But Rinpoche laughed. He had a hand on my arm. It seemed that he’d had a hand on my arm for the past week. The instructor, whose name was Kaylee or Molly or Kali or Paula—I was much too uncomfortable to hear it clearly—was standing two feet away in her yellow leotard, with her short black hair and clear-as-air green eyes. She seemed to think I was making a joke. When she realized that I wasn’t, she said, “But, Mr. Ringling, your mat is right here, in the front row. We’ve saved this place specially for you.” She pointed to a mat that lay between the mats of two women who looked as though they had one thousandth of one ounce of fat on their bodies. And these were not college-age women, either. They were loosening up (though why one loosened up for a yoga class, I could not imagine), sitting with their legs spread in a V and pushing their chests flat to the floor between their knees, or bringing their arms behind their backs—one arm from above, one from below, clasping the hands there and rocking this way and that. It was awful. It was a nightmare. I looked at Rinpoche with what must have been a pleading expression, because he squeezed my arm harder and told me I shouldn’t worry, that I was a good man, that I was his good and special friend.
When the class began, Rinpoche and Paula sat up front on their mats, and it took me about a minute to understand that the man who had been riding with me all these days, the thickset, muscular guy who looked like he could pass for a Chicago Bears linebacker coach, was as limber as a ramen noodle all cooked.
The room was filled: thirty or so shapely women in tights, a couple of long-haired men in the back who were built like the circus guys who catch female trapeze artists in midair, and behind them, lining the wall now, a crowd of mostly college students in nonyoga wear, standing reverently and watching Rinpoche’s every move. I was wearing chinos and a jersey, not exactly the uniform of the day. As instructed, I took off my shoes and socks and belt and set them at the side of the room. I unfurled my blue mat. My heart was thumping so violently I thought I might be saved by some kind of minor infarction.
But no, there was no salvation for me. Molly introduced the Rinpoche as a great holy man and yogi and then introduced me as his associate, “first student,” and traveling companion. My face was the color of a persimmon. Behind me I could feel four dozen sets of eyes, and there I was, in all my clunky middle-aged glory, fit only for the occasional two-mile walk and friendly game of doubles tennis, the chinos, the jersey, the sweat already plastering my hair to the back of my neck. We knelt, sitting on our heels, and began with a few minutes of silence, “to quiet the mind,” as Molly said. But my mind was about as quiet as Grand Central Station at five p.m. on a Tuesday. When the meditation was completed we chanted “Om” once and then stood. We began with a bow, simple enough—even I could manage a decent bow—and then went into something called “whipassavana,” or something of that sort, which, of course, every single other matted soul in the room was familiar with. I looked around, spying desperately. The lithe creature to my left was crouching down and extending one leg behind her, planting her palms on the mat to either side of her bare foot, and arching her back so that she was looking at the ceiling. It was as effortless for her as reaching across the table for another handful of honey-roasted cashews was for me.
But I tried it. Rinpoche was watching me, smiling broadly, one knee poking up through his robe, and his new necklace glinting in the natural light. I managed not to fall over. We put our hands briefly on the knee, then raised them to heaven, palms pressed together, eyes up, and I did fall over. I fell sideways and knocked into the woman next to me. “Sorry,” I managed. I was breathing very hard. I tried again. This, Kali said, if I heard her at all right, was called “keepassona.” We were to breathe into our stomachs. My stomach was full of khichadi, yogi tea, and the sweet dessert. But I tried. We were to bring the hands down, thank God. Then put the other leg back also and hold ourselves in the higher push-up position—“allassoavana,” or something like that, also called “the plank.” This I could do. But Kali held us there until my arms were shaking, all the while telling us in a depressingly calm voice that, to get the most out of the pose, we were to turn the muscles of the upper arm out and the muscles of the forearm in and the muscles of the inner thigh up and breathe through a relaxed throat. Then we were supposed to sink slowly, almost—almost, she repeated—to the mat, and hold ourselves one inch above the floor for eight slow breaths. I collapsed. I looked up at Rinpoche. His body was as rigid and still as a piece of metal, an inch or two of air beneath his chin.
