Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  Guess what else? I’m engaging it right now.

  Later

  Lou says that there are steps that precede meditation. First you withdraw from your senses by closing your eyes. Next you concentrate on a single image or mantra. Once you can concentrate, you can begin to meditate.

  But even when you’re meditating, there are levels as well. You don’t go directly into a deep meditation. You sort of find deeper levels as you go.

  It feels like sinking, sometimes. I focus and then I feel like I slip down a rabbit hole. I always come back up almost immediately, because it feels a little like I’m going into a lucid dream.

  Or maybe I’m just hungry and about to pass out. I’m turning into a vegetable, I’ve eaten so many. I’m a green leaf. I’m a papaya.

  March 20

  I can’t stop looking at Marcy’s hands. Marcy’s from the Bay Area, and she’s probably my mother’s age. Definitely a baby boomer rich former hippie type—lots of gold bracelets and a big ol’ diamond ring, and the kind of language that people acquire after years and years of New Age therapy. She told me the other day, while running her fingers through her thick white hair, that she didn’t want to be “ageist,” but that I would understand the importance of engaging the mulabanda in every pose after I’d had some kids. “My sexual health is vital to my sense of self, especially at my age, when it’s easy to give in to fear-patterning about death and aging. Engaging the mulabanda in practice frees me up to not have to do my Kegels every day. I really don’t want to be ageist, but you couldn’t possibly understand the importance of a tight womanplace at your age.”

  And you know, she’s right. Frankly I don’t think about a thing called womanplace ever, if I can help it. Womanplace is even more embarrassing to say than yoni.

  Marcy’s nice, though, even if she is a little annoying with all that ageist talk. But her hands just make me want to weep. Today at lunch I couldn’t stop looking at them, resting one on top of the other just at the lip of the white tablecloth. She was chatting with Lara, and she was laughing, but her hands looked forlorn. Around her rings her fingers are dry and raw, as if she washes her hands too often. The backs of her hands are just beginning to show sunspots, or liver spots, whatever those big brownish spots are called, and the skin is starting to cave at the knuckles and around her tendons and veins.

  Marcy’s hands are the last hands one wears before one is the owner of old hands.

  She’s my mother’s age.

  The thought of my parents being old makes me want to die before them, so I won’t have to see it.

  When I think of being my mother’s age, I feel so tired. What if nothing changes? What if I’m fifty-five and still feel like I haven’t started to live yet?

  I’m afraid of losing everything. Of life being over before I can get a grip on it. I can’t die before I understand why I’m here, what it means; before I have at least one moment of living my life in a way that is both authentic and connected.

  March 21

  I’ve been practicing this mantra Baerbel told me about. We were sitting on her veranda a few days ago—she lives down by the pool, closer to the road—and she was rolling around on a giant blue exercise ball, her table overflowing with books. She’s been talking me through the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, her reading glasses propped on her nose, her short gray hair messy as if some friendly person had just tousled it.

  Baerbel reminds me of a female Jesuit; warm, learned, with a wicked sense of humor. I was feeling kind of down, thinking about Gram and Noadhi’s dad. She told me that the Buddhists try to accept death in everyone and everything. So they say, I am of the nature to die. All of my loved ones are of the nature to die.

  It reminds me of Indra’s instructions to practice death.

  So I went through the rounds: I am of the nature to die, my parents are of the nature to die, my siblings are of the nature to die. Jonah is of the nature to die.

  And if I can be honest? My God, I will have to burn this book before I leave Bali. When I thought about Jonah dying, I felt sort of relieved. Which is so horrible it makes me want to kill myself. But it’s not a wish, of course. My God, no. No, it’s a question: What would I do if I were unattached?

  For a second, I was going to write: I would read the Sailor’s book. But when I think of actually doing that, I get kind of scared. I don’t trust myself to read it, somehow, though I realize that might be a bit absurd. It’s only a book.

