually, and make something of my life.” Just like in my first class with Lo, I had begun my story thinking I had to make up something that sounded realistic, and once it was out of my mouth, I realized it was 100 percent true.

  Everyone seemed to accept my origin story. And I felt lighter after I told them why I was there. I wasn’t so worked up about taking my shirt off anymore. It didn’t seem like that big a deal, and it didn’t seem like anyone was going to make me do anything weird or sexual, or both. Not much later, Bodhi licked his finger and put it up in the air. “I think the wind is telling us it’s time to retire for the evening.” He chanted “Nam myoho renge kyoooooooo” one more time and then put his shirt back on. Willow and Maria did the same, and so did I. Then we walked in a single-file line back to our rooms.

  My sessions with Lo were the only places I felt any sense of calm. My concept of time continued to blur. I didn’t know what day or date it was, since every day melted into the next. It was both destabilizing and soothing. I was so used to being on a workday schedule and responding to my bosses’ needs, it was nice to float around in a timeless netherspace. As the days went by, it threw me off-kilter because I was so disconnected from everything I’d ever known.

  Lo was my stability. She was full of praise for my work with her, which helped me feel supported in her presence. We were establishing a true bond, and I hoped that I’d soon feel comfortable asking her about Ethan and Amaya, as well as whether she had known Rosemary. But I was also learning more about myself, and how I’d let my life end up this way.

  The second time we met we discussed our elementary school years. Lo’s family of Witnesses had settled in Sacramento, which she called “Sactown.” She made it sound like a barren hellscape where the sun shined unremittingly and her unfeeling parents either ignored her (she was the second youngest of seven) or beat her for her dirty thoughts.

  “There was a lot of shame in my household,” Lo explained. “That’s why I was drawn to this work in the first place, to process that shame.”

  “My household wasn’t filled with shame, exactly,” I said, and then didn’t say: It was filled with land mines set by my mercurial mother. “But your mention of shame brings up one particular memory.”

  “Please tell me about it,” Lo pleaded.

  “I’m not sure. I’m afraid it’s going to bring back up a lot of bitterness. I’m trying to move on from that kind of feeling.”

  “If you’re afraid to discuss it, the emotions need deeper processing. Remember, this is the safest space in the world.” I looked at her kind, open face and believed her.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I sighed. “My mother had planned a big fourth of July party in our yard for the whole neighborhood. She rented a bounce house. She spent the week before preparing all her signature dishes: rhubarb pies and deviled eggs and burgers with her own proprietary blend of spices. She picked out the dress I was going to wear. It was a white sleeveless sundress with big red bows on the shoulders. I remember her staying up almost all night before the day of the party, just to make sure everything would be to her liking.” Lo maintained eye contact while I took a breath and then continued.

  “The morning of
the party, I could feel she was on edge. Whenever she gets anxious, she starts cracking her knuckles, and I could hear the crack crack crack from ten feet away. As people started arriving, I kept looking over at my mom, and she had this scary smile plastered on her face. But everyone seemed to be having a good time, so I relaxed a little. The kids were bouncing on the bounce house and drinking juice boxes. The moms and dads were drinking their spiked lemonades, waiting for their burgers to be ready.” I paused for a second. I could feel the weight of what I was about to tell Lo, like a barbell perched on my chest.

  “Everything was fine until the food was ready. I bounded over to get my burger, and I could feel my mother watching my every move. I sat down to eat, careful to put a napkin on my lap because my mother hated it when I made a mess. But when I took my first bite, a dollop of ketchup fell onto the front of my white, white sundress.” I couldn’t help it; I started to cry. Sharing the memory made it feel new and raw again. “The second the ketchup made contact, my mother started to scream at me in front of everyone. I can’t even remember what she said. But I remember I spent the rest of the party locked in my room, sobbing.”

  “And how did that make you feel?” Lo asked, sidling up to me and putting a comforting hand on my back.

  “Fucking terrible!” I shouted.

  “There, there,” Lo said, pulling my head into her chest and stroking my hair. For a moment I recoiled at the intimacy. Lo’s touch was so maternal, it felt too close. But it also felt nice, so I relaxed into her.

  After a few breaths I sat up and wiped my face with my sleeve. “I feel like I spent my whole life on tenterhooks, worrying that any misstep would set her off.”

  “That must have been a very hard way to live,” Lo said.

  “It was awful. And it’s why I stopped talking to her. I needed her support when Ethan left me, but all she offered was judgment. About eighteen months after he left, she was nagging me about getting back on the dating scene and finding a man before my eggs dried up. I told her again that I still wasn’t ready. That I was still working through our breakup. And you know what she said? She said it was no wonder he left. That I emasculated him with my big career and all my money. I made him feel small.”