Soon we were doing what sounded like “sikovara,” which entailed sitting on the tailbone, bringing one knee up, and twisting over it so that the eyes were facing the back of the room. I was sweating profusely. There wasn’t the smallest sound from anyone. Sikovara the other way, slowly, watching the breath. Then forward bend—achinarrassavana. Then achinarrassavana left, achinarrassavana right. I was, by this point, furious at Rinpoche for having tricked and humiliated me. Even a person who did belong in the print in the alcove across the street would have been furious. But I did not belong there. It was a case of mistaken identity! He smiled at me. I did not smile back. I vowed to press on. I would show him. I would show Kali, or Molly, or Paula, and the woman to my left whom I’d knocked over, and the trapeze artists in the back of the room with their steroid shoulders and long hair, and the students against the wall staring. I would make it through, if nothing else. I called upon every ounce of will developed in my 135-pound days on the Dickinson High gridiron, every bit of courage from the rink at UND jayvee hockey tryouts, when I was similarly outmatched but managed to be the last man selected. Ognipassineh. Silsa rannawathana. Boothanagan masi. Standing on the left leg with the right foot pressed into the left thigh, hands high, palms together. Downward facing dog. Upward facing dog. Dog facing death. My arms were trembling, my legs were violently trembling, perspiration had worked its way through my shirt and down to the top of my chinos and I worried that I had not sufficiently washed my feet that morning. On and on and on it went, standing, lying, twisting. A torment.
At last, after what seemed like the better part of a school year had passed, Molly called for something named, appropriately enough it seemed to me, corpse pose, or death pose. The lights were dimmed. We lay on our backs and tried to relax every cell in our bodies. For the first minute I bathed myself in a kind of triumphant fury. I had made it. Stumbled a few times, given up on a few poses, but survived. And Rinpoche would pay. Forget my lessons, my open-mindedness, his three- or four-day tutorial on America. We were going to get in the car and race to Bismarck and I was going to drop him at the farm in Dickinson the next day, do my business, and be done with him for all time.
But then, as I lay there, the fury subsided. What caused it to subside I’m not sure, perhaps just the fact that my body was no longer in pain. Or, at least, not in severe pain. I was pretty certain I’d pulled my left hamstring—which meant no tennis for six weeks—and that I’d torn a small muscle in midback, which meant a few hundred dollars in chiropractic visits. But after several minutes of stewing, I noticed that a wonderful whole-body calm was coming over me. I had not relaxed like that in decades, if ever. Every fiber of my body, every cell from the soles of my feet to my scalp, had been worked, and now they were at rest, and my mind slowly joined them. It was not like sleep, I was not drowsy at all, but a kind of sunny calm descended over my thoughts. And then, for a short while, a few breaths, there were no thoughts at all. I had never experienced anything remotely like that, had believed it impossible, in fact. But there was a short stretch of alert thoughtlessness and it was unimaginably sweet, stunningly sweet. When it passed I found that I was thinking of my children and wondering if they had ever given yoga a try, and if not, why not.
Then Kali was calling us to our feet for a final bow, a thank-you to Rinpoche. Mats were folded up, the crowd at the back swelled forward, and my friend was surrounded as if he were Elvis come back to Graceland for the summer season. I shuffled over to my shoes and leaned against the windowsil
l in a state of exhaustion. My shirt was drying. I could feel it going stiff against the skin of my belly.
In a moment, Molly herself stepped free of the crowd and came over to me, not walking exactly but floating along an inch above the floor. She could have been a model for the anatomy charts, the muscles defined, the posture perfect. I looked at her with what wasn’t even sexual admiration—it transcended that. She was somehow beyond sexual, überhuman.
“You made it through okay?” she said, rather coyly, I thought.
