Yoga Bitch Page 5

  I’m more than willing to throw Karlee under the bus here. It was her idea, and she never got caught.

  I was the one who got caught.

  It was after Indra and Lou came back. When my teachers were in town, I attended Indra’s classes four times a week, and I rarely went to Lou’s. But with Indra and Lou gone, I didn’t pay as much attention to the schedule, and one afternoon I found myself in class, facing not the substitute teacher I anticipated, but the male half of Indrou Yoga.

  I had lured my friend Joni to the studio with the promise that ninety minutes of sun salutations would tone her upper arms. It wasn’t until we were set up on our mats that I saw who the teacher was. Lou’s black-brown eyes burned through my forehead.

  At the end of class, Joni hesitated by the sign-in sheet. “Keep moving,” I said. “We didn’t bring any money, so how can we sign in?”

  She looked fretfully to the front of the room, where Lou was levitating three inches off the ground while chatting with a few advanced yogis. He glanced at us, then turned back to his serious students, and I had the uncomfortable sensation that he was reading my mind.

  • • •

  Well, as it would happen, he was reading my mind. I summoned the courage to go back to the yoga studio the following week. I was craving a class, but I had to be at my grandparents’ house for dinner, so I braved another of Lou’s afternoon classes, hoping his eyes on me the week before had indicated curiosity rather than condemnation. I had passed most of the last week sleepless with shame, vowing never to cheat my yoga teachers again. What would Indra think if she found out? How could I risk everything I was learning from her just to save a few bucks? And what was especially absurd was that I was saving money to go to Bali to study with her! I was cheating her so that I could pay her! As Lou raised his ropey arms to the ceiling for the first sun salutation, his eyes landed on my face. He lowered his arms.

  “What’s your name?”

  I swallowed. “Suzanne Morrison,” I said.

  He nodded, taking note. His arms flew up, and we were off.

  At the end of class, after an all-too brief period of lying flat on my back in a pool of sweat, Lou said, “Suzanne Morrison, can I see you for a moment?”

  It turned out that the substitute teachers were smarter than Karlee had thought. They did know who we were, and they had kept track of how often we came and failed to pay.

  “You’re five classes behind in payments,” Lou said. His eyes bored into mine. “And you and your friend walked out last week without signing in.”

  “We did?” I whipped out the checkbook, sweating, blushing, trying not to stammer. “How much do I owe?” And then I wrote a check for twice the amount, the remainder a down payment on future classes. A show of good faith, as it were.

  Classic behavior on my part, like the time I gave my dad my piggy bank as a gift on Christmas Eve, because I was worried that Santa Claus had noticed all the pennies I’d swiped off his dresser.

  Lou watched me as I wrote the check, his eyes full of disappointment and a sort of kung-fu madness, like he was ready to kick my ass with his mind if I didn’t write that check fast enough.

  I could’ve killed Karlee. I called her the second I got home. I was tempted not to, since she deserved to go through the same humiliation I went through, but I took pity on her. Or, to be honest, I was afraid that if she got caught she’d own up to the scam and then my half-baked explanation that I’d forgotten to pay five times in a row would be yet another infraction in the judgey eyes of Guru Lou. So I told her, and the next day she arrived in class prepared with a story about how she “was just wondering” if she might not have forgotten to renew her monthly pass. “I get so lost in my yoga practice each month, I forget about the earthly details, you know?” Meaningful eye contact, sheepish shrug, bit of a blush. I could’ve killed her, and then myself.

  I went to Bali to study yoga with Indra. But I also had something to prove to Lou. I think I would have liked for him to believe that I stole from his yoga studio only because I was that serious about yoga. Lame? Well, yeah. But also typical of someone who has all the guilt and none of the faith: true penance would have been coming clean and then scrubbing Lou’s toilets for a year. That’s what disciplined spiritual practice gives you, a finite punishment that fits the crime. Instead, I tortured myself thinking that every time Lou looked me in the eye he saw my sin, the one I didn’t fess up to even though I might’ve felt relieved later—even though I might have enjoyed that nice clean slate my mother taught me to expect after confession.

