Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  When you get serious about yoga, when you do it every single day, when you live yoga, you start to feel like a god. You’re on a spiritual high all the time. Your body starts to submit to your will, which makes your brain feel great, and you start to see how you can change everything about yourself, from the way you jump from one negative thought to another, to the way you respond when your mother tells you what to do. You start to think that you can stop yourself from sweating, from complaining, that you have the wisdom to make communism work—and not just in theory.

  You feel like a god. You think like a god. People look at you, as you casually wrap your legs behind your head, not in a show-offy way, but just, you know, stretching, and they tell you you’re a god. You, who were lost, are now found, and you begin to believe that your example could lead others to seek themselves.

  That is when you become absolutely insufferable. I made a quick mental inventory of my yoga studio, which revealed dozens of them. The gold-star yogis. They make way too much eye contact, and they’ve done heart-opening workshops until they’ve achieved the personality of a raw oyster. And the egos on them, my God! Always making the right choices, always feeling really good about themselves and waking up at dawn. It’s enough to make you sick! When they control their minds and desires, they pat themselves on the backs, you know they do. They must! I certainly would.

  Oh shit, I thought. I certainly did. I put down my magazine. I was thirty years old, and I finally understood what had happened five years earlier when, for a while, one spiritual breakthrough in Bali turned me into this uniquely exasperating creature, the yogic egomaniac.

  After my kundalini experience, I felt so good, so complete, so united with my surroundings, how could I not feel like I had special insight into what yoga was? A weak human mind such as my own easily translates such satisfaction into a conviction that one is more evolved, more aware, more enlightened than those around her.

  It was astonishing: The most difficult time to maintain a healthy yogic outlook was when I thought I had a healthy yogic outlook. When it seemed that I really knew what I was doing, that I had it all figured out. That I had a true gift for yoga.

  Si comprehendis, non est Deus.

  I started collecting gold stars at a young age. In kindergarten, for reading. In piano lessons, for memorizing. The whole point of a gold star is to show it off to everybody else—especially to those who only earned silver stars. So how do you not become a total asshole if you have the discipline to get up early, stoke your agni, salute the sun with your perfect yoga body, and then go about your day being enlightened? How do you not start to congratulate yourself on being so expertly yogic, especially when you look around and see so many others flailing, cigarette in one hand, mudra in the other, chanting their petty desires and attachments to anyone who’ll listen?

  How do you not tell yourself that you are better than the rest? How do you overcome the urge to polish those gold stars until the act of polishing them becomes a meditation?

  I went back to yoga the next day looking for an answer. I let my leg shake. I rested a lot. And when it embarrassed me to be the cripple in the class, I reminded myself that humiliation was a part of my yoga practice. Or, wait, no. Humility. Humility was my practice. That’s what I told myself, and it helped, so I practiced it some more, and it helped some more. And soon I began to think that maybe my knee injury had led to a bigger breakthrough than any kundalini awakening ever could have. It might sound cheesy, but that whole notion of being here now? That’s what my knee injury taught me. My new mantra was Wherever my knee is, there I am. Instead of sending my mind out to compare myself to the über-yogis surrounding me, I trained my mind on my mantra, teaching myself to concentrate again. And when I started to think I was becoming really wise with my mantra, I changed it to I am a deep asshole.

  These days, at thirty-three, I sometimes practice in beginners’ classes, for two reasons. One: because I’m lazy. Two: because beginners’ classes are full of people who’ve never done yoga, people with injuries, and people like me, who have to take breaks from the upper-level classes whenever they start making us feel like we’re upper-level yogis.

  Not long after my kundalini breakthrough, Indra and Lou began teaching us how to be yoga teachers. Our retreat became less about meditation and more about pedagogy. Soon we would start anatomy classes, philosophy classes, and practice articulating the subtle kinesthesia of the yoga poses. What this meant was that on top of being the recipient of a kundalini breakthrough, I would have the added authority of acting as a teacher, which is but a few steps away from calling myself a guru.

