by Tim Cahill
I’m a writer, of sorts. My job, such as it is, requires me to travel to remote countries, where I have, in the past few decades, covered the drug/guerrilla war in Colombia, investigated the murder of an American in the jungles of Peru, dived with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa, and sat negotiating my fate with Tuareg warlords in the southern Sahara. Pretty hairy-chested stuff, but the truth is, I was a little scared about meeting all the yoga folks in Jamaica. There’s a lot of testosterone involved in what I do. I assumed that yoga people would perceive me as some sort of throwback: a Neolithic macho, and an abyss of awareness.
Well, everybody wants to be liked, and I deeply feared the scorn of the assembled yogis and yoginis. The books I read before coming to Jamaica had calmed me somewhat: yoga, I learned, is not a religion, and you can take from it what you will. Go only for the physical benefits: fine, yoga doesn’t have a problem with that. Use it for stress relief and meditation: sure, okay. Or a person might opt for a total yoga lifestyle, which includes diet, meditation, and the search for enlightenment. Take from it what you will: yoga, according to the books, doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
But I assumed that people who would choose to spend their vacations doing four hours of yoga a day would be lifestyle folks, the kind of weenies who might sneer at my own rather soiled lifestyle. I feared my classmates would be holier than thou, or, in any case, holier than I, which is pretty much a slam dunk.
In fact, my classmates—a couple of dozen of them—did not appear at all the way I thought yoga people were supposed to look. The men were not little weenie guys, for one thing, and there were several of them there—I only say this out of journalistic integrity—who probably could have taken me at arm wrestling. The women—whose ages spanned a couple of generations—were not hippie burnouts and acid crawlbacks. None wore patchouli oil, and an extraordinary number of them were highly attractive. The rest were just conventionally good-looking. Don’t misunderstand: I was with my wife, and I am not single and looking. But if I were, I’d take yoga classes, if only to meet chicks.
Our instructors were John Schumacher, founder and director of Unity Woods, a studio with locations throughout the East, and Barbara Benagh of Boston’s Yoga Studio. We had started the class by introducing ourselves and talking about our experience with yoga. Several of the students had studied for twenty years or more. My wife and I were the only total beginners, but, when my turn came, I told the assembled yogis, “I haven’t done any yoga physically, but I’ve read three entire books and figure I know everything there is to know about it.”
There was a brief moment of silence, and I thought, yep, humorless. And then the class burst into laughter. Not a lot of it. It wasn’t that good a joke. I looked up at Bob Marley and thought: Every little thing, is going to be all right.
The books in question had been sent to me by Todd Jones of Yoga Journal, who had asked me to write a story about my first yoga class. Todd said he was looking for “a view of our little subculture from the outside.” That seemed fair enough, and I asked him if he could mail me some introductory texts.
He sent yoga books appropriately addressed to dummies and idiots, along with Erich Schiffmann’s Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, which I found well written but a bit on the ethereal side, at least for me. I figured yoga kinda guys might get a lot out of it.
What I was able to glean from all this material was that the poses, or asanas, were developed thousands of years ago to give people control over their bodies. Such control is essentially for yogic meditation. The purpose and goal of meditation is the bliss of eventual enlightenment. That stopped me cold. Enlightenment? No sir, whoa Nellie. None of that whoop-de-do for me, thank you very much.
The Enlightened Masters I have read are invariably incomprehensible and the Masters themselves are entirely incapable of constructing a single coherent English sentence. I’m not discussing someone like Eric Schiffmann, who is actually very good. What I’m talking about here is Flat Out Enlightenment, which is mostly unintelligible gibberish and reads to me like someone swimming through a thick custard of delirium. And don’t think I don’t know my Enlightened Masters. I’ve been to ashrams in India, power spots, and convergence points and “vortices” in California and Colorado and New Mexico. I have spent time chatting to a woman with many, many followers who lives near my home in Montana and who channels Enlightened Masters all day long as if making calls on a cellular phone.
The link between them all—the convergence people, the gurus, the Enlightened—is that, in their written materials anyway, they don’t make any sense at all. For that reason they all are self-published, which is to say, they themselves pay someone else to publish the work in question. As a professional writer, I prefer the opposite strategy, in which the publisher pays you. Enlightenment, my reading suggested, is an exceedingly poor career path for a writer.
Oh, I knew bliss and enlightenment aren’t often achieved. It said as much in each of the books I read. One strives toward the light. Okay, I’d buy that, sure, but what if I turned out to be one of those guys who just happens to “get it” straight away? What if I was an anomaly? I’d crank out a few asanas, sit cross-legged, thinking-but-not-thinking, and all of a sudden, flash-bang, I’d see it all: the meaning of life, my own connection to the cosmos, and the blinding curve of energy that is the pulsing soul of universal consciousness itself, and I’d know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that at that moment, I was completely and irrevocably screwed.
Enlightened people are dead meat in the publishing industry. I’d lose my jobs, such as they are. My mortgage would go unpaid, my wife would leave me, and I’d wander the earth in ragged clothes, informing the less spiritually fortunate of a consciousness above and beyond. Perhaps those people might give me a few coins with which I could buy a scrap of bread. This is to say that, in my mind, enlightenment and homelessness are synonymous situations.
