My first yoga studio was in a converted garage behind the food co-op where my roommate worked. My teacher, Michael Fahey, was an Irish carpenter who reminded me of the soccer coaches of my youth. He was encouraging, preached the gospel of alignment, and would occasionally join us at the bar next door for dinner after class. We used handmade wooden blocks for props and did inversions with straps hitched to the walls that he’d anchored into the rebar behind the plasterboard.
He played his share of typical, atmospheric new-age yoga music, but sometimes we rocked out to Journey, Joan Armatrading, or the Police. I found early on that I was less self-conscious about the space under my knees in staff pose, or the degree to which I was sweating in half-moon, because I was quietly singing along to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.”
The vibe was spiritual but not religious, which suited me. I was raised Unitarian, so I was familiar with the menu at the world’s religious buffet. But the kitchen was always closed, and I was hungry.
I’ve since practiced in places as secular as a suburban racquetball club, complete with mirrors and that wet-towel smell, and in places where the harmonium comes out, the incense burns, and the other students look at you funny for wearing surf trunks. Over the years, they’ve all grown to feel like home. Even if home—like our bodies, our jobs, our government, and our country itself—is sometimes awkward, unfamiliar, or frightening. In yoga, as in life, you adapt, take what you want, and leave the baggage at the door.
William Broad’s new book, The Science of Yoga, explores yoga’s evolution and suggests a place for it, allied with science, in the 21st century. It also charts yoga’s rise as a big-time commodity and a lifestyle cynically referred to as “the yoga industrial complex.” Perhaps more interestingly, the book explains the physiological mechanisms behind the relaxation, peacefulness, and euphoria that yoga promotes. Research that Broad cites has proved that yoga is good for stress, blood pressure, and balance. But it lowers our metabolism and is, for the most part, not aerobic, so it won’t necessarily help us lose weight, and it might hurt us if we’re not careful. On the plus side, though, it improves our sex lives by increasing testosterone.
I can’t remember why I went to yoga the first time. I definitely wasn’t thinking about sex. Perhaps because I wanted to be released from earthly suffering, because I thought it would be a good place to meet women, or because I wanted to increase my flexibility for the sake of playing soccer. I told my skeptical friends and fellow grad students variants of these things so that they’d stop asking me why. In truth, I think I was looking for something that I could not apprehend intellectually. Like Goethe’s Faust, who makes a deal with the devil for the sake of gaining transcendental versus purely intellectual knowledge, I gravitated to yoga because it emphasized the intuitive and the spatial rather than the rational, and because it offered action rather than words.
Eventually I learned that yoga’s purpose was to quiet the mind for the sake of meditation. Initially, though, I appreciated its sense of play. Adults in the United States don’t often stand on our heads, and we aren’t encouraged to wear short shorts or hang upside down from ropes. The fourth wall of the television makes far too many of us spectators rather than participants. Yoga allows us to regain agency and to participate more fully in our lives.
I mean this literally: My right wrist is held together by a steel plate and pins because of a cycling accident, and my left knee is thrashed from years of competitive soccer. Yoga is as close as I get to the gym or to physical therapy. If I practice, then my body works when I’m off of the mat, too, and doesn’t get in the way of my mind. If I don’t, then the aches and pains crop up. The corollary is that in the studio, my mind disengages, or tries to. The clutch is released, and through attempts at an often impossible symmetry, I find balance, if even for a moment.
Yoga teachers talk a lot about being in the moment. They tell us to clear our minds and to concentrate on the task at hand. Where is my left quadriceps? What is that sensation? How does this feel now?
Yet for most of us mortals, remaining in the moment is sort of like objectivity in journalism, or a limit in calculus. It is to be aspired to or approached. Regardless of what my body is doing, I may be thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner, how I’m going to wrap up this essay, or what’s going to happen to me after I die. I am tethered to the whims of my mind even as I try to silence it. I oscillate from the mundane to the existential, until every once in a while, I’m snapped back into the present, to my breath, and to a sense of clarity. This tension between the hyper-self-aware and the selfless is where the battle lies, and it’s why yoga is intriguing, aside from its quantifiable benefits and despite its risks.
Through my practice, my flexibility and my strength have improved. But after a decade, there are still basic poses that I won’t or can’t do. I’ve been holding steady at the intermediate level, with occasional, accidental forays into the advanced if I show up at the studio at the wrong time.
There are times during class when I put a block under each knee, recline, and pretend that I’m waiting for a cocktail on a beach somewhere. When I began, I treated yoga like a sport. Now I treat it like halftime, like a puzzle, like quality time with myself for the sake of forgetting myself.
At OM, the studio where I practice now, we often discuss transience. That the routine of the practice itself is fleeting and in flux is but a minor example. When one of my teachers left to move to California, we had a quick, teary-eyed goodbye in the hallway. I thanked her for her patience, and for always graciously telling me the same thing week after week, year after year: “Get that bend out of your left knee and don’t snap into upward dog with such vigor.” I told her that she made me a better teacher, because she reminded me what it’s like not to know, and because she helped me to remember the innate joy of encountering the entirely unfamiliar. Yoga simultaneously humbles us and liberates us, as it reminds us what it was like to learn to crawl. It takes us back to the time before we shed Wordsworth’s trailing “clouds of glory” and grew up.
On the flip side, while discussing the Zen Buddhist poet Gary Snyder and the idea of dharma, or “duty,” one of my students asked me, only half in jest, if teaching English was my dharma. The rest of the class laughed, and I admitted that I hadn’t thought about it much because I was too busy doing it. But I suppose in a sense it is. It turns out that “I hadn’t thought about it much because I was too busy doing it” is what it’s all about.