  Indra and Lou gave us a talk about ego not long after we began to practice teaching. Since my knee injury, I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot. Lou told us that there’s a simple way to keep your ego in check as a teacher, and that’s to remember your own teachers.

  If a student comes to you and thanks you for all you’ve done for her, you must say, “Don’t thank me, thank my guru.”

  So, let’s say this student is really serious about finding somebody to thank for her spiritual progress. So she goes looking for your guru and when she finds him, she offers him her thanks. And your guru will listen to your student and respond, “Don’t thank me, thank my guru.”

  Each guru your student finds will say the same thing until she must find a time machine to travel back to the first yogi, meditating in some obscure cave in some ancient corner of India, and thank him. In this way, it is the practice, the teachings, that hold the power. The teacher is only a conduit.

  Well, if it were up to me, I would’ve stayed in my happy place forever, polishing my little gold star of a kundalini experience, bringing it out to show to guests who came to ask me for some wisdom, and when they thanked me for clarifying a yoga sutra or a breathing technique, I would happily receive their thanks and tell them, “Don’t thank me. But if you want to? Well, okay, sure. Thank me. Thank me again. Thank you for thanking me.” And then I’d send an e-mail to everyone I know, telling them about how I was thanked and that if they want to experience something that will make them thankful, to come and see me soon, the line is long and tickets are selling fast.

  Hey, in a competitive yoga world, you’ve gotta self-promote, right?

  Indra seemed to know this about me. That I wanted to be special. That I wanted to be the best. Even now I wonder if she saw it in me because she knew it in herself, or if she saw it in me because she couldn’t see it in herself.

  After that day in the wantilan, all I knew was that Indra was trying to keep me down. I didn’t see my ego swelling. I didn’t have the perspective of a higher bird. I was down on that low branch, looking at my teacher with a mind twisted into a yogic pretzel and a nervous worry in my gut.

  I worried and worried, and my stomach churned. I nursed myself with peppermint tea and still I worried until I thought I’d be sick. Indra was so cold, so distant, so critical. But really, she needn’t have worked so hard to punish my poor, swollen ego. She could have just sat back, relaxed, and allowed the gods to do it for her.

  April 7

  Until yesterday, I felt like a drop in the ocean of consciousness. As if I were just one cell in the Great Indivisible Self. Oneness. I was finally starting to get it. Union is real.

  But now I feel like I’m about to dip low. Like I need to defibrillate my kundalini shakti if I’m going to maintain this wondrous state. God, I can feel it slipping. A minute ago I was a drop in the ocean of consciousness, but now I can feel my droplet self swell into more of a pond or a small lake. Discrete, confined, full of myself. Separate.

  Watching Indra smile at Jessica and congratulate Lara on her beautiful Forward Bends, I feel like a boil on the backside of the Great and Indivisible Self. HERE I AM, I want to yell at Indra, WHAT ABOUT ME?

  Evening

  It only gets worse. Indra doesn’t compliment me on any poses. She doesn’t come by my mat to chat. She’s freezing me out. I stopped chanting the kyries again this morni
ng just to see if she would notice and come by, maybe ask me if I’m experiencing a resurgence of Catholic resentment, or if anything’s troubling me, but no. Nothing. She doesn’t care.

  Last night Jessica and I were sitting out on the veranda watching the moon rise when Jason and Lara came back from dinner, so giddy and inspired by their night that we invited them over for tea. They had been out to dinner with Indra and Lou. Just the four of them.

  “It was absolutely amazing,” Lara said as I poured hot water over her ginger tea. “So nice to get Indra and Lou alone like that.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. I must’ve sounded less than convincing, however, because Jason patted my back as I sat down and said, “Indra was being hard on you, Suzanne, but I’m sure she meant it with love.”

  Jessica sat up a little straighter and put her teacup down, her face flushed and indignant. “I think Indra was unfair,” she said. “In fact, I think she was projecting.”