  Oh, but there’s no such thing. When a person gives you a book to read, he’s asking you to look into his soul. And I think it would be a bad idea for me to see any more of the Sailor’s soul than I already have. And I wonder now—is it because I’m afraid that it won’t match up with my fantasy of him? Or because I’m afraid it will?

  But even as I write that, I notice something: nothing. You know, I think I may have burned myself out on this story. I’ve used it up. I haven’t been thinking about the Sailor all that much lately, but today I’m antsy and a bit bored and I think I’m trying to give myself a charge from a dead battery. It’s so much more fun to think about romance than it is to think about death. I told Jessica this, just now, and she said, “God gave you the Sailor to remind you to give that romance to Jonah! He’s giving you a lesson in the cycles of love. It’s time for you and Jonah to have a renewal!”

  That made me feel great until I started thinking about that chant again. Jonah is of the nature to die. If I were still in the clutches of the Sailor story, my relief would make sense. But now I keep thinking, What if we were to get married and then he died when I was in my forties or so? Then I could still do something different with my life before I die! I would be free. God, what an awful thought to have about someone you love. Sounds like the start of a Hitchcock film.

  I am of the nature to die.

  God. Buddhism is depressing.

  March 22

  Baerbel told me that she lives in Berlin, and her husband lives in the countryside an hour outside of Berlin. She spends the week on her own in the city, and then takes the train to the country to be a wife every weekend. I am so impressed by this schedule I can’t stop thinking about it.

  She must have noticed that I was impressed, because she said, “And so what? I have been a wife since I was young. He has been a husband since he was young. What a boring way to go out of life, being what you’ve always been. So I get five days a week to be myself now.”

  Later

  If Jonah would go for it, I would totally do what Baerbel and her husband do. Just weekends. Five days a week to do whatever I want!

  I wonder if she can do whatever she wants.

  March 23

  It’s after 1 a.m. and I have just come home from a bar. My clothes smell of cigarettes. How strange that that is strange!

  Tonight we went to a club called the Jazz Café, a crowded, overpriced jazz club in a dingy part of Ubud I hadn’t been to before tonight. It’s a bit off the beaten track. There are fewer tourist spots along the street, no transport guys or tchotchke shops. Fewer smiling faces. The street was lit with sputtering street lamps. Broken palm fronds and piles of garbage burned in the middle of the street.

  Before we went in, Jason and I paused in front of a tiny pedestal altar at the corner of the gate. It looked like an altar and a nest; stringy patches of thatch burst from its center, where a pile of offerings was laid on a stone ledge. Next to it, a demon guardian carved into the stone wall stuck its tongue out at us. A dog howled, and then another, and then as many as eight mottled and flea-bitten mutts ran toward us from across the street, turning just before they reached us and running away again.

  I smelled a sweet, earthy smell as we walked into the club. I raised my eyebrows at Jason. “Leyaks?” I said.

  He sniffed the air dramatically. “Beer, I think.”

  The Jazz Café appears to attract every tourist under fifty in the area. It looks like most Balinese structures, open, airy, lit mostly by lanterns and candles on the walls and tables. Jason reserve
d us a bale, a raised platform with a canopy, where we sat at low tables littered with plastic water bottles, candles, and stone vases full of jasmine and frangipani blossoms. We sat on square silk pillows of green and gold and drank virgin cocktails out of pastel-colored martini glasses.

  From our perch on the bale the entire club sprawled out in front of us. Behind us a dark courtyard full of plants and dotted with small rice-paper lanterns squirmed with couples. Their cigarette tips glowed like animals’ eyes. I looked up, leaning back until I could see beyond the canopy to where the full moon lit up the sky. Then I sat forward again, to check out the action at the bar, the restless activity on the dance floor, and the band—a cover band playing near-perfect imitations of Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.

