I didn’t know where there was, but Jessica nodded vigorously. “We have so much to learn from them!” she said, beaming around the table.
Lara laughed. “Jessica,” she said, “you are the most excitable girl I’ve ever met.”
Jessica smiled. “But Indra is just so inspiring, and Lou—”
“Lou’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?” Lara said. “He’s a love.”
They went on about Lou’s gentle spirit, how tenderhearted he is, and I sat back, wondering who the hell they were talking about, and could I please have some of whatever they’ve been smoking?
Nobody’s afraid of Lou but me, it seems. How is it possible that I’m the only one who feels like Lou can see my smudged-up soul when he looks in my eyes? You’d think he was a Care Bear, the way they talk of his cuddly personality. I’m shocked.
“It’s so sad,” Lara was saying. “There aren’t any enlightened yoga teachers in London. They’re not the least bit enlightened! They really don’t get it at all. They’re all a lot of climbers who worship their celebrity students. So pretentious.”
“Really?” Jessica said.
“Oh yes. All they care about is what you wear and the bag you’re carrying and whether or not Madonna and Gwynnie have visited the studio, isn’t that right, Jason?”
Jason murmured his agreement, a pained expression on his face. His eyes were focused on his lap.
“Are you okay, Jason?” Jessica asked.
“He’s fine,” Lara said. Jason nodded. “He’s just been a little unwell. Anyway”—she pushed her water bottle over to Jason, who unscrewed the cap and drank—“Indra and Lou, you can tell they’re in it for the right reasons. Something about them—you can tell they’re living it, not just preaching it, isn’t that right, Jason?”
She reached across the table to tap her finger on his open palm. He had been sitting still with his eyes closed, which he now opened, and then his face broke into a grin.
“Sorry, ladies,” he said. “I’m a bit preoccupied with my netherparts at the moment. Nothing new. In Africa I could hardly fart, I was so backed up. These days it’s the opposite problem.”
I discovered I no longer wanted my tea.
Jason has been all over the world—Cambodia, Laos, and North Africa just in the past year alone—and he collects parasites like some tourists collect postcards. Apparently he’s unwell because he’s suffering from a particularly bad one right now that he can’t seem to shake. Before they left London, he went in for a series of tests and the doctors thought he had stomach cancer. But he had been into town early today to check his e-mail and got the good news that it was just a parasite.
“So, I thought you were all drinking pee in order to avoid parasites!” I said. I couldn’t help blurting this out—for all my years of acting classes, I’m a terrible liar, and I couldn’t go through this conversation pretending to be like my yogamates in this regard. “I hate to say it”—I didn’t, really—“but maybe this urine therapy thing is a New Age snake oil.”
“Oh no,” Jason said. “You’ve misunderstood me. It’s not that urine therapy failed me so much as I failed urine therapy.” Jessica and Lara cracked up knowingly. “I take breaks sometimes. You know, when you’re traveling it’s hard to keep up with any discipline, and some of the places I’ve been asked to piss in haven’t made me feel all that thirsty, if you know what I mean.”
“So it was probably during one of your breaks that you caught your parasite!” Jessica said.
I shuddered.
Lara looked at me pityingly. “So you’ve never even tried it?”
“Nope. Never even heard of it till now.”
Jason cut in, “But listen, here’s what Indra told me yesterday: she said that if it’s cancer, I shouldn’t go home. She said I should go on a urine fast instead. She said all I’d have to do is drink nothing but my own urine for eight days, and by the end of that”—he snapped his fingers—“gone. Just like that.”
Jessica became very enthusiastic about this. “You should do it anyway, Jason,” she said. “You won’t believe how amazing you’ll feel afterwards!” She beamed at Jason, her eyes bright with the possibility. She made a tumbling gesture with her arms. “Cycle it through,” she said.
