Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  I’m practicing contentment, which means that any time I think a bad thought I try to counter it with a good thought. For instance, today I thought, I would like to punch Louise. And then I thought, I love Louise.

  Ah, Louise.

  There are only six of us who will be here for the full retreat. This month we’ve got visitors stopping in for a week here, a week there. And so arrived Louise. She does Burning Man. She said it right away, like the statement was a secret decoder ring or something. She’s in her early forties but in that arrested Burner, I-still-think-I’m-twenty way. She sports a wiry red pixie cut and wears a lot of purple and semiprecious stones.

  Louise is a type-A yogini and—if you ask me—a bit show-offy about how hard she’s working. She complains endlessly about how hard everything is. Take yesterday, for instance. We were having lunch at Casa Luna, and the woman wouldn’t shut up. She’s an American who has lived in Australia and has a British husband. So she has an accent that makes no sense whatsoever.

  I was saying how I found guided meditation to be very relaxing, and she looked at me with wide blue eyes and said, “Relaxing, are you mad?” in her Madonna accent. And then she sat back in her chair and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Right!” she said. “So, let’s be honest, meditation is hard!”

  An endless monologue ensued about how difficult it was for her to concentrate for such a long time. “It’s too hard for me!” An eternity of her complaining about her brain interfering with her serenity. “It’s just that I was really precocious as a child, you know? I was quite keen on learning, so my mind has always been overly active.” She smiled with what looked like faux modesty at Jessica, who smiled back, because Jessica is an inherently kind and patient person. “In my family the joke was always that I was ‘intellectually hyperactive.’ ”

  I started laughing, the way you do in a straitjacket. When she looked at me I played it off as if she were just terribly amusing, a real comedian.

  “But meditation is so hard. It’s the first thing in my life I’m not good at, and it’s really starting to get to me.”

  “I think you need to relax,” I said. I passed her a dish called kangkung. “Have some more green leaves.”

  “But you know what’s even harder than meditation?” she said, leaning in and lowering her voice. She sounded really perturbed, like she was going to admit something she’d never admitted before. It had to be something good—I was hoping she would say something like, “I keep dreaming of Lou spanking me,” or “I secretly want to smoke behind the wantilan between classes.”

  But no. What’s harder than meditation?

  “Chanting.”

  I love Louise. I love Louise. I love Louise.

  Later

  Here’s the thing about yoga: people are farting all the time.

  I am not a squeamish person, not at all. I’ve changed diapers on young and old since I was in junior high. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy hanging out and farting with a bunch of people I don’t know. Generally speaking, I think farting is something to be enjoyed on your own time, in the privacy of your own home, especially if you’ve been on a diet of greens, rice, and soy for a week or more.

  But the problem is—farts are funny. So I simply can’t keep it together when my placid-faced yogamates start honking at each other like Ganesha the elephant god.

  You’d think Jason, being the only guy, would be the worst offender, but no. He’s the one who makes the funniest noises, little toots, like a princess. And when he does it, they don’t smell and his giggling about it makes everybody laugh. We have a very healthy relationship with Jason’s GI tract.

  It’s the girls who wage silent warfare, surprise attacks that could destroy whole villages if employed properly. They never acknowledge what they’ve done. It’s like they’ve all been holding in these farts for their entire lives, just waiting till my mat is next to theirs so they can unload a few decades’ worth of steam. But of the girls, no one compares to Louise.

  My good sweet God, I can’t handle it. Today she didn’t even make a sound, it was completely unfair, no warning at all. And suddenly I was drowning in a vat of rotten eggs and fried bananas. A sweet, sulfurous smell, as if her body had fermented the food in her stomach for years before deciding now, finally, to digest it.

  The force of her fart literally knocked me over. I didn’t even realize what had happened till I was on my hands and knees. Without thinking about it, I got into Child’s pose, as if I were tired and needed a rest. But what I was really doing was plugging my nose with my fingers so I could breathe through my mouth.

  I was trying to be content about it. I was trying to tell myself that in yoga people are more liberated, that they see farting as a sort of letting go of the past, that we’re all one Self, after all, so when one of us farts, all of us fart, and that I should just, you know, enjoy the wind on my face.

  But suddenly it hit me that I was trying to understand Louise’s fart. I was trying to relate to a fart. That’s when my diaphragm started to quiver, and then the giggle just sort of popped out of me in a rush of air. It was trouble laughter, the kind that you might not be able to stop and that always happens at the wrong time. It just rushed right out through my nose. But, oh my God, it’s so much worse, because my nose was plugged by my fingers so it came out in more of a snort, which, you know, sounds a lot like a fart. So suddenly my nose and lips were emitting all of these horrible fart sounds, snorty fart sounds which only made me laugh louder, because now I was sure that nothing worse could ever happen. Because now my yogamates, immersed as they were in their Camel poses, must have thought that my wet, snorty sounds corresponded to Louise’s smells.

  When I finally caught my breath and looked up from child’s pose, Lou was glaring at me. He came by my mat after class and said, “Suzanne. You are only the person you are RIGHT NOW.”

  That could be the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.

