by Abby Maslin
CHAPTER 26
July 2014
A week later, the sun casts a shimmer on the blazing tarmac of the Thira airport, more than five thousand miles from the sidewalk where I kissed TC and Jack goodbye twenty-four hours earlier. I make my way down the open-air stairs of the plane, my purse slung over one shoulder, my black yoga mat hanging from the other as I hold my straw sun hat down with one hand. If I let go, the salty winds, the meltemi, as they are known here on the island, threaten to carry it east into the Aegean Sea.
Santorini.
Even the name of the island oozes with glamour. This is the land of whitewashed walls, twisting paths of black volcanic gravel, and sunsets so hypnotizing it’s as if the light swallows the whole of the ocean.
Santorini is, among many things, the destination of rich travelers and beautiful young lovers. The place TC and I ambitiously planned to honeymoon years ago, back when we could still pass for the latter. It never occurred to me that I’d end up here alone one day.
With each step across the tarmac, nagging guilt takes hold. You don’t deserve this. You should be at home taking care of your family. Who the hell do you think you are?
I take a breath and keep walking. I am judging myself as harshly as I can, a punishment tactic for all the silent judgments I imagine people have held on their tongues since I began planning this trip. A month in Santorini. My husband and three-year-old child at home. It sounds terribly selfish. And now that I’m here, a witness to this Mediterranean paradise, it doesn’t look any better.
Seven months ago, I stumbled upon the Drishti Yoga Teacher Training website. All it took was one breathless look at the web page before my mind was filled with visions of myself gracefully warrior-ing in front of a cerulean backdrop. The thought of actually going, of doing this thing for myself and abandoning my responsibilities at home for nearly a month, felt terrifying and embarrassingly audacious. But everyone agreed: with a little extra help from our families, TC and Jack would be fine without me. I just needed to justify the decision to myself.
I could have gone the simplest route, opened my mouth to acknowledge the truth: I’m going to Santorini because I’m still unhappy and I need a break. But to admit unhappiness in this world requires a special kind of bravery. One that leads to the stirring of questions (But WHY are you unhappy?), which inevitably leads to harder questions (So what are you going to do about it?), and ultimately to the surrendering of my hard-nosed image as TC’s unwavering cheerleader and advocate.
So we made a plan. Me in Santorini first, earning my yoga credentials, followed by TC and me in Greece together. Our very belated honeymoon, as we marketed it to others. Or Ten Days Away from Our Kid to Decide If We Can Still Be Married, as we acknowledged it to ourselves.
And now I am here.
From the moment I step inside the tiny airport, glamour abounds. A gorgeous couple waits for their luggage a few feet away. A young woman with legs up to her armpits wears a napkin-size skirt that shows off her perfect knees. Her tanned lover leans in, twisting strands of her hair through his fingers and whispering into her ear with a smile.
I try to look away as I clumsily manage my many carry-ons, but I’m hungry to keep staring, taking in each of the sultry details as I try to temper my envy for a lust I can only distantly recall. Can a love that shameless possibly be real? I wonder. And what hides beneath their perfect aesthetic? Is there some dark undercurrent the rest of us can’t see? Or is it like my college friend Sarah: unreasonably beautiful and the sweetest, kindest person ever? Can something be truly beautiful and authentically true at the same time?
I reach on to the conveyor and use both hands to haul my oversize suitcase over the side. It is no surprise that I have massively overpacked for this trip. Ever since my study abroad days in college, I have been a reliable overpacker. After all, why bring one white sundress when you can bring six? It’s especially humorous now, given that I won’t be needing more than a sports bra and a pair of stretchy leggings for the next four weeks.
The obsessive packing is a symptom of my insecurity about this trip. I am scared shitless by my decision to come here, worried I’ll be wildly out of place among my peers. I’m not a lifelong yogi or an adventurous single woman working her way down some international bucket list. I certainly won’t be the most experienced person here. Or the most interesting. And because I am none of these, my only plan is to hide myself in a funky pair of batik-printed pants and hope no one notices that, in fact, I am a grief-stricken mother of one from Washington, D.C., desperately trying to resurrect my marriage. I will dress the part of the carefree yogi, even if I feel absurdly far from it.