  It was so strange—I felt shy around my yogamates, being away from the wantilan and in what normally would be familiar territory. But this club seemed to bring out a new shyness in all of us, not just me. We were an island of sobriety in a sea of drunkenness. My yogamates and I sipped our fruit drinks quietly, tapped our fingers against the tables, and eyed the crowd as if we weren’t sure how to reintegrate into normal society. I’ve only been away from home a month, and yet I feel changed in some fundamental way. I don’t know how to be myself in a bar anymore. I wanted to make eye contact with everyone who passed me by. Maybe it’s all the deep breathing I’ve been doing, or the meditating, but I felt too open to be there. There’s a certain wildness to this state of being that feels very protected in the wantilan, but out in the world it seems almost dangerous, like I’m seeing too much.

  We all had our tricks. Jason hid behind a magazine—one of those spiritual tourism rags in which everyone interviewed takes long pauses before speaking with great wisdom. He’d brought it with him in his cloth satchel, and now he sat quietly, occasionally lifting his eyes to survey the band before returning to his reading. Jessica and Lara were sitting on my other side, speaking quietly about the differences between Satchidananda’s and Desikachar’s interpretations of the Sutras. I faked comfort by taking pictures. I needed a filter for my eyes. It was so much easier to stare at people through a lens.

  Jessica was the one who finally stood up and made everybody dance. She loves to dance; she’s part of some ecstatic dancing group at home called Five Rhythms, where you dance at five different rhythms until you hit some sort of ecstatic, meditative state. But it’s funny—watching her on the dance floor, she wasn’t the ethereal hippie dancer I assumed she’d be. What she does is more hip-hop than Hemp Fest. Her moves are fast and precise and actually pretty badass.

  Soon all of my yogamates were on the dance floor, but I held back for a while, saying someone needed to guard our stuff.

  I loved being alone. I have so few moments to really be alone here, unless we’re meditating, I guess. But I’ve noticed something. I’ve learned how to find my solitude while walking with Jessica to and from town. I’ve found it in class. By the twentieth Sun Salutation I usually forget that there are people around me. And Jessica is so easy to live with. I can do things—writing, stretching, meditating, thinking—exactly as I would do them at home, by myself, and only occasionally notice that Jessica is just a foot or two away. I mean, I’m not about to start douching in front of her or anything—I’m not there yet—but I am getting comfortable in this life.

  Actually, being around yogis is not all that different from being around actors. Before rehearsals, actors do things normal people would find very strange—we pant like dogs, we assume bizarre stretches, we chant tongue twisters. Another actor will never think you’re weird if you’re lying on your back in the middle of a room, buzzing your lips like a bee.

  I’m starting to get that about my yogamates. They’re not as different as I thought they were.

  Jessica gestured to me from the dance floor to come join them, but I pretended not to notice. Instead I lifted the camera to hide my face. I took a few pictures of my spinning, gyrating yogamates—or the fuzzy shapes I believed to be my yogamates. Then, because I’m stuck on this one mantra, I thought, My yogamates are of the nature to die. I am of the nature to die. And then I pointed my camera around the room.

  The place had filled up since we arrived. I watched the club through the lens of my camera. One moment the frame was filled by long-haired Balinese hipsters, then by scoping European men flanked by chic, weathered-looking Asian women. The men reclined on pillows in wrinkled linen pants and shirts, smoking, sweating, sunburned. In the camera’s view they looked so colonial, so European, lounging as if they owned the place.

  I pointed the camera at the tables along the dance floor. There, cocky, short-haired white guys flirted with Indonesian women. Beachy-blonde middle-aged white women with extravagant breasts sat at tables overflowing with drinks and ashtrays, with young, baby-faced Balinese boys at their sides. The bar was packed with shiny-shirted, tight-trousered beautiful people who licked their lips at each other as they flipped open and shut their cell phones. Eyes flitted about the room, following the waitresses as they wove through swaths of drunken dancers, their spines long, trays of cocktails balanced on their heads, a few graceful fingertips holding them in place. I pictured these women returning home to their family compounds and waking up in the morning to prepare the same offerings Su makes each day for the temples and the grounds. The idea of these women appeasing the spirits of the island by day didn’t seem a far stretch from their work by night as they handed out shots of liquor and boxes of cigarettes to the Europeans, Australians, and Americans in the club.