This passion for cycles is something I’m learning about Jessica. She loves cycles. Everything is about cycles of the moon, cycles of life, cycles of the soul. So even her pissdrinking is cyclical. Or, rather, re-cyclical. She doesn’t just drink her pee first thing every morning like everybody else at yoga camp. No. She actually recycles it continuously throughout her day. She starts every day standing in the shower to pee into her gigantic Starbucks coffee mug. She takes little nips from that first batch throughout the morning before class. And then, when next she feels the call of nature, she repeats the process. So she is constantly recycling her pee. She doesn’t flush a drop.
“I’m so glad it’s just a parasite,” I said. Lara and Jessica looked at me sadly. I am a disappointment to them. “Sorry, guys,” I said, “I guess I’m just sort of chickenshit when it comes to consuming my own bodily fluids. I don’t like drinking blood, either.”
But it turns out that Indra’s treatment for a parasite is almost identical to the treatment for cancer. Only difference is that he can eat fruits and vegetables.
March 2
I’m sitting at the table on the veranda, waiting for Jessica to finish her morning Starbucks mugeus nauseous so we can walk to class. Honestly? I’d rather stay home. But I’m practicing contentment. I’m just waiting for it to kick in.
I feel like a lump of flesh in class. Nothing works right. I’m not as strong or as flexible as my yogamates, I have no muscle tone, I shake in every standing posture. I look at Lara and Jason’s arms holding their bodies up in handstand and feel so inferior, like some pale, wheezing, consumptive character out of a nineteenth-century novel.
Lou came over to my mat yesterday and you’d think I was shaking on purpose, he was so affronted.
“Watch the knee,” he said. “Watch it.”
So I looked at it and I watched it and I couldn’t see anything wrong.
“Your knee!” Lou said. He grabbed my knee and adjusted it. “It should always be at a ninety-degree angle in this pose. Yours is more like forty-five degrees, and it’s turning inward, and it’s because you aren’t supporting yourself.”
I was panting. “I don’t have any muscles, Lou.”
“Well, you’ll never build any like that.”
When I rested in Child’s pose a few minutes later BECAUSE I WAS DYING OF TIREDNESS, Lou stopped by my mat and said, “Take a few breaths and get back in the pose.”
What is this, the army?
THERE IS ONE posture I excel at, however: Corpse pose. It’s my favorite. I love any exercise that involves lying on my back pretending to be dead. Lou says I have a particular knack for it. Har-har.
We were lying in Corpse pose today when I noticed a sound collecting in my ears as I drifted in and out of focus. It was a buzzing sound, coming from the rice fields, like someone doing wheelies on a Harley-Davidson. It took me a minute to realize it was a chainsaw.
Lou asked us to lift ourselves out of Corpse so that Indra could lead us in guided meditation. We rose from the dead to meditate, and I couldn’t help but look around to see where the sound was coming from.
“Eyes closed, my plant,” Indra said, winking. I quickly closed my eyes and tried to look meditative. Indra’s meditation began with the usual business about focusing on the breath, and then after a few minutes of heart listening and all the usual stuff, she said something that I believe was just for me. She said, “Sometimes during meditation it’s easy to become distracted by noises and movement happening around you.”
I almost laughed, because just then the chainsaw roared, and then roared again at a higher pitch as if to say, Distracted? By this?
She asked us to imagine that the chainsaw wasn’t coming from outside the wantilan, but was actually emanating from dee
p within our own bodies.
The chainsaw sounded like it was right outside the wantilan. I was thinking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre now, and that sound definitely wasn’t coming from within. It was coming from Leatherface. I half listened to Indra as she gently spoke about our inability to control our surroundings—“We can rent the wantilan, but we can’t control the Balinese who need to build more bungalows, we can’t control the Tiger Economy!”—but that we could control our response to it, if we discipline our minds.
“So, just for a moment, let’s imagine that the chainsaw isn’t some worker sawing a piece of wood. It’s you, sawing away at your … nagging thoughts … your regrets, your fears.
“That incredibly distracting noise is, in fact, your own inner hand, sculpting your energy, cleaning away the rough branches of attachment that are covering your chakras, blocking their light and suffocating your potential for transcendence.”
