About a year later, as a junior in college, I have what is—for lack of a better word—an episode. It is winter again. I am driving to get my girlfriend; she will be spending the night at my place. This eerie Sunday night has almost no traffic. A week-old snowfall is now greasy and dirty. I am driving above the ice-laden Mississippi River on the Franklin Avenue Bridge. This bridge feels tired. Once a vibrant spoke of bustle and traffic in an emerging economy, now it is an overlooked passageway, a relic pushed aside by sprawling metropolitan freeways. The three-block drive feels like traveling through time.
I am wondering if Jane and I will have sex tonight. The image I carry of myself regarding who I am supposed to be—a fun-loving, hormone-driven college student—is in conflict with reality. In truth, I am not led by my loins. For me, for sex to be truly enjoyable, it requires enhanced focus, the conscious appreciation of the subtleties of lovemaking—all the things that actually matter. It cannot be brainless. It must be serious, and serious is not what I want just now. I start thinking about my body, about how mine is so different. I feel the contrast between my loins and walking loins—my loss of movement … loss. My dread begins as tragic appreciation. How strange my life is, I say to myself. Soon I am imagining that the presence I experience within my body is on display, lit up by lights. I imagine an uninjured body next to mine; it is also lighted. In comparison, so much of me has become dark. I feel a creeping loss of light, of growing older. But mine is accelerated; from the nipple line down, I am already gone, two-thirds of me is already snuffed out. This perceived acceleration of losing space, of losing ground, consumes me. I am only twenty-one. As I am driving, I am breathing less, becoming less. Inwardly, I moan, Why am I being pushed out of life? Seized with dread, I pull over on this forgotten bridge, press my head against the steering wheel, and cry without tears.
I am without tears because I am reaching for my most familiar healing story: using the silence to achieve a deadened acceptance. I am not pounding the steering wheel; that would be angry. I am not sobbing; that would be realized grief. Instead, I close my eyes, feel my head upon the wheel, feel a sudden quiet within my car. I mutter, This is my life … this is what it is. Of course, I am not breathing when I think these words. I am static, gripped in the space after exhalation, giving a life-denying offering to the life that is mine. Once the silence deadens me, I can reboot with the tragic feeling of a broken life and a decision to willfully live anyway.
This moment is more than eight years in the making, a culmination of negative healing stories, beginning with the doctor’s prescribed unreality of phantom feelings. As I continue my drive along this particular bridge, on this particular night, I have completely become an upper torso—the rest of my body is dead. I am no longer trying to make the rehabilitation’s healing vision work. I am it. My head, neck, arms, and chest sleep with Jane that night. We do not have sex, and the relationship begins to end.
So when does healing begin? Perhaps this negative realization of losing “space” within my body pushes me over a threshold. Life as an upper torso is unacceptable; my survival begins to rouse itself once again. This does not mean there are immediate results. I do not go ding like a perky microwave oven and suddenly reconfigure within my body. Still more pressure is required.
Over time, a phase begins where I manifest gray. I wear almost exclusively gray clothes; I buy a gray car with a gray interior. I live in a gray, north-facing apartment, tucked into a gigantic, characterless complex. I have the interior of my next living space—one side of a duplex bought with my brother—painted gray. I buy gray carpet. I unconsciously create a world that mirrors how I inwardly feel. My smile even deadens for what will be years. I become negatively aware of the world around me, of the values that I was reared with, of the folly of human beings. I apply to graduate schools, a stressful process in itself. I notice that my hands hurt, both of them in the same place, the space between the knuckles of my pinky and ring fingers. One day, I realize that the pain is self-inflicted. I have been unconsciously rolling my own knuckles, wringing my hands as I ruminate on the plight of living. But it is my living that is being denied, not the world’s.