  Later—almost dawn

  This is the third time I’ve had this dream:

  I am in a white padded cell, on all fours, and I’m wearing white leather chaps and nothing else. I have clothespins sucking on my nipples like they are alive, like they are baby clothespin-sucklings. And I’m just hanging out like this when Lou enters the room, looking even taller than he is. I am aware of every muscle in his body, and he keeps saying, These are yoga muscles. Yoga muscles are better than other muscles because they are made out of GOD.

  And then he gets behind me and I slap my ass and say, Just do it, Lou. Do it. I’ve been bad. I’ve been so bad.

  Holy hell.

  March 5

  Louise left today, and everybody cried to see her go. I didn’t, but I did give her a warm hug that I actually meant. What is it about yoga that makes us all so stupidly emotional?

  Evening

  I’m feeling a little depressed today. Lou was being muy pantheistic in class this morning. Well, I guess he’s always pantheistic in the sense that he sees the universe as God and God as the universe—all that We are all One Self business—but today he was treating all religions as yoga. We were chanting when he switched from the Sanskrit Om Namah Shivaya to Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison. My mouth opened but the words wouldn’t come out.

  It pains me to admit this, but Louise was right: chanting is hard.

  I grew up in that Church, and I did not confirm in that Church, and I don’t want to be reminded of that Church.

  Ugh. If I’m only the person I am right now, then I am a person who does not fit in at yoga camp.

  It feels like it’s been months since I was home. I still don’t quite get my yogamates, nice as they are, and it’s been impossible to get any time with Indra. That’s really it. She’s kind and attentive in class, but if I approach her after class, she gets this distant look in her eyes, as if she has to protect herself from her students. During practice it’s clear that she favors me. Or, at least, I hope it is. I really want to be her favorite. That is unabashedly unyogic of me, but I
want to be the one student she looks back on and thinks, She is the reason I teach. She has made it all worthwhile. Indra spends more time helping me than the others, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m the least experienced. Well—I hope not.

  If all I’m here to do is be abused by Lou, chant Christian prayers, and endure the myriad bodily functions my yogamates insist on sharing with one another, then I’m a bigger fool than anyone could have guessed.

  Jonah is winding down his life in Seattle, meeting with our friends and my siblings for final drinks, final dinners. And I’m not there. I feel so disconnected from him, and I keep thinking about all the negative things. I’m not thinking about how sweet he is, how he cooks for me or brings me Swedish Fish because he thinks it’s funny that they give me such an incredible sugar high. No, I’m thinking about the fact that we watch too much television together, that I wish we would travel together, that I don’t know what it’ll be like living with him.

  My sister is alone in our apartment. We might never live in the same city again. We spend every night together. I can’t imagine how I’m going to live without her, and yet I’m wasting two of my last months before moving to New York here, among strangers.

  I keep picturing Seattle the last night I was there, driving through downtown, the streetlamps festooned with plastic, talismanic American flags. I had just come from my grandparents’ house, where I sat with Grandpa and watched All Creatures Great and Small on PBS before going down the hall to say good-bye to Gram.

  She was in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon. I sat down next to her on the raspberry-colored bedspread and told her I was there to say good-bye. Just then, the new home nurse came in, the one who took over the days I used to stay with Gram, and Gram said, “Mary, I’d like you to meet my granddaughter Suzie. She lives in New York with her boyfriend Jonah.”

  I said, “No, Gram, I’m just going to Bali for a couple of months. I haven’t moved yet.”

  She smiled, flashing her dimple at Mary, cocking her head in that flirtatious way she has. “Suzie’s come all the way from New York just to visit me.” She patted my hand.

  I smiled at Mary as she left the room—we’d already met a half-dozen times at least—and listened as Gram prattled on about a dream she’d had, which she clearly thought was real. I tried not to think about what she might be like in two months’ time. She changes dramatically on an almost weekly basis. I started to get antsy, trying to skirt the guilt stabbing at my stomach and throat. Her room, as always, smelled strongly of dusty rose potpourri and faintly of urine, and even though I’ve spent hours in there with her over the years and am quite used to it, I suddenly felt a strong need to leave.

  I kissed Gram good-bye and put my head on her chest while she chatted away about how her dog, Blitzen, had been in the room earlier, and how my father and his fraternity brothers had gotten the dachsund drunk on German beer last night, so his little legs kept giving out. I murmured to let her know I was listening, and gradually she slowed down, her words drifting off. I sat up to look at her. She was dozing, her mouth slightly open, exposing her small yellowing teeth. I rubbed the space between her eyebrows with my thumb, the way my father did when Gram was upset, and then I slid off the bed. I spent a few minutes tidying her room, putting her nightgown in the hamper, straightening the stack of notebooks on her bedside table. I tried not to think that this could be the last time, that I was trading time with my grandmother for an Indonesian adventure. As I walked through the doorway I heard the sheets rustling and then her voice, childlike and full of joy, exclaimed to the empty room, “I am so lucky.”

  It was like being hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.

  Where’s the positive thought to counter this one? How do you look at a deteriorating woman and practice contentment? I mean, if you’re not a sociopath?