With my monster suitcase in hand, I pull myself away from the beautiful couple and exit the airport. I’m looking around for other women who, like me, seem to be traveling alone, a yoga mat stuffed into some carry-on item—a clue we might be heading to the same training. A small group of us have coordinated via Facebook to share a taxi to the hotel.
I lay my suitcase down on the curb and sit on top of it. The airport is compact (just a single door for arrivals), and it seems unlikely that I’ll miss the other women. After a few minutes of waiting, I spot a tall, dark-haired woman making a home for herself farther down the curb, her own monster suitcase parked beside her.
“Hey, are you with the Drishti training?” I shyly call over.
“Yeah!” she responds warmly, before moving her bag closer and introducing herself.
This is Crystal. Crystal is from Canada, and with her long, slender face and beautiful, swanlike neck, she could easily pass for a ballerina. Yet everything about her, from her ethereal name to her celestial-printed leggings and dangling tassel earrings, screams something more mystical, more unexpected than a dancer or a yogi. In my nervousness, I begin rattling off questions. Where in Canada are you from? How was your flight to Greece? What is it you do at home?
I’m tapping into my well-memorized series of D.C. conversation starters, but my questions feel forced and more than a bit lame in the presence of someone as obviously unconventional as Crystal. My lameness is affirmed a few minutes later, when while traveling in a van to the hotel together, I begin to hear a bit about her life.
Crystal is many things, among them a shaman, a chicken farmer, a trained masseuse, and a certified Reiki master. She is a world traveler who has participated in an actual Peruvian ayahuasca ceremony (which, she explains, is an indigenous spiritual ritual that involves drinking a hallucinogenic substance and then puking out your guts). And at home, in Canada, she is a minor celebrity who made the national news when she began randomly high-fiving strangers in the street. The High-Five Revolution was an experiment to help Crystal beyond her own shyness and spread love in the world. Like me, she’s here because she loves yoga, minus one big difference: she has never taken an actual yoga class.
As Crystal speaks, I listen in admiration of her nonconformity and the sheer balls it takes to sign up for an intense monthlong teacher training without ever having stepped into a formal yoga studio.
For someone who describes herself as introverted and shy, Crystal is undeniably fearless about putting herself out there. I haven’t even met the rest of the women, but if they’re any bit as fascinating as Crystal, I fear that, by comparison, I am worse than boring. I am tragic. And it will likely take only a few minutes of conversation and some very general questions before I am forced to share my awkward sob story.
For the hundredth time, I ask myself, Why have I come here?
For yoga? For my marriage? For my sanity? I hear a chorus of resounding yeses in my head, and all I know is that as much as I’d like to deny it, I’ve come here for some very specific purpose. I’ve come to learn something.
“Try not to have any expectations,” Pat, a family friend, advised me in a solemn moment huddled over her kitchen island two weeks before I left.
I remember nodding in agreement, eager to prove jus
t how zen I already was, how very open and present-oriented yoga had already made me. “Of course not,” I remember lying in a chatter-filled response. “I’m just going for the experience.”
But that wasn’t the truth.
Behind my fake smile, the truth was pulling at me relentlessly. You are exhausted, it affirmed. You need space, it persuaded. Your marriage is still undone, it whispered. You need time to figure this out, it begged.
For although things are better between TC and me than at any point in the past two years, I have officially spent everything I have on the people I love. I am burned-out, still emotionally raw, and in desperate need of a fresh lens with which to view our lives.
So, I am here. I am here in Santorini to figure it out.
Even if it means learning to stand on my head first.
* * *
For the next three weeks, my home is the Pelagos Hotel, a modest little homestead in the northern part of the island, a forty-five minute walk from the famous picturesque city of Oia. Pelagos is a sprawling property, set back upon a long, gravel driveway and neighbored by farmland. The hotel is composed of a dozen or so freestanding, Cycladic-inspired villas, an organic garden from which our food is grown, and a giant, tented yoga shala, under which I now spend the majority of my waking hours.
