Yoga Bitch Read online

  I don’t remember what happened next, except that I was outside the car, being hugged by my cousin Gabe, who is a priest, crying furiously until my dad ordered me to get back in the car.

  Grandpa’s breath had deepened a little and he relaxed, and we scrambled to get him home. On the drive, he rested limply against the seat, exhausted. He turned his head toward mine. “Well, this is no fun at all,” he said.

  The next day, all I had to do was think about my grandfather, and my chest and throat would constrict as if I were drowning. I tried not to think about what was coming, but it seemed as if the clock were running faster than usual, as if I could only watch as time pleated like the bellows of an accordion. I watched my grandparents die, and then, as if only a day later, there I was, guiding my father into the car, my own children paralyzed by the realization that soon they would be guiding me. I saw myself wheezing beside my panicked grandchild, creating another link in this daisy chain of family love and heartache, and I knew that it wouldn’t matter if I lived an authentic life or not, if I lived for my family or my boyfriend or some idea of my truest self. None of that would help me as I peered into the void.

  I went to Indra’s class and did everything she told me to do. I inhaled when she said to inhale, I exhaled when she said to exhale, and by the end, when we were lying still in Corpse pose, I could finally breathe again.

  It was just a few months later that I took all the money I would have spent on a year’s worth of cigarettes—about twelve hundred dollars—and gave it to Indra. It was a down payment to attend a two-month yoga teacher training in Bali with Indra and her partner, Lou. But I’ll be honest: it wasn’t a down payment to become a yoga teacher; it was a down payment on a new me.

  Not long after I sealed my fate with that check, I bought a thick, lined journal bound in teal leather, and started to write. The act of writing wasn’t new; I had kept journals since my tenth birthday, when my diary had a Hello Kitty cover and a small brass lock to keep my brothers out. But this time I was vaguely aware that I was writing for someone I couldn’t pinpoint. Was I writing for an older version of myself, so that I might remember who I once was? Or was it for Indra, for Jonah, for the ether? I can’t say for sure. But I’m thinking of Thomas Mallon, now, who said, “No one ever kept a diary for just himself.” In the case of the diary to follow, he is right.

  February 17, 2002

  Seattle, 3:00 a.m.

  Okay. So, I’m freaking out.

  I leave for my yoga retreat in Bali one week from today. I can’t wait to go, and I don’t want to go. It’s heartbreaking to think that in one week I’ll be on the other side of the globe, while Jonah starts packing his things to move to New York. When I get back, he’ll be gone. I’ll have a few weeks to shut down my life in Seattle before joining him there. He’ll find an apartment for us in Brooklyn while I’m still in Bali.

  I don’t know what’s more shocking to me—that Jonah and I are going to leave Seattle, or that my mother is actually happy that I’ll be living with my boyfriend. Living in sin. She says she’d prefer it if we just got married already, since everybody knows that’s the plan. But as she put it, “If you’re not ready, you’re not ready. But I feel better knowing you’ll be in New York with a man in the house.”

  Bali. Two months away from home and family. I’m not cutting the umbilical cord, not yet. I’m just sort of perforating it.

  I used to have balls, dammit. I look back on the person I was when I was fresh out of high school, and I don’t even know her anymore. Back then, I did what I wanted. I didn’t care what people thought of me, or if I was letting anybody down. When all of my friends went off to college, I ran away to Europe as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I hadn’t even been out of the country yet, but I knew what I wanted to do, and so I saved up my money and I did it. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now I feel like I have to apologize to my family for moving to New York. For cutting short the precious time we have together in order to pursue my own selfish dreams.

  I’m even afraid of this journal. I’m terrified of being honest with myself, but I’ve made a promise that I won’t censor myself here. Ever since the ex-boyfriend read my journal (including an unfortunate entry about how I had cheated on him with a German engineering student named Jochim. Or Johann. I couldn’t remember), I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about anything too risky, except in code. But this trip will be mine. No boyfriend, no family. If I write anything too damaging, I can always burn this book before I come home.

  I haven’t been to confession in over a decade. When I was a kid my mom would say, “Don’t you feel better? A nice clean slate,” after every confession. I usually felt guilty when she said that, because I knew my slate was still smudgy. I could never bring myself to do all of my penance—if the priest said to do twelve Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, I’d do two or three of each and call it good. So I knew I hadn’t really been purified.

  But now I am ready for the clean slate. This trip to Bali is an exhilarating adventure when I think about spending two months with Indra, who I love. But it also represents two months of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, a purgatory of sorts, when I think about spending so much time with Lou, Indra’s partner, who will be teaching alongside her.

  Lou scares the crap out of me. I feel like he can read my mind. Hell, I’m writing this right now and I have the creepy sensation that he knows I’m doing it. I imagine him, already in Bali, in some womblike meditation chamber, shirtless and tan, wearing linen pants with an elastic waistband. I see him breathing deeply, communing with Babaji, when suddenly he opens his eyes, and knows. That’s all he would do, just open his eyes, and know. He wouldn’t know it with his mind; he would know it with his mindbody.