  But the truth is, I needed to stay. Not just to do my penance, but because I was onto something, I could feel it. That moment in our check-in circle when Indra looked me in the eye and said that we all fear death felt like a promise; she could help me, she knew what I was talking about. Living embedded in a cult of pissdrinkers would be worth it if it meant Indra would help me find a way to live without fear. The other option—leaving, giving up, going back to my old life with no promise of liberation—was no option at all. That road led to death. Indra could lead me to life.

  I felt nauseous every time I thought about what my yogamates and teachers did first thing every morning, sure. But I was also fascinated. It was a mighty strange way to live, that first week in Bali, one moment struck by how diverse the world was, that it was full of so many crazy motherfuckers, and the next moment clutching my throat in horror to think that there might come a day when we would be expected to drink pee together, like wine at the Last Supper. But I had to stay. I wanted to stay. Those first weeks I felt like Dante working his way through the bowels of hell, searching for the escalator to purgatory, only half certain of ever finding it. But if I did, it would be only a matter of time before I would work my way free of Lou and my debt to his studio, free of fear and self-loathing, and begin the journey to paradise, in blissful contemplation of the future.

  February 26

  God, it’s so hot here. My whole body is prickling and covered in tiny red bumps, as if colonies of ants have burrowed beneath my skin while I sleep. If I’m in direct sunlight for longer than a few seconds, I start to panic. I come from a land where the sun is kept in a bomb shelter for nine months a year. I am lunar white. Sometimes I run toward shade only to find that there is no shade. Just this fire on my skin, under my skin, fire everywhere, boiling sweat and sunscreen dripping into my eyes and mouth and pooling in my sports bra.

  Lou quoted Milton today: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.” He said artists have always understood the power of the mind to warp reality. I swear he looked straight at me when he said, “If they’re strong enough of mind to understand that.”

  And I thought, I’m in hell. Perhaps Milton spent time on a yoga retreat?

  HERE’S WHAT I keep wondering: Is Indra brave for drinking her pee, or is she crazy?

  Why would someone so disciplined and smart and kind do something so disgusting? I see no other signs of craziness. Other than this one big billboard.

  She was telling us about the Self today, how we’re all a part of the same giant Self, and she said that our ability to have compassion for others is proof that we’re all connected to one another. She was so persuasive on the subject that when it came time to meditate, I almost made myself weep, having this gorgeous fantasy about hugging children at the Special Olympics and people telling me how compassionate I am.

  If anybody at home knew that I wait around after class, hoping that Indra will come by my mat to talk, they would look me in the eye and say, I don’t know you at all anymore. And I would say, Well, shit—me neither.

  So maybe I’m the crazy one.

  February 27

  We’re three days into classes and I’ve figured out that the only thing to do at yoga camp is yoga. When we eat, it is with mindfulness. When we walk, it is in silent meditation.

  Even in downtown Ubud, where the streets are lined with taxi drivers who call out “Transport? Transport?�
� to every tourist who passes, even there, my yogamates walk serenely, with Mona Lisa smiles on their lips. We speak of little other than our processes and our progress and our spiritual, psychological, and physical wellness and how the Balinese people hold the key to all three. Lou said we should try to be like the Balinese. “They have such childlike innocence,” he said, which made me cringe. The whole purpose of my college degree was to learn that no one has a childlike innocence, except for maybe Zorba the Greek and a handful of actual children.

  Wellness is very big among my yogamates. If Wellness were a person, it would be Michael Jackson circa 1984, and my yogamates would be screaming, crying fans, jumping up and down just to be so near to it. Kind of the way I would act around a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes right about now.