Honestly? I couldn’t fathom what she was talking about. So I imagined Leatherface crouching on the floor of my inner landscape (which, inexplicably, resembled a Russian prison cell), sawing away at the version of me who was afraid of the future and ashamed of her past. My fearful doppelgänger.
“And as your chakras are, one by one, released from the wood of attachment and the branches of indecision and dysfunction, you feel lighter …”
Leatherface was chopping off my doppelgänger’s arms and legs.
“You feel happier, brighter …”
My doppelgänger’s severed limbs flopped about on the floor of my Russian inner cell. Her stumps gushed cranberry-red blood.
“You feel closer to oneness with the indivisible unity of life, the great Self …”
Suddenly another version of me stepped into the cell. Brave, pissed off, and carrying a semiautomatic weapon: my kick-ass triplegänger. She pointed the gun at Leatherface, who snarled through beef-jerky lips dripping with saliva, and revved his chainsaw in her direction.
You want some of this, you sick bastard? My triplegänger asked him, waving her gun. You want a taste of this? And just as Leatherface started toward her, chainsaw raised, my triplegänger doused him in a stream of bullets. I watched as Leatherface flew backward in slow motion as the bullets entered his body, then shook and twisted and flopped to the ground, where he convulsed a few times before lying motionless. His chainsaw kept revving, reverberating against the cold cement walls of the gulag cell as if in mourning.
Then I remembered my chakras. I pictured my triplegänger claiming the still-revving chainsaw and hacking away the branches and stuff surrounding each chakra. I know that chakras are energy centers, but I couldn’t remember how many I had or where they were in my body, so my triplegänger was forced to saw through what appeared to be a half-dozen multicolored lightbulbs covered in leaves.
I got back to my doppelgänger. She wasn’t dead yet. And even though, technically, she was the one who was holding me back, I watched as my triplegänger picked up her limbs and reattached them to my doppelgänger’s body with a soldering iron she happened to have strapped to her belt. Then she sent her on her way with a wink and a spank to the derriere.
“Now take a deep breath,” Indra said. “Hold it, release. Good. And now, breathe as if you are alive.”
March 3
So, I’ve established that I’m really good at Corpse pose. But I’m really bad at walking meditation.
This morning, for instance, Jessica and I took a walk through the village, single file. Jessica was showing me how she does her walking meditation so I could do my own. The idea is to move through space without becoming distracted or desirous. To focus on the horizon, living in each footstep. You step only for this one step, not to reach any goal.
White people all over the village are practicing their walking meditation. It’s sort of like Dawn of the Yogic Dead around here. Except that, if we were zombies, we’d be looking for human flesh to eat. But since we’re not, we’re just looking to—um. Shoot, I guess we’re just looking to meditate while we walk? I don’t know, I’m new here. And like I said, I’m really bad at this.
At first, walking through the rice paddies, I thought, No problem. I’ll just keep my eyes focused ahead, and let this green sea flow along in my peripheral vision.
But soon we headed back into the village, and I began to wonder how anybody would ever want to transcend such a place. The day was clear and bright. Hot, but not hellishly so. Creamy white frangipani blossoms literally filled the air; they drifted on soft breezes and landed in the path in front of us as if they’d been strewn there by invisible flower girls. The air was full of their sweet perfume. I instantly started to think about how I wanted my entire apartment to smell like that. And I wondered if it came in oil form, and if so, if I could buy some to take home for all my girlfriends.
Or soaps! People love soaps!
A few paces ahead, Jessica lifted and dropped her shoulders and let out a long, melodious sigh. I refocused my gaze and went back to living in my footsteps. That is, until we passed Balinese women dressed in sarongs of yellow and white, their lacy tops stretched over camisoles or bras and tied at the waist with thick silk sashes. On their heads they balanced large square offering boxes made from palm fronds, their lids stacked high with fruit and flowers. The scent of cooked chicken wafted from the boxes, and it occurred to me that all I really wanted in life was some chicken. Oh, chicken! Oh, delicious meat!