“You’re laughing at me.”
“It was hard, wasn’t it.”
“Hard? It was like being inside a washing machine.”
“But you feel good now, right?”
“Differently good,” I said, and she laughed.
“And mentally?”
“Calm there for a minute.”
“Going to keep at it?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe. I don’t know.”
She smiled, touched me on the shoulder, said, “Drink lots of water,” and glided away. “You might be a tiny bit sore tomorrow,” I thought she said, as she went.
It was the better part of an hour before the crowd around Rinpoche dissipated. Even then, Molly had to chase them off. I don’t know if they were asking for his autograph, or plying him with questions, or what was going on. Who could see through the dreadlocks and backpacks, the torn T-shirts? This, I supposed, was his talk, though I could not hear him talking. Leaning there, resting, I watched the goings-on, and as my mind does after sex, a particularly good meal, a fine symphony, or any other joy it wants to touch and touch again, it kept circling back to those few seconds when it had been blank. But blank was not the right word for what it had been. Stillness was not the right word. For the space of eight or ten seconds, something, some process or interior habit, had been suspended, and in those seconds, wordlessly, I thought I had seen or understood something, and I kept reaching back to retrieve that understanding, and my mind kept tripping over its old habits and bouncing away.
THIRTY-FOUR
That night we stayed on the outskirts of the modest city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. On the drive north out of the capital, Rinpoche said not a word. A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small (and yet so important) that I could have gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed. As I reflected on it, I realized that I’d experienced somewhat similar moments—watching the sun go down from a beach chair on the Cape; taking a first sip of hot chocolate after a morning of skiing; just lying in bed on a Saturday when the children were small and safely asleep on my chest. But those flashes of peace seemed somehow accidental, and they bore a resemblance to what I’d felt in that overheated yoga studio in the same way that a kiss on the cheek by a nice aunt bears a resemblance to an orgasm with the person you love. A lush new field had become part of my interior world, and it was difficult to sustain anger under the open sky.
Rinpoche was quiet, quiet, quiet, not mooing, not asking, not chuckling, just staring out the side window, buried in thought. Or, perhaps, buried in no-thought. I wondered if he had somehow found a way to remain in that airy, sunny field for long stretches at a time, and I wondered what that would feel like.
Just at dark we pulled off the highway and immediately found a place called the GrandStay. Still riding a kind of yoga high, I went in and asked the young man at the desk for his most expensive suite. And what a nice room that turned out to be, out there on the edge of the Wisconsin wilds. Two large bedrooms with their own TVs, and a huge central room with fireplace, full kitchen, sofas and chairs, two baths.
When we were about to begin the ritual of going to our separate rooms and giving each other some alone time, I felt I had to break the silence. “I’m angry at you,” I began.
Rinpoche nodded without smiling. He seemed to be standing perfectly still, as if he were not breathing, his heart not beating. He was not blinking.
“Just when I was starting to trust you, to really listen to you, you tricked me into doing that yoga class.”
He nodded again, waiting.
“At least you could have let me be in the back row so everyone couldn’t see me make a fool of myself.”
Another nod. More attentive stillness. At last he spoke, “Is Otto finished being angry now?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
Nod number four. “Are you ready to become the new Otto, or do you want to stay the old Otto?”
“The old Otto wasn’t half-bad,” I said. “Some people liked the old Otto. Loved him, even.”
“Today, you had a little bit of while when you were the new Otto.”
“Where? When?”
“Corpse pose. A few seconds.”
“How would you know that?”
“I see it.”
“How do you see it? Where? My aura?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “It was pleasure-making to you, yes?”
“Yes.”
“New pleasure, yes? Different.”
“Yes, I admit that.”
“Then I will show you more, but if you want to be angry with me I can’t show you. Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.”
“All right. I’m done with it, then.”
“Good,” Rinpoche said. “We are not eating tonight, you and me. Tonight no eating, and tomorrow no eating. Tomorrow, dinnertime, we eat. Okay?”