Of course, the hardest times also begin healing. Living and dying occur simultaneously. During this gray period, I find my first and most important bodyworker and begin the search for my lost body. Carole is in her late thirties and has red henna highlights in her hair. She wears purple, drinks tea, and is perhaps the most intuitive person I have ever met.
A bodyworker lies outside of my paradigm, but I need something, something to shake me loose. Carole does massage, but that is not her specialty. She practices a blend of various methods, but her focus is on influencing the flow of energy through the body. She introduces me to many new concepts: energy body, trigger points, muscle testing, chakras, tuning forks, and others. But she does not teach me in two dimensions—through talking and words. Instead, she shows me—through my body—how to release the physical and mental trauma that I hold. Of course, the trained philosopher in me is skeptical, but over time, he too must sit back and observe the awareness that begins to unfold through my body.
With Carole’s help, I begin to acknowledge the price my body has paid. It has taken more than ten years, but I am ready to acknowledge just how damaged I am, how difficult my life is. My will is tired, my body is tired, and my mind finally admits to living in a protracted survival mode. It is not a relatively normal life. I am beginning to surrender.
Most important, Carole shows me that my paralyzed body has not fallen silent. It did not die. Rather, it changed its voice, speaking now on a subtler frequency but still offering keys to its inner experience. Carole radically affects how I view my body and bodies generally. She sets the groundwork, the framework, for my future yoga practice. She teaches me to listen inwardly to energy, to its movement. She gives me my first access to my whole body again. I am forever grateful.
I also fall in love during this gray time, knockdown, flat-out in love. Somebody sees me, not my relatively normal shell, but me. It is Liz, my first wife. She whispers to me that I am an angel, that I am trying to land. Although she shares my pessimistic view of the world and adds a feminist perspective, she helps me feel subtlety and magic and the ageless wisdom of women. She listens to great music, loves eating chocolate, and wears high-top Converse sneakers. She brings both a playful and a serious depth to my life.
On September 30, 1989, when I am not quite twenty-four, Liz and I marry. After our wedding in the Twin Cities, we immediately move to Santa Barbara. We begin our married life, away from our friends, in a new city and in the midst of my beginning graduate school in philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Our four years of marriage is another story, as is our divorce—ones that I will not be telling. Just know that I was in love and that we are still friends.
Two events—one big, one small—are the straws that push me toward the healing of yoga. The first occurs during my second year of graduate school. It is January 1991. I am twenty-five. Our country cunningly executes the ground-war portion of the Persian Gulf War—Operation Desert Storm—in four days. Through the media, our leaders brag about there being only 140-plus casualties. But in the vacant vision behind my eyes, I see piles and piles of more than 100,000 Iraqi people dead. I hear the silence of their abandoned bodies, real people lost, real families changed forever. As the media follows General H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s celebrity tour, I feel like I am living in a cartoon. The bite of the absurdity fuels an overwhelming sense of death.
Simultaneously, I am taking a graduate seminar in epistemology—the philosophical study of human knowledge. We are reading Plato’s Theaetetus, the famous dialogue in which Socrates puts forward the notion that knowledge is true justified belief. Basically, this means that a belief counts as knowledge if it is true and if we can provide good, sound reasons for believing it. We talk about this for ten straight weeks. We piss and piddle, and labor and argue. We indulge in the exercise of abstract thinki
ng and, worse yet, make ourselves believe it matters. Bombs are dropping, lives are ripping, talking heads are boasting, and here I am. The juxtaposition makes me nauseous.
After winter quarter, I take a leave of absence from school. I tell my graduate advisor, “I have to take care of my body. I’m coming apart.” Of course, it is my mind that is coming apart, because most of my body has already been abandoned.