We slowed at the bottom of a hill and looked down into a deep ravine. Its dimples and paths were clogged with garbage, some of it on fire. The frangipani and chicken were smothered by the pungent reek of burning garbage and decomposing leaves. I could hear a river down there somewhere, but I couldn’t make it out through all the trash. The path inclined in front of us, deep grooves on either side where mopeds churn up the dirt countless times a day.
Everywhere I looked, life was being lived differently than at home. I couldn’t help but feel excited by so much possibility. I drank it in, I wanted to become one with it, I wanted to own every second of it, every piece of it.
The wet sheen of the banana leaves, the sweetish smell of jungle rot, the reek of animal dung, the blossoms on the road, the women who passed me, smelling of jasmine oil and incense and a god’s supper.
Who in her right mind would want to transcend any of this?
Later
I’ve been imagining Jonah and myself on one of those mopeds, scooting around town, having parties for our friends at the mini-mansion. I thought that maybe I’d rather stay here and bring Jonah out than go to New York. Because there are three things New York doesn’t have:
One: frangipani blossoms
Two: gamelan music every night
Three: women who carry roast chickens on their heads.
Oh, and rent here is five dollars a day. I don’t think we’ll find anything like that in New York.
I e-mailed Jonah something to this effect, and he responded right away, laughing it off. But part of me is serious. Jonah says I need to let him get through one move at a time.
March 4
Jalaneti: the art of cleaning snot out of your nose. Having clean nostrils is a big thing around here, so I started my very own jalaneti practice this morning. Honestly, I barely survived.
Jason and Lara are very sweet, like older siblings to Jessica and me, and they offered to teach me. They set me up in their bathroom, which is practically identical to ours, where they had already filled a tiny white plastic teapot with salt water. They said a funny little blessing over the pot (“let Suzanne’s nose know what is known by our noses, Namaste”) and then watched, calm and expectant, like godparents at my baptism, as I took the neti pot from Lara’s hands and acted like I knew what I was doing.
But I’m such a klutz. I couldn’t help but laugh at Jason, who started chanting, “Clean that nose, clean that nose,” just as I slid the spout in one nostril and tilted my head to the side. And apparently I laugh through my nose, because the suction from my laughter acted like a vacuum on t
he tiny teapot, the contents of which I snorted up like an aardvark. The salt water went straight up to my third eye, where I was treated to a flash memory of being dunked in the pool by my older brother. I started sputtering and laughing and crying all at once. Lara pressed a towel to my nose. “Breathe,” she said, giggling. Jason was laughing so hard he had to sit on the edge of the bathtub.
“Tha—that—” He took a deep breath and wiped his eyes, still laughing. “That’s what happens to everybody the first time they do it.” He sighed and then started giggling again. “But I’ve never seen anyone spray so much water out their nose as you just did.”
I’m thinking that maybe my nose is fine the way it is.
Now I’m sitting here with a spongy nag in my sinuses. My head is waterlogged. And I’m thinking, this is why we must transcend our physical bodies. Because a body is always going to piss you off.
Later
I’m lying on the bed between classes, slathered in tingly arnica gel and Tiger Balm. Every muscle in my body resents me today. When I sit down I hum with pain, like my grandfather. I wish Jonah were here, and that he’d rub my shoulders. Though I suppose I’m being unrealistic. Not about my desire for Jonah to be here, but about him being willing to rub my shoulders. I’m kind of an affection whore—it drives Jonah crazy. But what can I do? I was raised in a family of affection whores. In my family you can’t leave a party without hugging everybody at least three times. And that’s even if we’re going to see each other again the next day.
Anyway, it’s only been a week and I’m already even more affection-starved than normal.
I am doing everything I can to be a good yogi. I’m reading my sacred texts. Well—I’m reading The Autobiography of a Yogi, at least, because it’s got lots of great Hindu saints in it who float through the air and can breathe underground. I would like to be able to do both of these things. I love Yogananda, the author. He’s funny and chubby and loves to eat sweets. I wish he were here. I think he’d understand why my walking meditation is going so poorly. Also, he looks pretty snuggly.
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