  When I first began attending Indrou Yoga last fall, I quickly became aware of a certain group of slightly smelly, deeply focused yoga students who followed Lou around like he was Jesus in Spandex shorts. They showed no fear around Lou, just reverence and adoration.

  Lou makes me feel very small and very weak. Maybe it’s the way he calls his students “people” as if we’re all more hopelessly human and flawed than he is. It might be simply that Lou reminds me of a priest. Well—a priest who smells of curry, has fingernails stained yellow from turmeric, and who chews cloves instead of breath mints. Lou’s the kind of yogi who probably uses a tongue scraper. I think tongue scrapers are revolting.

  Which is not to say that Lou is Indian. Actually, I think he was born and raised in Connecticut. The legend at the studio is that Lou dropped out in the late sixties, wore his hair long, and draped himself in East Indian getups that looked like long linen nightgowns. He rivaled Timothy Leary in hallucinogenic drug consumption, and when he was done with drugs, he spent four years consuming nothing but fruit juice.

  The first time I went to one of his classes, he looked straight at me and said, “People, if you are here to study yoga in the same way you studied aerobics in the eighties, please leave. Yoga is not exercise. It’s a spiritual practice. When I see you practicing, you’ll get more of my attention.”

  I’ve avoided his classes since then. But now I’ll be with him every day. Holy hell.

  February 18

  The last time I was in New York, a year or so ago, I was smoking a cigarette at a downtown Starbucks when I overheard two women chatting outside the yoga studio next door. They were gossiping, actually, but in a yogic sort of way. It was clear that they meant their cooing to suggest that they were more concerned than angry. They were talking about another girl in their yoga teacher training program. They both spoke in soothing tones, their vowels as round as the breasts of a Hindu goddess. Clearly this classmate of theirs had done something appalling, because their conversation went like this:

  “Feather just doesn’t get it.”

  “Mmm-hmmm. She doesn’t get it. Poor Feather.”

  “She doesn’t even get how unyogic she’s being.”

  “I mean, I feel sorry for her, honestly. She just do
esn’t get it.”

  “I know, and I can’t believe she thinks she gets it. Mmmmm. She totally doesn’t get it.”

  “She doesn’t get it at all!”

  “I mean, maybe she’s a young soul, you know? Right? But what troubles me is that she thinks she gets it.”

  “Right? And now we’re upset and she’s polluting the whole environment. It’s like what guruji said. She’s got, like, no samtosha.”

  “I had total bliss before she came in.”

  “I know, total bliss, right?”

  “Right!”

  And so on.

  At first I laughed at them. I went home to Seattle and Jill and I joked about them for months. When I told her I was going to Indonesia to study yoga, she said that if Bali turned me into one of those yoga bitches she would strap me down and force-feed me steak and beer and cigarettes until I came back to life. “I’ve got your back,” she said. I love my sister.

  But ever since I bought my plane ticket I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them. I don’t know what I’m more afraid of—that I will become one of them, or that I’m going to a place where I’ll be surrounded by them. What I keep thinking of as a yoga retreat is technically a yoga teacher training. But I’m more interested in the retreat part.

  February 19

  When I made these plans to be in Bali while Jonah moved to New York, it seemed like a good idea. Maybe we needed a break. We haven’t been getting along well in months. But now that the date is approaching he’s sweet and attentive and stays late at the pub till I get off my shift so we can go home together. It’s like we’ve had a renaissance just knowing our time in Seattle is ending.

  I’ve been packing very slowly, and today Jonah was hanging out while I put my toiletry bag together. I’ve had the same bottle of sunscreen for at least three years—I have so little need for it beneath Seattle’s pewter skies—and I started to pack it, but then I had a thought.

  “Does sunscreen go bad?” I asked Jonah. He looked sort of puzzled, and got up off my futon to look at the bottle I held in my hands. “This bottle’s been around forever.”

  He took it, popped the top, and squirted a tiny bit onto his finger. Then, with a quick glance to make sure I was paying attention, he licked it off his finger and smacked his lips the way he would when testing butter to see if it’s gone rancid. “Tastes fine to me,” he said, shrugging. For a moment I actually thought that he knew what sunscreen was supposed to taste like when it had gone off, but then he cracked up and started wiping his tongue with his sleeve. “Blech,” he sputtered. “Remind me not to do that again.”

  I hate the idea of coming home to find him gone.

  A friend of mine, a sailor who’s been around the world a million times, came to the pub last night and he and I talked about Indonesia for a long time. I’ve always had a bit of a secret crush on him. Last night I felt that familiar thrill—equal parts euphoria and panic—when he walked in. But today? Today I miss Jonah already.

  Later

  So, I know I said I wasn’t going to censor myself in this journal, but in this one instance, I have to: my friend, the guy who came into the pub last night. I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t write his real name. It just feels wrong. So, I’ll allow myself this one act of cowardice, even if it is terribly Sex and the City of me. He’s a sailor, so that’s what I’ll call him. The Sailor.