  I swear to God, I could’ve kissed her. Though I also wanted to ask her if she had hit her head recently, because I never thought I’d hear Jessica say anything negative about our teachers. About any teachers, really.

  Lara glanced at me and then back at Jess. “I don’t know that she was projecting. I mean, she herself isn’t competitive. Maybe a little superior, but not competitive. But she did seem to be in a bit of a mood yesterday. So maybe she was just, I don’t know—”

  Jason leaned his head toward mine. “On her moon cycle?” he said. He raised his eyebrows, nodding mock-gravely, until Lara and I took the bait and punched him from both sides.

  “What does your boyfriend think of all this?” Lara asked, changing the subject. “Have you told him all about your kundalini rising?”

  I had to admit that I hadn’t, yet. “I told him something unexpected and strange happened in class, but I didn’t know how to go into it.” Lara and Jason exchanged glances, which made me feel worse. Like—tonight they were probably bonding with Indra and Lou about how nice it is to have a spiritual union with your mate, and here I can’t even tell my boyfriend about what I’m doing here, because I’m not sure he’s going to understand. But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I said, “I’m certainly not going to tell my parents—they would send me to get my brain scanned, no question.”

  Before they left, Jason told me not to worry. “You’re Indra’s pet, I’m sure she was just having a rotten day and needed to take it out on somebody.”

  I shouldn’t worry.

  That’s like telling the sun not to rise.

  April 8

  It’s raining so hard I’m considering building an ark. But I’m only letting Jessica, Jason, Lara, and Baerbel come with me. And Lou, I suppose. And Su and her family. And the chickens.

  April 9

  I was walking in silent meditation through town today and saw Lou standing around with several men in a pavilion off the main street in Campuhan. I walked slowly, my eyes fixed on my dhrishti. Dhrishti means “focal point.” But when it’s a dhrishti, it’s more spiritual. Heels, balls of feet, toes. Lou stood in the pavilion watching as a man at the top of a ladder fastened an enormous chicken-wire head atop an equally large chicken-wire body. Su told me that these huge sculptures eventually will be gigantic monsters called ooga-oogas. It’s tradition, I guess, to parade them through the town at the Balinese New Year, which is a couple of weeks away.

  My walk was going splendidly until I felt my neck grow hot. I turned my eyes back to the pavilion and saw Lou smiling at me. He wore a yellow sarong and a wrinkled linen shirt. I smiled back at him and sent him a message with my mind. Hello, I said. I am sending you this message with my mind. I could tell he received it, because he nodded with his eyes.

  Then my stomach did a few flip-flops. Lou’s been making me nervous again lately, God knows why. I thought I was over that.

  Later

  The thing that is most upsetting about Indra turning on me? I can’t concentrate in meditation. I keep wanting to show her how meditative I am, how I am a better student and a better yogini than she’s making me out to be. But the more I focus on showing her how well I’m meditating, the harder it is to meditate.

  I’m terrified that my kundalini experience was just a temporary high, and that I’ll never get it back.

  It hardly rained for weeks, but lately it’s been raining almost constantly. The sharp, earthy smell of animal dung has pervaded every corner of the grounds, from our house down to the pool. It wafts over from the family compound, where the pigpen floods every other day.

  I’m finding myself welcoming the storms and praying for them to stay, because so long as it rains, all I can smell is rain. And maybe dirt. Rain and dirt I can handle. But the minute the sun comes out and the world bakes dry again, a steam of pigshit, garbage, and diesel fumes overwhelms us on our walks to the wantilan or to town. Or just sitting on the veranda. It’s sort of an olfactory nightmare. I’m trying to rise above it. Higher bird and all that.