  Everything must promote Wellness. What we eat, drink, put on our skin. Jessica complained of chapped lips this morning, and when I offered her my Chapstick, she was as horrified as if I’d offered her crude oil straight from the barrel. “Petroleum!” she said, her lip curled in disgust. Clearly, my lips are not Well.

  We spend about six to eight hours a day in the wantilan, stretching, lunging, backbending. Being in the middle of the rice fields, there are a lot of bugs and we sweat a great deal. There are also geckos in the rafters, and they occasionally drop soft little pellets of gecko shit down onto our mats. People cry a lot. Not because of the gecko shit, although I might if it falls on me one more time. No, they cry because, as Indra said, we hold repressed emotions and traumas in secret stashes throughout our bodies, and the complex yoga poses are designed to ferret these out, so they can be purged and we can be purified.

  After that first class a few days ago I went to the Internet café—it was called Ubud Roi, which made my inner theater geek very happy—and dashed off an e-mail to my folks and Jonah. I really wish I hadn’t done that, now. They already think I’m crazy for being here, when I could’ve just gone ahead to New York with Jonah.

  God, am I here just to procrastinate moving to New York?

  No. I know why I’m here. And I’m staying.

  Anyway. I dashed off a quick SOS e-mail to the fam, which, in its essence, read, HELP ME. I’M STRANDED ON AN ISLAND AMONG PISSDRINKERS. (Why, oh why, must I confess everything to my family? Why can’t I just write them e-mails about the temples and the gamelan music and make them resentful of the never-ending sunshine here? Why must I overshare?)

  Today I went back to Ubud Roi and had three new messages.

  My sister: That’s hilarious, do they eat their own shit, too?

  My mother: For God’s sake Suzanne Marie, why would you sign up to study anything with anybody who was so foolish as to drink her own urine? I’ve spoken with Dr. Randelkin about this and he says urine is a waste product, sweetie, not a beverage!!!

  My dad: Don’t even think about it. Love, Pop.

  NOTHING FROM JONAH. He doesn’t move for another six weeks or so, but I’m sure things are already getting busy for him.

  I’m going to practice the niyama of contentment. Samtosha. What that means is that you practice being content. Everyone here talks about it all the time, it’s all samtosha-this and samtosha-that, and that’s why yogis smile even when they walk through downtown Ubud and have to say no to three thousand taxi drivers wanting to drive us the three miles home.

  February 28

  Penance at yoga camp is called karma yoga. You do chores to burn up past sins and please the god in charge of reincarnation. Doing lots of karma yoga means you won’t end up spending your next life on the lowest spiritual plane, as a cockroach, say, or a reality TV star. It’s a really neat trick for getting people to scrub toilets and lift heavy things. We practice it every morning in the wantilan when we move the women’s gamelan instruments to one side of the floor to make room for our mats. The effort is spiritual, if you want it to be. But I’m having a hard time seeing how pushing a four-million-pound xylophone is going to make my soul sing. So far it just makes me sweat.

  Occasionally someone will accidentally bump one of the instruments so that it reverberates for a few minutes in a deep, low, metallic thrum. When this happens I always think of that Soundgarden palindrome of my Seattle youth: Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. If there is a God, I’m sure he’s saying, “Seriously, Suzanne? This is how you please me? Seriously?”

  BALINESE HINDUISM INCORPORATES many yoga practices, but not the same kind of yoga we do. Theirs is a bhakti yoga, which is a devotional yoga—no exercise, just lots of rituals devoted to pleasing God. It’s what we Catholics call a “smells and bells” religion.

  Every morning while Jessica does her morning beverage meditation on the edge of the veranda, I sit at the table with Su and watch her make offerings. She weaves pale green banana leaves into square or circular shallow boxes, each one about the size of my hand. She makes dozens of these little containers, filling them with flowers, wrapped hard candies, incense, and cooked sticky rice. When she’s finished, her work tray is stacked two feet high with these little dishes and their contents, like little miniature Easter baskets without handles.