Everything is open-air here, from the shala to the swimming pool to the trellis-lined courtyard where we take our meals. Back home I am an air-conditioning fanatic, lulled to sleep by the comforting white noise, but here, my roommates look at AC with disdain. Air-conditioning, it’s mostly an American thing, they explain gently. So at night, we sleep instead with the blue shuttered windows open, the meltemi occasionally offering a cool gust of relief through the tiny loft in which I sleep.
My roommates here are Caitlín and Irene. Like Crystal, Irene is also Canadian, but her family is Greek, many of them living just hours away on the island of Crete. Besides Torun (another woman in our group who lives here on Santorini), Irene is the only one of us who can actually speak Greek.
“Yamas,” she teaches us over dinner one night as we hold up our post-meal aperitifs. “It’s Greek for cheers to our health.”
“Yamas!” the twenty-one of us repeat, clinking glasses, trying to slug away any guilt about alcohol consumption during what is otherwise intended to be a month of total mind-body detoxification. Some of us are embodying that philosophy more than others (me being one of the less disciplined “others”).
Yamas, as we learn in philosophy class, is also the Sanskrit word for one of the eight limbs (i.e., components) of yoga. There are five yamas and we are required to memorize them all if we want to finish this training with certification in hand. There is ahimsa, meaning nonviolence toward all (cue me and the other vegetarians and, of course, the lone vegan); asteya, meaning non-theft (both physical and intangible items); aparigraha, a word meaning non-greed or nonattachment (something I can certainly work on when it comes to accepting life in its current state); brahmacharya, meaning celibacy or self-restraint (at least I’ve got this one well covered); and my personal favorite, the one I aspire to above the rest: satya. Truthfulness.
The five yamas provide the ethical, moral code of yoga. Put together, they all make sense. And as I pore over my reading material for the training, I can’t help but think how much yoga is just about figuring out how to be a decent, happy person in this complicated and difficult human life. And, also, just how very in sync TC has always been with the core of this practice.
I couldn’t appreciate it when we were twenty-three. A boyfriend with an interest in Buddhism. A bookcase filled with dog-eared copies of the Tao Te Ching and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. His reading choices are what helped him construct a spiritual philosophy that matched his own insides: tranquil, observant, rooted in nature.
I think about my husband daily, hourly, even, as I sit on the warm concrete of the courtyard during our afternoon classes and make my way through the readings of the great sage Patanjali’s 196 yoga sutras. Each sutra is a thread of knowledge, an aphorism, derived from the ancient knowledge of the yogis. The book of sutras has become the instruction manual I need for my own life right now.
TC’s never even heard of this ancient text, and he’s probably never done a warrior pose in his whole life, but the more I read, the more I am forced to contend that my husband is the original yogi. His unchanging discipline in all things, particularly the discipline he’s shown in his recovery, along with his distaste for the material world and his utter lack of self-consciousness, all feel so closely aligned with yogic principles.
I came here thinking yoga was about the movement, about the actual postures. But already I can see that I was wrong. It’s about the perspective that guides your life.
I may have come here with an ambition to teach yoga, but before I can do that, I must learn it in the ways TC has always understood it intuitively. I need to figure out how to sit in nature. To be still. To once and for all stop constraining myself by all the external and self-imposed rules I’ve since figured out are bullshit anyway. I’m here to do the thing I’ve known I need to do for the past year: to learn to see my life through new eyes.
“If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear, I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it,” Edward Abbey wrote. And of course, it’s true. Fear involves a very high opportunity cost. I am scared of what I might lose in the years to come if I stay in this still-shaky marriage. I’m scared that a life with TC means sacrificing some better, easier life. I’m scared I’m not strong enough to truly accept a life with disability, that I’ll constantly be picking at the edges, disguising it with Band-Aids, and playing a shameful game of pretend.