  The wantilan is also becoming an epicenter of animal feces. Those beautiful Javanese workers have finished harvesting the rice, and the empty fields around the wantilan have become home to about a million small brown ducks. I look out from my mat and see fields of dry tan bristles, as if each field were a god’s personal back scratcher. But when it rains, the fields flood with water and the young ducks get very excited, squawking and swimming in patterns like gulls in the sky, and pretty soon the wantilan smells like a duck’s toilet.

  Ah, nature. I didn’t know what I was missing in Seattle, where rain is just rain.

  April 10

  Lou’s been paying so much attention to me in class. Half the time I feel like I’m going to throw up from the nerves. I want to impress him, maybe that’s it. It could also be the dream I have every few nights. In this dream, I’m standing at the foot of my bed, and Lou is in front of me, shirtless and tan. He clasps my face in his hands, then trickles his fingers to my neckline, where he rips my tank top with shelf bra right down the middle. He falls to his knees, slowly lowering my Spandex yoga pants, and then strips them off my body like a matador brandishing a cape. Then he pushes me back on the bed and says, I see myself … in you.

  Later

  Indra’s on the warpath. She says I’m being competitive or looking outside myself in lots of poses. Not just my Forward Bend, but Downward Dog, Upward Dog, Cat, Cow, Happy Baby pose … I mean, Happy Baby pose, are you kidding me? Who the fuck is competitive in Happy Fucking Baby pose?

  Whatever. I’m trying not to think about it, because my stomach is so upset and I’m so unhappy. My kundalini experience may as well never have happened, that’s how unenlightened I feel. I don’t feel like I’m transcending my physical body, I feel like I’m getting trapped in it. My stomach feels like a salted slug. We’re leaving soon to go eat dinner, and I’m hoping some rice and leaves will settle me down.

  Evening

  Oh dear. It sounds like I have a tenant rearranging furniture in my guts. I—hold on.

  Later

  So, it looks like I—dammit.

  Later again

  I’m going to try to write this quickly, before I have to—

  Oh for the love of Jesus Mary and Joseph, I’ll be right back.

  Midnight

  Um, I have a problem. I’ve just swallowed about four thousand pounds of neem leaves and a charcoal pill, which should hopefully give me enough time to write this entry. Oh, it’s bad. So bad.

  JESSICA, LARA, AND I walked to the Bali Buddha tonight for dinner, and about halfway there I became aware of a powerful and alarming sensation in my gut, as if a family of elephants were having kundalini seizures in there.

  We were walking in single file, meditating our way through the transport guys and the hair braiders and shop owners, Jessica leading the way, then Lara. I took up the rear, not meditating so much as chanting. Breathe, I chanted, breathe. Please God, please God. Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Banyan Eleison, ANYONE Eleison.

  “Where is this place?” I
called to Jess.

  “Just a few more blocks, I swear!” she sang.

  I tried to mirror Jessica’s beautiful posture, her slightly wobbly feminine head, but the seething in my midsection was impossible to ignore. A waterfall of sweat tumbled down my back—not entirely unusual in this heat, but this sweat was cold. I knew what it was. It had nothing to do with Lou’s attention or Indra’s disapproval. It had nothing to do with anxiety. It had nothing to do with yoga.

  “Jessica, where is it?”

  “One more block, I promise!”

  “No,” I said. I walked as fast as I could to catch up with her. “Where is it? I’m going to run ahead, we’re not going fast enough.”

  I knew exactly what was happening to me and exactly what was going to happen to me if I didn’t make it to the bathroom in the next minute.

  Finally we were on the block. Jessica pointed to the restaurant. I threw my bag at her and ran. In my agitated state I sort of hopped-ran, actually, like a maimed dog. It wasn’t good. Holy Mother Mary, it wasn’t good at all.

  “There’s someone in there,” the woman behind the counter at the Bali Buddha said. “You’ll have to wait a minute.”

  I looked at her without really understanding what she had said. “Is there a men’s bathroom I could use?” I thought that all she’d have to do is take one look at me and get it, that I was about to cause a health hazard in her restaurant if she didn’t work with me.