by Ben Feder
Asher sipped a cup of his own brew. “Peter and I are going for a bike ride tomorrow afternoon. Want to join?” I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but readily agreed. “We’ll leave from here at four o’clock.”
I showed up the next day with the locally constructed bike I’d bought. Asher had changed out of his baggy shorts into tight cycling gear. He introduced me to Peter, a Canadian entrepreneur and video journalist. He was a good decade younger than I and sported a soul patch of facial hair. Both Peter and Asher had slight bodies, but as we set out up an early hill, it was clear that their legs were powerful and their skill high. As we rolled along, I realized that whatever cycling skills I had picked up in New York on a road bike would be worthless in Bali on a mountain bike. Many of the roads were broken, and pathways often snaked alongside deep, lush ravines with no barriers to protect pedestrians and cyclists from plunging over the side.
The terrain was muddy from the rainfall earlier in the day. I struggled to control my bike around the quick turns and up sudden, sharp inclines. While Asher and Peter confidently zipped around, I was tentative and nervous. When they bounced down a set of stairs, I dismounted for fear of injury. While they practically floated on the trails, I plodded along cautiously.
Slowly, I gained confidence and picked up my pace. At one point, when we took a break to take in a view, a Balinese man asked if we would like some kelapa muda, a local drink made from fresh young coconut. He climbed a coconut tree and, with a small knife, picked the fruit and sliced off the top so that we could drink its water.
The light faded in the late afternoon. As we prepared to end our ride, Asher and Peter led me down a path along one of the canals in which the Balinese both bathed and disposed of their trash and sewage. In my peripheral vision, I spotted a young local woman washing in the canal. Just then, she stood up, exposing her topless torso. As my head spun around instinctively, my front wheel hit a dip in the track, and I sailed over the handlebars into the shallow canal water. When Peter and Asher backtracked to fish me out, I felt a deep pain in my right pinky finger. It was bent outward at a sharp right angle.
That evening, Nyoman took me to the closest medical clinic, in the town of Mas. The attending physician, using an X-ray machine as ancient as a Hindu god, bombarded my hand with radiation to determine that no bones were broken. To fix the severe dislocation, though, he needed to call in an orthopedist from Denpasar. An hour later, the specialist arrived on his motorcycle and waltzed in the front door. Without removing the bag from his shoulder, he stuck me with a long needle of anesthetic, then relocated my finger and told me to stay off my bike for a few days. Then he left the same way he came to rejoin the dinner date he said he’d abandoned at a restaurant table.
When I sheepishly told the kids what had happened, they all agreed I’d gotten what I deserved.
seven |
Two weeks later, I woke to a bright sun that laid down blocks of heat and air soupy with humidity. A motorbike was parked in the front of the house. “Five hundred thousand rupiah per month,” Nyoman said, about fifty dollars. He had rented the bike for us from a friend and presented us with a gift: new bandanas he’d bought in the market to cover our noses and mouths as we traveled so we didn’t have to suck in the clouds of exhaust from the traffic in front of us. The best way to get around the island was by motorbike, especially for short trips.
Victoria slung the strap of her yoga mat across her chest like a messenger bag and hopped onto the motorbike. “Hurry up, we’ll be late!” I was busy with emails. “What happened to being present,” she yelled, “to detaching? Get off that damn thing!” I gathered my belongings so fast, it was as if, like Shiva, I had four arms. I jumped on the back of the bike.
We motored toward Ubud and were immediately held up by a duck stampede, about one hundred strong, crossing the road and quacking up a racket. A farmer carrying a white flag on a bamboo pole herded them as they waddled their way from one rice field to the next. “Natural insecticide,” Victoria said. Ducks ate bugs that damaged crops. “And fertilizer too.”