I called Todd Jones back at Yoga Journal and said I’d take the course, but I intended to resist enlightenment. And if, through some cruel trick of fate, I did become enlightened, I was going to go out there to Berkeley, California, and kick his ass.
So, there I was, three days into the yoga vacation, with twelve big hours of yoga under my belt. I had feared, on the whole, that yoga might be too light a workout for me: a bunch of sissy stuff about standing on one leg for a couple of breaths. I typically run (or plod) two miles a day, occasionally lift weights, and stretch assiduously. I had called Todd Jones before I left and asked if he couldn’t get me into one of the more sweaty disciplines, some kind of power yoga.
“If I put you, as an absolute beginner, in an ashtanga class for a week,” Todd said mildly, “you really would kick my ass.”
He was right about that. I was able to do many of the asanas, but it had never occurred to me that once you attained the position, it was necessary to keep working through it. It never got any easier. If you did it right, you were always working at the very edge of what you could do. In a typical four-hour day, I felt I’d gotten a pretty good physical workout, and each would have been a lot more effective if I could have done some of the more advanced work we typically did late in the session. Todd Jones was right about ahstanga.
I was standing at the bar after an afternoon class, having a beer and a cigarette, when John Schumacher stopped by for a chat. I was wearing a T-shirt I had bought from John, who runs the Unity Woods Yoga Center. The shirt featured a large triangle whose legs read: “serenity,” “awareness,” “health.”
“I suppose,” I said, “I’m a bad advertisement for Unity Woods.”
“Not at all,” John said. “We’ll just add the words ‘not applicable.’ ”
There were several people at the bar, and though some undoubtedly lived a yoga lifestyle, others did not. No one talked about Obstacles Along the Path. There were even a few smokers, and several who drank alcohol, though hardly in the quantities I find refreshing. A “yoga vacation,” I was told, is different tha
n a “yoga retreat,” where I might have felt considerably more out of place.
In the class, there was a guy who taught stress reduction at various corporations, an engineer who’d worked in the Middle East, among other places, and a woman who’d been to India several times and studied with a man named Inyengar, who, I knew from my reading, was considered hot stuff and one of the modern masters.
There was a psychiatrist there, and we talked a little about my preconceptions. “Exactly,” the doctor said. “I don’t tell people I practice yoga for that reason. Some people automatically think it means you also do crystal healing or some such.”
The stress-reduction guy told a yoga story that made me laugh. “I was at a convention in one of those big hotels. I check in, strip naked, and start on my yoga. So I’m doing a headstand, and the door opens. There was a mix-up at reception and they’d given someone else my key. The guy says, ‘whoops,’ and closes the door. All I ever saw was his shoes. All he ever saw, I’m sure, was, well, what he could see from his level. I spent three days looking at people’s shoes, wondering which guy it was. He probably figured I was some strange kind of pervert.”
“Ignorant people think that about yoga,” I said, from the perspective of a twelve-hour-old yogi.
I spoke with the woman who’d studied with Inyengar. Her husband told me about the time he accidentally poured out her cake batter before an important party. “I thought it was a dirty dish,” he explained. His wife discovered the transgression just after her yoga class, and didn’t yell at him very much at all. “I decided then and there that I’d encourage her to take all the yoga she wanted,” he said.
The instructors had diametrically opposed styles of teaching. John Schumacher, who has studied with Inyengar several times, was about precision. I was amazed that he could stand there, tell me exactly what I was feeling, and then suggest a certain shift of balance that made the asana more steady, more exact, more difficult but somehow more comfortable. The right way felt right. The wrong way did not.
Barbara Benagh, on the other hand, tended to use visualization. I was not the only student who didn’t know exactly where she was going. You’d be sitting cross-legged, imagining roots sprouting out of your butt, or some such, and then she’d have you twist just so, move the other arm, extend the right leg, and suddenly you were up in a complex position you never imagined you could do.
Barbara’s overall strategy for the week, it seemed, was to guide the students through a plan to get energy running back and forth from the groin to the back through what she called the lumbar bridge. This may not be entirely correct: I sometimes lost the thread of what Barbara was saying late in the class, either because I couldn’t feel what she meant physically, or because the concepts were too advanced for me. People who had been studying yoga for several years, however, like Inverted Naked Man, told me that they’d been working on those very concepts for the last year and that they were in the midst of a kind of mental and physical breakthrough, thanks to Barbara.
While Barbara and John had been teaching together at this “yoga vacation” for over fifteen years, they were quite dissimilar in other ways. Barbara, for instance, loved marathon-length mountain biking sessions, and she was an avid swimmer, racking up as much as a mile a day before teaching class. John, on the other hand, felt yoga, done consistently, was all a person needed to stay in good shape.
“Well,” I said, over dinner with the both of them one night, “you’ve gotta do some cardiovascular stuff, running or whatever.”
John didn’t think so. Yogic breathing, properly practiced, was all a person needed. He himself had recently had his cardiovascular system tested and he’d scored pretty much off the scale. He never ran. “I think all that stuff about keeping the heart rate at such and such for so many minutes is a real caveman way of doing it.”