  As the scene became more animated, it was difficult to capture anything with the camera, so I stared, the camera lifted only halfway to my eye. The music was louder than before. I looked at all the people.

  Something shifted in me, then. I looked at all the people, with my own eyes, unfiltered. I had a thought that this might be all there is. And I loved it. I loved the waitresses’ gliding movements, I loved the men looking at the women and the women looking at the men. I loved the writhing bodies on the dance floor.

  I am of the nature to die?

  No. I am of the nature to live!

  I leaned back and looked just beyond the fluttering edge of the canopy to see the sky. The moon was perfectly round and perfectly white. A crowd jostled the bale and I thought about joining my yogamates on the dance floor. I leaned back farther, blinking at the moon, and I thought that I would like to stretch the moon open like a hole in dark fabric, pull the sky over my head, and see for myself what lay beyond.

  March 24

  I don’t know how to describe what happened today.

  Jessica and I are on the veranda. It’s sunset. The gamelan music is playing. I’m going to try to re-create my day in these pages, although part of me wants to just let it go, to stay in this present moment with the sunset and the music and Su down below, making an evening offering to the temple—something I’ve never seen her do before.

  But I want to remember this.

  Today we had already been through several rounds of bastrika when Lou asked us to inhale, then exhale all the air out. Then he told us to engage the mulabanda. So I did, and in that moment the wantilan, my yogamates, and the surrounding fields fell away and I found myself driving a car toward a light that was white, like the moon. But I wasn’t driving toward it so much as in it. The car was a convertible, and I was in a cylinder of white light, as if I were inside a vein of white lightning. Two androgynous people I recognized as family were in the backseat of the car, and they both wore Dorothy Hamill haircuts. They laughed at each other in the backseat, and their laughter was silver and tinkling, falling from their mouths to the floor in glistening drops of mercury.

  The light brightened, and I felt, then heard, the thrum of murmuring voices, and I thought that I had fallen asleep during Corpse pose and had had a wonderful dream—the kind of dream you don’t want to wake up from. I wanted to go back to dreaming, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be asleep, I was supposed to be sitting up to meditate.

 
One voice was trapped in a spiral, loud, then soft, then louder and louder. It’s okay, the voice said. I’ve been here before. I felt as if this voice were hitting me in the face, it was so loud. Finally, the voice took shape in my mind and I recognized the face that went with it.

  It was Indra. Her face was a few inches from my own. I was lying in her lap. Indra’s hand was over my hand, which was pressed against my heart. Every time she spoke, a wave of air splashed against my face. I looked around without moving my head, and could make out my yogamates, in pairs, massaging one another’s feet. Lara was crying. So was Jessica.

  I must’ve said something, because Indra told me not to speak yet. She handed me a blue plastic cup and told me to drink.

  I lifted my head just enough to take a sip from the cup, but it was hard to swallow because I couldn’t stop smiling. Look at them, I thought. My beautiful friends, rubbing each other’s feet. I smiled at Lara, hoping she understood me. She cried harder.

  I started to laugh and then I knew why some laughter is compared to a bubbling brook; I wanted to drink my laughter, it was so clean and clear. How amazing! I thought. How perfect and amazing we all are!

  Lou was in front of me suddenly, and his hand was on my leg. I smiled at him, too. He looked relaxed but inquisitive. He murmured, “How do you feel?” and I just smiled. I love you, I thought.

  His face brightened like I’d never seen it. Like he really could read my mind. He put his hand on Indra’s, which was still on mine, and with his other hand he brushed a few hairs out of my eyes. “Suzanne,” he said, “I believe you may have had a kundalini rising.”

  I felt Indra’s arms tense. “Let her drink her water, Lou.”

  “How do you feel?” he said.

  There were no words. “Good,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling at him. I’d never noticed how luminous his eyes were. “What’s a kundalini rising?”