When the ducks passed, we continued through the center of Ubud and down Hanuman Street, the main retail drag, named for the Hindu monkey god. We passed shops selling schlock art and T-shirts and past Kafe, a local hangout that attracted customers with organic food and free Wi-Fi. We turned left into the small alleyway that led to Yoga Barn and slotted our bike among the dozen others already parked. I noticed then that Nyoman had wedged a devotional offering tightly behind our front license plate. It might not quite provide the protection of a helmet, but I appreciated his gesture.
A schedule of classes was posted at the entrance of Yoga Barn, a smorgasbord of offerings ranging from power yoga to more esoteric practices like gong therapy and ecstatic dance. The moment I saw it, I knew why Yoga Barn billed itself as Southeast Asia’s holistic healing and retreat center.
I didn’t quite know what I was doing there. I had attempted yoga before and hated it. I found the practice hard, boring, and feminine. Resistance training and cardiovascular exercise were more my thing. Yoga was stretching, a necessary evil that came with real exercise. Plus, my body simply didn’t move in the way yoga required. Even though every instructor I’d ever met had told me it was enough to simply do what I could, for me it was never enough. I wasn’t wired for enough. If I was going to practice yoga, I was going to win at yoga.
Victoria paid the entrance fee for us both. We were just in time for the nine o’clock power yoga class, taught by Denise Payne, who stood at the front of the studio next to a four-foot elephant-head statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha. Out of the corner of my eye, I recognized a Green School parent preparing his mat and flashed him a smile. Denise was a yogi transplant from Arizona, but I could tell she’d been on a long journey of personal discovery before arriving in Bali. She was a single mom and attractive, and her body was a canvas for tattoo artists. She had a reputation for an aggressive teaching style. The class was scheduled to last nearly two hours.
As we got under way, Denise focused on physical strength, balance, and flexibility. She drew attention to the connection between the body and the earth, trying to ground her students both physically and emotionally. She began with the simplest of standing poses, mountain pose. “Feel the edges of your feet touch the earth,” she said. I felt the heaviness of my body and the stiffness of my joints. The many weeks of travel had done nothing to increase my flexibility, strength, or endurance.
A pleasant breeze blew through the open space to cool my body as I grunted and strained my way through the poses. On her mat beside me, Victoria was having an easier time. She flowed from one pose to the next while I groaned. I tried to move my body the way Denise instructed, but it felt unnatural.
Heat began to build in my body as I pushed it from one awkward stance to the next. Barely thirty minutes into the session, I began to sweat, first lightly and then profusely. My yoga mat became so slick with the water dripping from my pores that my feet slipped and hands slid. I couldn’t catch a grip. In desperation, I flipped my mat over to its dry side, and just in time too. We transitioned to poses that required my lying down on my belly.
I practically hoovered the floor with my heavy breathing. I arched my back, bent my knees, and reached back for my ankles. I couldn’t find them. I tried again, wiggling my body to catch first my right ankle and then writhing to catch my left. Denise came over. “That’s not the way. You need a little more grace. You have to catch both ankles at the same time.” She made a small adjustment, and I barely managed to grab my ankles. After three breaths, my hands and ankles slipped apart.
I struggled through the rest of the class. In no time at all, another puddle developed on the reverse side of my mat. I was soaked, exhausted, and completely spent. I knew if I were going to make a go of yoga, I would have to get into better shape. When Denise instructed us to rest on our backs, I collapsed with arms and legs splayed like a butterfly. I closed my eyes, slowly steadied my breath, and drifted
into a light sleep.
I woke to the sound of a single chime. Denise sat cross-legged at the front of the room, a candle and small bell by her side. She invited us to sit up tall in a meditative posture, placed her hands in a prayer position at her chest, and closed the practice with a traditional chant of Om. I looked over to Victoria, who smiled at me. We gathered our things and headed to the café next door.
Garden Café was typical of Ubud’s spiritual culture. On the menu were vegan, vegetarian, organic, macrobiotic, and raw dishes along with Ayurvedic drinks, which the menu tagged as “Healing and transforming since 3,000 BC.” We found a spot of shade, flopped onto the cushioned floor, and ordered a kelapa muda. When it arrived, I downed it in one shot. Victoria looked at me and said, “I could get used to this.”