  He gave me a novel to bring with me to Bali. I’m looking at it right now.

  Anyway, he’s just a friend. I mean—sure, there was one night, before I was with Jonah, when we kissed. A lot. Without our clothes on. But that was three years ago. So there’s no reason for me to feel guilty about him, even if I did get a little jolt when I opened up the book he gave me and found a card in it. It doesn’t say much other than “Bon Voyage,” but still.… Normally this would send me into paroxysms of guilt and I would fantasize about an alternate universe in which I live with him and we lie around in his turret reading books all day and talking about them at night. And other things. You know.

  But I’m too depressed about leaving Jonah. Can’t even enjoy a good fantasy.

  February 20

  So my yoga clothes for my yoga retreat in Indonesia were made in Indonesia. Is this a good sign? Like, my pants will get a homecoming? Or is this a terrible sign, that I will be greeted as an imperialistic capitalist neocolonialist visiting Bali to check up on my sweatshops?

  Ugh. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to buy organic cotton “Definitely made by grown-ups” yoga clothes. Shit. I’m already behind the curve.

  February 22

  I e-mailed Indra to tell her that I don’t think I can go. I’m not up for this, I’m not a brave person anymore and all I can think about is that the world is about to end—everybody says so, Nostradamus, the drunk at the pub last night who kept saying, “You think 9/11 was bad? Wait till you see 6/13!”—and I don’t want to be away from my family and friends when God’s other shoe drops.

  Indra wrote back. She’s already in Bali, and she said that if things go down she knows where she wants to be, and it isn’t the U.S. She told me it’s beautiful and warm and peaceful there, and that they’re waiting for me.

  “Everything is simpler here,” she said.

  Then she told me to do a visualization exercise in which I imagine everything going well. “Imagine a best-case scenario for your yoga practice, your meditation practice, and your life in this unbelievable paradise.”

  Okay. So, my visualization: I’m living in one of those thatched huts I saw in my travel book. There’s a mud floor. I’m sitting lotus style next to a straw bed, in flowing white yoga clothes, the ones I saw in Yoga Journal and would buy if they didn’t cost half the price of my plane ticket.

  My roommate is sitting next to me, and we’re eating curds and rice out of charmingly ethnic bowls. The curds are delicious. Whatever curds are.

  We’re reading sacred texts, and they are making us feel very sacred. When it’s time to go to class, we leave with our yoga mats leaning out of our straw bags just so—like baguettes in a black-and-white photograph from France.

  Hmmm. It’s working, kind of.

  February 23

  Up in the clouds.

  I am not having a panic attack. I am not having a panic attack.

  Later

  I just realized that I didn’t bring a single novel with me, nothing fun to read whatsoever, and yet I probably tore my rotator cuff waiting in the security line at SeaTac with eighty pounds of sacred texts in my bag. At the forty-minute mark I cursed the terrorists for ruining international travel, and my shoulder along with it. Then I took it back. Didn’t seem yogic. Also, bad luck: I’ve got twenty hours of flying ahead of me and I don’t want to tempt fate.

  That said, when I reached the hour-mark and still had a half-dozen switchbacks to go before my turn for the X-ray anal probe, I allowed myself a few unyogic epithets. They’re winning! I wanted to cry as the TSA guy fondled my emergency underwear at the frisking station. The terrorists are winning!

  He smiled down at me as he folded the undies and put them back. He smiled as if he could read my mind, and it was a secret joke between the two of us. It was such a funny smile I couldn’t help but smile back.

  Then he opened my compact of birth-control pills, presumably to make sure the pills weren’t actually teensy tiny little grenades.

  So, back to my books. I’ve brought:

  The Yoga Sutras. (“Threads of wisdom,” it says on the back. Sutra means “thread.” Opening randomly to a page, I read this: “The body is a disgusting place to visit, a place of blood and feces and pus. So why would you want to engage in sexual activity with one?” And now … I close the book.)

  The Upanishads. (Three different translations—two of which the teller at Elliott Bay Book Company nodded at, and the last of which made him wrinkle his nose and say, “Ew, mainstream.”)

  The Bhagavad Gita. (I read it in high school, senior year, and pretended that I found it really deep
and interesting. I think it’s about a chariot race.)

  The Autobiography of a Yogi. (Memoirists are egomaniacs. I adore the irony!)

  Trunk-in-Pond: The Illustrated Kama Sutra. (On sale, pocket-sized, and Hindu, people.)

  I also have a trio of New Age texts that, if put together, would be called something like The Universe Comes of Age: God(dess) in the Age of Aquarius. (Oh dear.)

  Okay, I lied. I do have one novel. The one the Sailor gave me. Oh, but I don’t even remember what it’s called. Forget it.

  Arrgh. Still lying. It’s called Maqroll. Never heard of it, and frankly I don’t even know why I brought it. I probably won’t have time to read anything fun with all these sacred texts to get through.

  February 24

  I wish this pen had Technicolor ink in it. From gray, gloomy Seattle to this!

  Bali.

  I’m in Bali.