The other event happens shortly thereafter. A stray cat starts hanging around my house. He is dangerously skinny, with bald spots plopped throughout his already sparse fur. At first, this cat is an annoyance, sleeping on my front stoop, holding me hostage with his needful meows. Over the course of days, he moves to the backyard and the back stairs. I grow accustomed to his company. I make him a soft bed in a low-sided box, buy cat food, and coax him back to the dignity of the front stoop. He will not eat or drink water. I realize that he is preparing to die, and I am not ready. I rush him to the vet, but there is nothing to do. His kidneys have shut down, and he has no teeth. He is suffering. Suddenly, I am confronted by a different story, one that is out of my control. This worn-out old cat is sharing his death, choosing me as his witness. I make another vet appointment; I will help him sleep. As my hand rests gently on his side, we wait for the injection. He is quiet, his breathing shallow. Maybe I just met this cat; maybe we are old friends; maybe it doesn’t matter. I wonder as the flicker leaves his eyes. I am stricken with unrealized grief. It is time for yoga.
Part Three
Yoga, Bodies, and Baby Boys
12
Taking My Legs Wide
I met my yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich, on the third Saturday of April in 1991, more than twelve years after the accident. I was still on a leave of absence from my graduate studies. She was teaching a weekend workshop at the Aikido Center. A woman I knew got us connected. Maia was a body-worker, a brown belt in aikido, and about to begin studying as a midwife. One day, as she gave me a massage, she casually asked if I would be interested in trying yoga. She set up a meeting with Jo, who taught in San Diego but made the trek to Santa Barbara once every six weeks.
As I approached the aikido dojo that day, it was sunny and unusually bright. I had no idea what to expect, no idea if yoga was even possible for a paralyzed person. When I rolled up to the doorway, I heard no voices, nothing. Was I at the right place? Was this where I was supposed to be? I didn’t dare look in. To make my apprehension worse, there was a tattoo shop above the dojo, and out of its windows was blaring Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. A more surreal frame for this experience would be hard to imagine. This was the moment before my life would make an unexpected turn, a moment with sun, music, and me hovering uneasily at the door.
Did my path to yoga begin that day? Life’s experiences are all open to interpretation, stories willing to be told. I have already hinted at other possible entry points into yoga. My overt out-of-body experience began something; those four twisting screws created a beginning glimpse into a separating silence between mind and body, a silence that now underpins my experience with yoga. Did something start when I began using the silence within my paralyzed body as a protective barrier against pain? Perhaps it really began when a thirteen-year-old boy was guided to forsake his paralyzed body. At the early dawn of maturity, life threw me off-track and gave me a lifetime dislocation between mind and body. Did this begin the opposite of yoga and thus lead me inevitably to it? When does a path begin?
I am young, no more than five. The year is 1970. My father has been in a series of minor car accidents. I am told that he has sustained something called whiplash and is in a lot of pain. Nothing seems to help. Eventually, he begins to practice this weird kind of exercising. Early in the morning, he sets a plastic mat over the gold plush carpet in my parents’ bedroom. It reminds me of the game Twister. He sits in his boxer shorts, centered on the mat, and quietly pages through a book filled with pictures. After some study, he strains and grunts his inflexible body into odd shapes and positions. It doesn’t look like fun, and yet I am fascinated by the quiet intensity of his focus. Day after day, I watch his regimen: the rhythm of his breath, the glistening of sweat, the sound of skin rubbing against plastic mat. Not allowed to speak, my experience grows in mystery. Each day, he wipes off with a towel, neatly folds up his mat, and places it—along with the book—into the front left corner of his closet. Then off to a shower, a shave, and a day’s work.
For me, the wonder of what he does resides in that book. The cover is yellow, with a picture of a dark-skinned man sitting in a strange position. It is not long before I start sneaking into his closet to steal peeks at those alluring pages. I am both attracted and horrified. In one picture, the man’s whole body is parallel to the floor as he balances only on his hands. It looks like magic. But there are other pictures. The man is kneeling on the soles of his feet, palms turned upward, hands spread widely over his knees. His eyes are bulging out of their sockets, and his tongue is sticking down past the bottom of his chin. He looks insane. As I am prone to nightmares, I quickly turn the pages. But then comes the unimaginable. The man is sitting in simple cross-legs, and each hand is holding the end of a thick string—it looks more like a round shoelace. The string—to my horror—goes into his nose and out his mouth. Not surprisingly, his eyes are again bulging. It gives me chills. Still, I find myself looking at this book quite often, both to touch what my dad is practicing and for a good spooking in the middle of my childhood day.