“If we keep coming to this class, I’m going to have to.”
As my body recovered, my mind cleared. I felt fresh. Somehow focusing on my breath while moving through poses did make me feel grounded in the way Denise had promised. I recalled the names of the poses she had called out and how self-contradictory they sounded: devotional warrior, peaceful warrior, and humble warrior. To me, these names were not cynical in the way that, for example, naming a nuclear missile a “Peacekeeper” seemed to be. The names of the poses described a tension that spoke to me. They described a desire to aggress on the one hand and to pacify on the other.
I paid the check, ten thousand rupiah—about one dollar—and Victoria and I walked out. We passed by a community bulletin board just outside Yoga Barn. It was filled with flyers that promoted various healing arts: colonics, holistic medicine, acupuncture. One that struck me as particularly out of place advertised the services of a Cherokee medicine woman. Another that caught my eye was for Ashram Munivara, which advertised an evening introduction to meditation. Located near Tegalalang, a village only fifteen minutes from our home, it seemed just the thing.
Except that it also offered spiritual dance, fasting, and chanting designed to “enhance positive energy.” That brought to mind images of the Beatles or Steve Jobs in their earlier days, when they explored spirituality. I had trouble taking it seriously. I thought of myself as rational and rigorous but nonetheless curious. Having struggled with tensions of work, sleeplessness, and self-criticism, I was open to a new approach. Meditation sounded promising. Wacky ashram or not, I needed to find out what it was all about. I was going to dive into Ubud’s alternative culture.
As we motored home, I thought back to a moment, six months earlier, when I sat at the Lure Fishbar restaurant in SoHo wearing a fine wool suit and Italian shoes. The restaurant attracted an eclectic crowd, from entrepreneurs in New York’s tech scene to well-heeled socialites and hipsters. Lure was designed and themed as the interior of a yacht and set in the semibasement of a converted factory. Its below-deck porthole windows, placed near the ceiling, opened to a view of the legs of hurried pedestrians on the sidewalk outside. From the inside looking out, the passing feet appeared as darting fish.
I was there early to meet Michael, an aggressive and successful litigator at a law firm known for its truculent tactics. We had a passing relationship that was mostly commercial. I had always known him to be a tough-minded professional despite his charming, self-deprecating sense of humor.
On the agenda for that day’s meeting was an item that was anything but business as usual. Two weeks earlier, Take-Two had released a story to the press. It began, “Chief Executive Officer decides to step down in order to pursue plans to travel in Asia with his family for an extended period.” Among the many reactions that I received from people outside the company, Michael’s call was the most intriguing.
“Listen, I need to talk to you. I’ll explain when I see you.”
When Michael arrived, we talked for a little while about business and how things were progressing. I forked the brook trout on my plate with disinterest. My appetite had waned with the waxing tension at work.
“I was blown away when I read your announcement,” Michael said.
“Why’s that?”
He put on a shocked expression and threw his hands into the air. “Because nobody actually does it.”
Again I speared the fish but left it on the plate.
Michael opened up to me in a way that I’d never expected from the kind of man I thought he was. He told me about the trade-offs he’d made in his career. “The thing I wanted to do when I was in college was to write. In some ways, I still want to be a writer.”
“And?”
“Couldn’t do it. I need to provide for my girls.” Michael was married with two daughters. “The thing is, I grew up really poor. True poverty. There’s no way I’m going to raise my kids with that kind of aching need.” So Michael chose financial security and a genuine affection for the law as a greater calling. “I want to make enough money so my daughters never have to make the trade-offs I made.”
“What’s your number?” I asked, repeating the hackneyed MBA question of which I was growing weary. When he told me, it seemed to me so lofty a goal as to be a burden. Normally, I wouldn’t have commented. But I wondered whether he was justifying to himself his pursuit of an activity that paid him more than he needed and was crowding out his true passion. Working hard for somebody else, especially your children, was an easy story to tell yourself.