  I haven’t looked at a newspaper since I’ve been here. Supposedly that’s what it takes to get enlightened, to live without fear: withdraw from the world, retreat from the people and things you’re attached to.

  But all I can think is, if the world were to end tomorrow, this is not where I would want to be. I wouldn’t want to be enlightened. I would want to be in Seattle, with my family and friends, toasting the apocalypse.

  March 7

  The last thing I expected at yoga camp was Christianity. For the past three days, Lou has been bringing that Catholic prayer, that prayer of my every Sunday for eighteen years, into the wantilan. This:

  Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison—which means “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

  Did I accidentally go to Bible camp?

  I’ve always had this little problem with my childhood faith: I can’t seem to believe in the Catholic God. I’d love to, but I just can’t, even if I find myself calling upon Him and occasionally praying to Him, and name-dropping Him and His pals, Jesus and Mary, as if they were celebrities I once had cocktails with.

  I go to church for family functions, and I always take part. I take Communion, I say the prayers. I still like the rituals.

  So I’m a bit surprised at my reaction to this little prayer. The second the words came out of Lou’s mouth, I felt like snickering. I literally felt my face and posture turn sour and teenaged, exactly the way I used to sit in the church pews when I was in high school.

  To be fair, I had a lot of reasons to snicker in church. Our pastor was a real bastard. Every week he looked down on us from the pulpit and told the women in the pews that we were impure, dirty, that we brought about man’s fall. I actually learned the word “bristle” because of him. “That priest makes me bristle,” my mom said on the drive home after Mass one Sunday when I was ten. That day our priest had begun his sermon by declaiming, “Sin was originated by a woman.”

  This was the same priest who laughed when I told him, at eight, that I wanted to be an altar boy. He laughed! So it was my brothers who were allowed to participate in those rituals, who rang the bells and wore the white robes and got to sit on the stage—or the altar, I should say—throughout mass.

  Kyrie Eleison. Lord have mercy. On women’s souls, for we are temptresses. Too dirty to stand on the altar, so close to the Host.

  As a kid, I was disappointed, and maybe a little convinced that I was bad. I had a terrible fear of hell, which seemed inevitable given all the bad thoughts I indulged in. But as a teenager, I was outraged. I was being condemned, in the twentieth century, by a myth? Eve eats an apple in a story, and you want me, sitting here in my blue jeans and Nirvana T-shirt, to feel bad about it? Fuck off, old man. That’s why I didn’t confirm in the faith.

  Turns out there were many Eves offering their apples to our pastor, and many of them were married. One was a teenaged girl. So our pastor is serving the Church no more.

  God be praised.

  ANYWAY, IT JUST doesn’t make sense, mixing a Christian prayer with yoga. Is this yet another 9/11 thing? It seems as if, in the six months since the attacks, everybody around me has been talking about God a lot more than I ever would have thought possible. God, and revenge.

  But as I understand it, yoga is about getting away from the ego and seeing that we are all one. I was raised to believe that God watches your every move, taking note of every single little thought, desire, every imaginary sin, as if you were the center of His universe. Doesn’t that reinforce your ego, your sense of being separate from others?

  I thought that what we were doing here was the exact opposite, not seeing ourselves as separate and special and spied upon twenty-four hours a day by a Taskmaster God, but rather as part of some big energetic force that isn’t judging us all the time and making us worry we’ll go to hell if we don’t atone, atone, atone! I mean, Christ. I’ve been doing penance (or at least some of it) my entire freaking life, and this Christian God probably doesn’t even exist! It’s just my inner knuckle-dragger that is too primitive to get that through her beetle-browed skull.

  I already feel guilty around Lou, as if he can see s
traight through my façade to the weakness at my core, just like the priests at home made me feel when I was a kid. As if it is a man’s job to judge me, to tell me if I’m good or bad, holy or impure. Listening to those words fall from Lou’s mouth, I want to burn this church down.

  Later

  Jessica says that I overthink things. She says, “Let go, and let God!”

  Funny—my cousin Gabe said the same thing in his first sermon as an ordained priest. Let go, and let God.

  Jessica said I overthink things because I’m a Scorpio, which made me split in two: one part of me wanted to say, Well, maybe Aquarians don’t think hard enough—if you did, you’d know all that astrology stuff is hogwash! While the other part of me wanted to sit her down and make her tell me everything else she knows about Scorpios.

  That, I believe, is the very definition of dueling egomaniacal urges.

  March 8

  Indra stopped by my mat after class this morning to “check in,” and I was so ecstatic—this was the first time she’s done that—that I blurted out, “What is up with the kyries?”

  Then I went off for about twenty minutes, I think. Like, bring me my soapbox, children, and let me debunk your God. I should have been in a college dorm room with a can of PBR and a joint.

  Indra sat there on my pink mat, listening. She nodded slowly, not to agree, exactly. More like she wanted me to keep talking. So I told her about sin being originated by a woman, I told her about how that prayer doesn’t work with yogic philosophy, and then I told her I thought we had all decided that God didn’t exist.