Thirty-three years later, I have that very book in front of me. My mom came across it a couple of years ago. She thinks she bought it for my dad at a rummage sale. Knowing what I know now, I realize that the book was intended to sensationalize yoga, to shock the Western reader or any five-year-old voyeur sitting in his dad’s closet. Published in 1957, this book was part of an initial wave of yogic awareness in the West. It did nothing to change the image of yoga as an esoteric art composed of strange and bizarre practices. In fact, it banked on it.
As I hold this book and travel through my memories, I am amazed by what my father was doing: his willingness to explore, the discipline needed to learn from a book, his solitary attempt to transform his life. They all stir me deeply. Still walking off his family farm, he pursued yoga long before it was in fashion, long before its commonsense approach to possessing a mind and a body had filtered into our popular culture. Knowing what I know now, I want to support him on his path, to help him with his poses, to let him ask the questions I know he had. The serious study of yoga requires a teacher. I cannot even imagine not having met Jo, not having her gentle guidance or sharp words at just the right times.
That man, sitting on his plastic mat in 1970, was lonely. His search had brought him to a place he didn’t quite grasp, one that lacked the reassurance of a clearly traveled path in front of him. I have my own version of that loneliness. I, too, am searching for something transformative. While I do have a yoga teacher, we have never lived in the same city. While I do practice where yoga is more widely accepted, I do so from within a paralyzed body. I do not know where the work is going, or even what is possible. But, while the work may be solitary, the impetus comes from loving the world, from wanting to join it. I wonder if he knew this, too.
I wait nervously on the sidewalk outside the dojo to meet my yoga teacher for the first time. Like after every yoga class, people are lingering, not with anything in particular to say, but with a shapeless need. Something has been shared, an insight, an uncommon intimacy. If the dispersion is too quick, the shared connection feels lost and the world becomes smaller once again. My entrance into the dojo adds confusion and curiosity. Confusion because there is a step and someone who has never bumped a wheelchair up a step must now do so. Curiosity because that same wheelchair, along with the person in it, is coming to meet the teacher.
Within this cloud of awkward transition, Jo and I meet each other’s gaze. A silence is shared, a relief. The feeling that it’s going to be fine moves through our bodies. This is felt before words, before d
etails. I am already her student.
Inside the door, there is a three-foot entryway and a bench for sitting. Then another step up. The rest of the dojo’s floor is covered with a hard white mat. No shoes, let alone wheels, traverse this ground. This is a place where bodies tumble and twist and fall. A martial art is practiced here, and its imprint is tangibly felt.
But now there is another problem. “Can you get down on the mat?” Jo asks.
I pause with uncertainty. I didn’t expect to be separated from my wheelchair so quickly. “I can get down, but who knows about up.”
She nods and smiles. “Obviously, there is plenty of help around.”
Jo is in her mid-forties, but her body is years younger. She wears a toe ring, funky bracelets, and shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair. Powerfully connected with the ground, her strength is wound tightly, like a pit bull’s sturdy stance. And yet, she is graceful and supple and thinks nothing of pointing with her feet. More than anything, her body is her own. Already I am learning. During our private session, she sits on the floor with me, catches my gaze, and asks me to sit as straight as possible. I smile and confidently tell her that I am. In truth, my body is so very injured, so out of alignment. My right foot is nearly three inches in front of my left. My weight sits unevenly on my right hip, and my upper body hunches to the left in compensation. My shoulders are far from level. But in my mind’s eye, this is straight.
Waking Page 13