“How about just a little snack before bed? Health food? Celery sticks or something. Popcorn.”
He sat on the couch and patted the cushion beside him. “Sit like me,” he said. So I sat there, separated from him by a few feet of motel sofa. He took one of the small throw pillows off the sofa, put it beneath him, and crossed his legs. I did the same, my recently overworked muscles protesting painfully. “Now,” he said, “listen to me with all your mind and all your self.”
“Okay. Trying.”
“Close your eyes, Otto, and listen to my voice.”
“Okay. Are you going to hypnotize me?”
“The opposite of hypnotize. The very different.”
“Okay.”
“Now. Do you hear that noise of tapping?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That is a bird hitting with his mouth against the edge of the window where he thinks it is wood.”
“Okay.”
“He is trying to make a house there. I saw him when you went inside to buy this room. He can’t make a house there because it isn’t real wood. It is pretend wood of plastic, but he is trying, do you hear him?”
“Yes. But it’s vinyl, I bet, not plastic.”
“Do you hear the noise of the refrigerator now?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel this chair against your back and your legs.”
“It’s a sofa. Yes, I feel it.”
“Do you feel your breath going in and coming out?”
“Yes.”
“Now, we will sit here for two hours about. If your legs hurt, or if you have to, you get up and walk a little bit, but don’t get up at the first time you feel like it. You will be thinking about food. Every time you are thinking about food, now and tomorrow, I want that you think about the feeling that food gives you on your tongue. Think about exactly that feeling, the food on your tongue, in your mouth. Take one breath thinking about that feeling, and then let that feeling go away when the breath goes out. That is what meditation is: You see the thought and you let it float away, see the thought and let it float away. Maybe you say to yourself, That is only a thought. . . . After a while, listen again to the bird, to the refrigerator, feel again the sofa on your back and your legs, feel the pain in your legs. You will think about food again. Breathe in and breathe out. You will think about your family, your work, about me sitting beside you, about many, many things that are interesting
to think about. This is like the bird knocking. You cannot make a home in those things. They are not bad, they are just not the right home for Otto. Do not get upset because your mind thinks about them. Do not push the thoughts away like they are bad things. Let them go away from you but do not push them, yes? But always come back to the feeling on your mouth, and breathe in and breathe out. Yes?”
“I’ll try.”
Rinpoche went quiet. And shortly after Rinpoche went quiet, my mind became a combination circus/symphony/ rock concert. Seven television stations on at once, in the same small room. Grand Central Station but with a band marching through it now, advertisements being read aloud, the babbling of fifty voices. I thought about food, at first, and tried to do what Rinpoche had advised. I heard the bird tapping. I thought about food again—a good steak, in fact, medium rare. I could feel myself salivating, feel the gnawing in my belly, feel a twinge of anger at him for making me abstain and a twinge of anger at myself for being foolish enough to agree to abstain. I heard the bird, the refrigerator. I thought about Jeannie. I thought of Anthony playing football, imagined him sitting on the bench, with the first-string players muddy and manly on the field, and the cheerleaders cheering, and Jeannie and I and Tasha in the stands. This particular scene played itself out in elaborate detail for what must have been several minutes: Natasha sitting a few feet away from us in the cold bleachers, texting and frowning, barely paying attention; Jeannie watching her son’s back to see what his mood was; me hoping for a lopsided score either way so that Anthony might see two minutes of playing time. It wound and spun, this scene, and then I heard the bird knocking and remembered to focus on the sensation of eating, remembered my breath. Then I thought of Rinpoche and actually even opened my eyes to peek at him, though it was like peeking at a stone to see what it is doing. I closed my eyes. Refrigerator. Bird. Rinpoche. Rinpoche. The steak. What were they doing at work? What would my assistant, Salahnda, say if she could see the boss now? Then, of course, my legs began to hurt.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 19