If I were as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear, I’d be at home right now with TC, figuring it out together, allowing him to be as close to me as he once was, instead of keeping him at a distance for fear of having my heart broken once more.
And if I were as capable of trust, I would have paid attention eight years ago when I first met the man whose values and spiritual wisdom I am trying to embody now. Perhaps I’ve come here to find him in myself.
CHAPTER 27
Each day of the training starts off exactly the same way: a 6:45 A.M. meditation practice, followed by ninety minutes of asana. All of this, with the exception of Carri’s and Sarah’s teaching instructions, is to be performed silently. From the moment I crawl out of my tiny twin bed, the moon still hovering in the sky, to the last sweaty breath I take in savasana nearly three hours later, I am silent. Well, outwardly silent. In my head, the chatter continues, one seriously judgmental voice reminding me that meditation is about turning your thoughts off, while another one acts like a wound-up school kid, desperate to distract the first and get all the attention.
Meditation is hard. Much harder than I’d expected. On the first full morning, I find the task of sitting upright for forty-five minutes downright painful. My shoulders and spine ache in response to Sarah’s instructions.
Inhale for four counts. Exhale for four counts. Inhale for six counts. Exhale for six counts.
Through each breath, I feel every minute of the three airplane rides it took to get here. I long to crack my neck and wiggle my legs in front of me. A lifetime later (but probably more like three minutes), Sarah lights a stick of incense somewhere behind me, and my nose becomes instantly congested. Suddenly I am dripping snot onto my mat and trying to breathe in any way that contains my sniffling. I’m certainly not going to be the person who stands up and interrupts meditation to get a Kleenex. Instead, I spend the remainder of meditation silently praying for decongestion so that I can safely exhale without having to wipe my nose on my arm.
When meditation is over and we’ve had a chance to shake off our wiggles and journal about the experience, Carri and Sarah announce that our morning practice for the day will be a ninety-minute Ashtanga primary
series. Several of us exchange confused looks.
“Everyone knows what Ashtanga is, right?” Carri asks the group expectantly.
I keep my lips pursed and my hands down. There’s no way in hell I’m going to admit to a group of strangers that I’ve traveled five thousand miles to be a yoga teacher and all I got out of that sentence was the word everyone.
From across the shala, one brave soul raises her hand, and Carri responds. “OK, well, the primary series is a set sequence of poses originated by the great teacher Pattabhi Jois, in Mysore, India.” I’m panicked inside.
She goes on. “We won’t do the full primary today, but we’ll build up to it later this week.”
I look down at my mat, and a memory returns to me. Fuck. I have been to an Ashtanga class before. Nearly six months ago, right after my dad entered hospice. My cousin Erin drove down from Cleveland to be with us that weekend, and she and Bethany and I had signed up for some mysterious early-morning yoga class that had turned out to be the most difficult, demanding, pretzel-twisting experience of my life. At some point during the class, the experienced (and, in my opinion, moderately arrogant) yogi practicing in front of me got into a headstand and balanced for a full minute before piking his way back onto the mat. I turned to look at my sister and cousin in bewilderment. What the hell kind of yoga is this? the look meant to convey. Who on earth can do this shit?
So, that was Ashtanga. I look back up at Carri, her tanned, muscular body ready to lead us in practice, her eyes trying to assess the confidence of her students.
OK, OK, I assure myself. You survived that class. You can survive this. And so it goes. I’ve come here to do hard things. No point in letting myself off the hook now.
* * *
It’s no secret that Western yoga seems to be the elixir of American women these days. I fully acknowledge the well-worn stereotype and the stretchy-pants commercialization of the practice, but I justify the reason behind it. It works. Something in this ancient practice, this daily melding of body and mind resonates squarely in my soul. In part, it’s the movement. For a baby who couldn’t walk until she was nearly two, I made up for it tenfold in the years of dancing that followed. For me, movement was a drug. I’d lose all sense of time plié-ing at the barre during ballet class or grinding in the middle of the gymnasium floor at a high school dance. To dance was to exist without any self-consciousness, to be forced into the present moment.