“Are you sure you need that much?”
“Are you sure I don’t?” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you don’t?”
What Michael did for a living wasn’t who he was. That much was evident not just in his words but also in that he was willing to expose his vulnerability by reaching out to me. I recognized something of myself in Michael. We each had achieved success, had experienced the anxiety in our early lives of not having (though he more than I), and were somewhat surprised to find ourselves in abundant situations. And still we did not feel secure. We still felt the tension of not having and the worry about the future.
“So I quit my job,” I said. “What do you do?”
“I meditate. Not as often as I’d like or as long, but I do what I can.”
I always thought of meditation as something for escapists with too much time on their hands. “Does it help?”
“I think so. It helps me not get carried away with whatever crisis is brewing. I’m more centered and able to deal with whatever comes.”
We spoke about meditation as a path to stilling the mind. I was struck then by the idea of making meditation a core goal of my sabbatical as a way both to recenter myself and to build up a practice that would help me live with the stress of work when I returned. But I never thought I’d have the patience for it. Like an addict, I craved distraction and stimulation. But soon I’d be one of those escapists with too much time on his hands.
The weekend after my lunch with Michael, I downloaded a book by Ellen Langer, a Harvard professor, who proposed a theory of what she called “mindfulness,” which was the title of her book. Most of us, she postulated, have predictable responses to the stimuli in our environment. We follow routines and have automatic responses that can lead to wrong decisions, pain, and a “predetermined course of life.” Our reactions tend to be automatically triggered by people and circumstance and are, in effect, unconscious choices. When we make these choices unconsciously, we are said to be mindless because it is as if we stumble through our days and years. When we make conscious choices, we are doing the opposite: being mindful and deliberate.
Mindfulness meditation, she wrote, is the practice of being aware of our surroundings, noticing the choices we make and the behaviors we adopt. Through meditation, we attempt to bring thoughts and behaviors from the periphery of our attention to the center. In that way, we take notice of our emotions and behaviors and witness them, as if from an observer perspective. The practice was derived from Buddhist meditation practice.
Mindfulness was already experiencing a boom in popular culture as men, women, and even children strived to cope with a hyperconnected world that, through the proliferation
of electronics, constantly and persistently diverts their attention in many directions.
After reading Langer’s book, I decided that one of my personal goals for my sabbatical would be to learn to meditate. Now as Victoria and I motorbiked into our driveway, I committed to giving it a try.
Also, as I had done a few times since coming to Bali, I phoned Take-Two just to check in, see how things were going. But I was clearly no longer in the loop.
The phone rang, but as usual, it was for Victoria. Her organization contacted her regularly. She tried to keep these calls away from the family as a disturbance to our sabbatical; it was a quiet house with no blaring media.
A key employee had threatened to quit, and Victoria was trying to turn her around. This evening, she learned she had failed. She hung up and slumped to the floor. “I just can’t seem to get away.”
The following Tuesday, I left Victoria and the kids at the dinner table. Putu’s mother had come by to prepare a Balinese dinner. The evening’s cool air was just settling in, and the road was still wet from the rain shower that passed over earlier in the day. I set out by motorcycle and headed north on Jalan Tirta Tawar, the road that ran from Ubud, past our home, and through the rice fields toward the town of Tegalalang. I pulled down the visor on my helmet to protect my eyes from the midges that swirled, suspended in midair like miniature tornadoes. The road curved in long S patterns past the rice fields, villas, and the small village of Junjugan. Off to my right, I could see acres of the migrating herons for which Junjugan was known. To my left, a few rice farmers shuffled down the road after their day’s work, sickles in hand, their sarongs filthy from the mud of the fields. I enjoyed the smooth shifting of my weight from side to side, as if I were slaloming down the pavement. I felt a tinge of excitement in anticipation of my first attempt at guided meditation at the ashram.