Well, yeah, I thought, if you’re John Schumacher, maybe you can keep your heart healthy through a combination of breathing and asanas. I wasn’t John Schumacher and I was going to just keep plodding along in my own Neolithic fashion, but I’d throw in a couple of hours of yoga a week as well. I had discovered that it made me feel good.
Unexpectedly, my wife and I became friendly with several of our classmates. That was my biggest surprise. There was a singular lack of sanctimony among the assembled students. And, indeed, several of us made plans to return next year. My preconceptions about yoga people had been pretty well demolished, but I wasn’t able to absorb the whole discipline and philosophy in a single week. I resolved to work hard on my asanas, then come back next year, and make the lot of them look like pissants.
Given that state of mind, I suppose it hardly needs to be said that I successfully avoided enlightenment. Happily, I suffered not a single stab of awareness, though I fear that if I keep this up for any length of time, I may have some difficulties with serenity. That’s something I’m going to have to work on, this creeping and insidious tranquillity. I’m a nail-biting, chain-smoking, hard-drinking deadline junkie. That’s my life. I love it, and I worry a lot about the curse of incipient equanimity. In my worst moments of serene composure, I assure myself that, even though I am currently practicing yoga, enlightenment is a long shot and I’m not going to get there. For that reason alone, I tell myself, every little thing is going to be all right.
The Search for the Caspian Tiger
I was sitting in the Owl, a small bar in a small town in Montana, when I was lifted bodily from the stool—no small feat—and kissed exuberantly on both my cheeks. “Doctor C,” Tommy the Turk said by way of greeting. He was a barrel-chested man, bald as a billiard ball, and he wore a wool-woven blue and white cap, like a yarmulke. I assumed that he was back from one Central Asian war or another. People who know these deadly disputes and these places know Thomas Goltz. He is a war correspondent of certain distinction and has received invitations to share his knowledge of shadowy wars in obscure places from prestigious universities, various institutions, and the CIA. “I’ve got a quest for you, Doctor,” Tommy said.
He showed me a clipping from the London Sunday Express. The lead sentence said that high in the mountains of Turkey “could lie a secret which will stun scientists: the return from the dead of a lost species.” The article quoted a Dr. Guven Eken, of the Society for the Protection of Nature: “The Caspian tiger is considered to be extinct but in South East Turkey, local hunters claim to have seen tigers in the mountains.”
We toasted Tommy’s safe arrival back in Montana and discussed the idea of searching for the ghost tiger. As I recall, this involved many toasts. The next morning I woke up with some fuzzy recollection about an agreement to go to Turkey and search for the Caspian tiger with Tommy the Turk, a guy famous for covering wars. Was that a good idea? Would we get shot at? And what the hell did I know about tigers?
One week later, to the day, Tommy and I were in Istanbul, along with photographer Rob Howard, nicknamed—for reasons impervious to investigative reporting—the Duck. We were sitting at a café overlooking the Bosporus and talking with Dr. Guven Eken, who had been quoted in the Sunday Express. He was an Art Garfunkel–looking guy who confessed that he had never actually been to the southeastern part of Turkey, didn’t know anything at all about tigers, and didn’t really actually have the names of any hunters who’d seen one. He’d only heard rumors. The guy had only heard rumors.
So now we were tracking rumors of a ghost tiger.
Dr. Eken sought to dissuade us altogether. The southeastern part of the country was “sensitive,” and “security” was a problem.
The security situation, in a nutshell—Tommy knew it well—involves a long-running Kurdish insurrection. There are 25 million Kurds living in five different countries, including the southeast of Turkey. The Kurds are said to be the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland. But there is a homeland, of sorts. Northern Iraq is a de facto, unrecognized Kurdish statelet, and has been ever since the U.S.-NATO no-fly zone was imposed over the region after the Gulf War. The two ruli
ng Kurdish groups there are largely sympathetic to the United States. A third group—operating in both Turkey and northern Iraq—is the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, a Marxist-Leninist organization which has been at war with Turkey since 1986. It had been largely defanged since the arrest of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in February of 1999. Ocalan, called Apo, was facing execution, and had recently spoken out against violence. But pockets of resistance still existed, especially in remote, mountainous, little-inhabited areas of the country, like the southeast, where there were skirmishes now and again. The day before our meeting with Dr. Eken, for instance, there had been an article in the paper: two insurrectionists had been killed by soldiers in a prolonged gun battle near the border with Iraq outside the town of Shemdinli. It was Tommy’s impression that things were winding down in the southeast and that we could talk our way through most military checkpoints.
Dr. Eken said we ought to talk to the Society for the Protection of Nature’s big-mammal man, Emry Can, in Ankara. The Caspian tiger, I knew, once ranged from southern Russia through Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. The last one was shot in the southeastern Turkish town of Uludere in 1970. A big creature—males measure nine feet from the tip of the tail to the nose and weigh in excess of five hundred pounds—it looked very much like the classic Bengal tiger, with khaki-colored skin and black stripes on its legs. In the winter, it got a lot furrier than your basic Bengal.