  Once you’ve noticed one offering, you start seeing them everywhere. There was one on the dashboard of Made’s car on the drive from the airport when I first arrived. They’re on the backs of the toilets at Casa Luna, the bright, open-air restaurant in downtown Ubud where we eat lunch almost every day. There are dozens of offerings littering the steps in the wantilan. It isn’t customary to clear them away after the dogs and chickens and ants have eaten everything in them and all that’s left is a dried husk and a candy wrapper. So there are piles of these desiccated offerings cluttering every corner of every building, surrounding the base of every scarecrow in every field, and even beneath the icebox in our kitchen.

  Su has to do all of the offerings for the entire guest compound: our five guesthouses, the pool and grounds, and then she does the same for the family compound in the back, which is a collection of ramshackle one-story dwellings and a temple devoted to several Balinese incarnations of Hindu gods. She makes and distributes the offerings every day.

  My yogamates have pointed to Su as an example of Zen calm and wellness, but she told me that she only gets one day off a year, and that her brothers and her father get most days off a year. She said that she and her mother and aunts and girl cousins do all of the work around the compound. I suppose she was calm when she said this, so who knows? Maybe she’s got some sort of Zen magic going on. But I keep wondering what would happen if we got her to do a few rounds of sun salutations? Would there be secret stashes of resentment and animosity hiding in her muscles and tendons?

  LOU IS VERY direct and often seems frustrated when I can’t hold a pose as long as he wants me to, but Indra says things like, “Offer it up, Suzanne!” or “Make it an offering!”

  Reminds me of my mother. When I used to complain about my knees aching from kneeling for forty million hours at Mass, she’d always tell me to offer it up to Jesus. I thought that was the craziest idea I’d ever heard. I mean, why on earth would Jesus want my pain? What would he do with it, put it on a shelf? Add it to my trousseau for when I get to heaven? “Oh, look! Jesus saved my knee pain! That Jesus, he’s just so thoughtful …”

  I sort of like the way Indra says it, though. She says that everything we do should be an offering, from our karma yoga in the wantilan to our studies to picking up after ourselves. She says that if you’re practicing yoga, even washing the dishes is a meaningful, meditative activity. I sort of love that.

  Maybe that’s how Su sees her offerings? Not as something to resent as bondage, but as a meditation. As a path to clarity, or to her God.

  Or maybe she weaves those little dishes thinking, “I hate my brothers, I hate my father, I hate my uncles …”

  Later

  Tonight we drank tea on the veranda with our next-door neighbors, Jason and Lara. Jason and Lara are here en route to Australia. They’re from London, but they’ve spent the last two years applying for visas to m
ove Down Under permanently. “All we need are two certificates to teach yoga,” Jason said, “and we can begin living the kind of life we want.”

  Jason has a very kind face, with soft features like a kid’s, and bright white teeth. He looks like he should be wearing a newsboy’s cap, or playing the lead in Oliver!

  He and Lara must use the same toothpaste; she’s got the same movie-star teeth. Lara’s hair is thin and dark brown, as shiny as coffee. Her eyes are an arresting grass green, and a little buggy—when she laughs, they water so much she looks like she’s crying. Both she and Jason are in their early thirties, and they look like they’ve been doing yoga for years. They have incredible arms, like they lift each other instead of weights.

  “So you’re Indra’s pet,” Lara said, fixing her big eyes on me in a way that made me wonder if she was joking or judging.

  “Her pet?”

  “Of course,” she said, leaning back in her chair and putting one leg up on the table. A flowering vine tattoo crept up her tan leg from her ankle to just below her knee-length white linen pants. “She mentioned you before you arrived—you’re the only one from Seattle here, so we’ve all been dying to meet you and hear what their studio is like.”

  I pictured their warm, bright studio in the middle of the dark city. “It’s an oasis,” I said.

  All three nodded. “You can just tell,” Jason said. “Indra and Lou are something special. I think they’re there.”