6. Nobody’s Child
Indeed, we bitched nearly everybody at the seminar. We decided that … these professionally religious people were hypocrites, posers, windbags. From our decision, a convenient conclusion could be drawn: if they weren’t acting up to their professed principles, then we needn’t act up to ours.
—CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD,
My Guru and His Disciple
At twenty-eight, I took to drinking a tea I bought at a popular yoga studio in Manhattan. After sneezing my way through a class, the teacher—a stunning, raven-haired actress—guided me into the studio boutique and advised me to purchase her favorite brand of neti pot, a tub of eucalyptus salts for my bath, and a box of tea that tasted like a roomful of hippies. I don’t know if it boosted my immune system or not, but I enjoyed the tea because each tea bag came with a spiritual aphorism printed on its white paper tag. My favorite was this one:
What is yoga? When you open yourself up and let the universe come in you.
Now, forgive my filthy mind, but doesn’t that seem just a little bit slutty?
That’s how I felt the day Jonah moved to New York and I lost my shit in the wantilan. I felt like a spiritual slut. Like I had spent many weeks becoming one of those wet-eyed, overly emotional seekers who are forever riding a spiritual roller coaster that, from another angle, could look like emotional masturbation. I looked back at the weeks before and couldn’t believe myself: Where was my skepticism? Where was my reason? Would I become one of those New Age wanderers who traveled from workshop to ashram to sweat lodge, always looking for the next spiritual fix, the next kundalini awakening, the next catharsis?
If I needed to live in a constant state of epiphany, I would never be strong enough for life outside the retreat.
Life outside the retreat. I hadn’t thought about my real life, or the very real changes ahead of me, in weeks. It was astonishing to hear my home name and feel pushed out of the safe nest of my retreat and back into the real world—or, rather, the illusory world of the lower bird, where my attachments and ego and desires lived and breathed and expected things of me. How bewildering, to look back at so many weeks of retreat behind me, only to turn forward and see the same visions of loss and death that made me retreat from the world in the first place.
Indra thought it was good for me. After class she sat with me and hugged and petted me while I cried some more. She was so kind. Her eyes were so concerned. By the time I stopped crying, she’d come up with an idea: She wanted to keep going with this line of therapy. She wanted to keep calling me Suzie in order to help me work through my fears about leaving home.
I knew that if I agreed, we’d have lots of conversations in the remaining weeks, that she’d check in with me to see how I was doing—if, by using my nickname, she eroded its power over me. This would be a chance to have Indra all to myself. To win her attention, her approval, her love. This would give me the right to request time alone with her to really talk about our lives, our paths, our beliefs. And who knows? Maybe it could lead me to that God I was sensing, to overcoming my brain’s need to disprove everything.
She could help me prepare for my future with Jonah.
I considered all of this very quickly, with Indra’s warm brown eyes looking at me as sweetly and expectantly as they did when I first came to her for advice. And then, as kindly as I possibly could, I quoted Whitney Houston: Hell to the No.
She was disappointed. I could see it in her face. Disappointed and surprised. She nodded, saying, “It’s up to you, of course, but …” The funny thing was, I didn’t mind her disappointment. I almost liked it.
This was inevitable, you see. We had been on retreat for weeks. When you’re doing yoga eight hours a day, days are like weeks, and weeks are like months. So basically I had been on retreat for like fifteen years. I was a teenager in retreat land. I was ready to rebel. Somehow, along the winding path from one week to the next, Indra and Lou had changed from idols to surrogate parents insisting that I see everything the way they did, that I eat the foods they eat, drink the bodily fluids they drink, and go to church, or the wantilan, whenever they said I was supposed to be there.
It’s always the mother who gets it worst from her teenage daughters. Lou was beyond reproach, I thought, but when I looked at Indra I saw a woman who wanted me to grow up and be like her. And for the first time in months, I wanted to be myself again. I yearned for a good cup of coffee and a gray day. I wanted to wear a sweater and be around people who swear.
All teenagers question the way they’ve been raised, how their parents might have done things differently. With Indra, I started to question her integrity, looking for holes. Between the haggling in the wantilan and her conversation with Jessica about paying for anatomy, I wondered if maybe Indra saw us as customers as much as students. I didn’t understand why money should ever come up on a spiritual retreat. Was she manipulating us into forking over more cash? With Jessica, was she trying to control her, or just protecting SuZen’s interests? Or both?
I looked at my own financial sins—how I’d cheated Lou’s studio because I wanted to practice yoga and it cost more money than I thought I could afford. I knew that was the wrong thing to do, but maybe Karlee had been right, maybe money corrupted all spiritual practices. Maybe yoga studios should be like churches, where everybody tithes to keep the place running, but no more than that. Or like gyms, where you don’t need God or philosophy to properly experience the elliptical machine, and nobody cares if you have an ego.
A few months after I returned from Bali, my sister flew with me to New York to help me move. By the time she left, I had a lead on a job, a yoga studio, and a futon big enough for both Jonah and me.
Jonah and I found a group of friends who quickly became our urban family. These were the friends who met every cousin, aunt, and sibling who came to visit me in New York, and several of them caught on to the fact that no one in my family called me Suzanne. The only friends who called me Suzie were those I’d known since elementary school, so to hear these new friends call me by such an intimate term was strange, but also delightful. In Bali, my name filled me with terror. In New York, it made me feel loved.
I have never been so homesick as I was that first year in New York. I missed my family the way I would miss my legs if they were amputated. I longed for the green and the gray of Seattle, for the lakes and the mountains. I remember a day that first August, wading through the thick summer air on my way to Penn Station to pick up a visiting friend, when, for a second, I caught a sliver of a glimpse of the Hudson River. Just the sight of that silvery water, and I felt my lungs expand with air, as if I hadn’t taken a full breath in months.
I tried every yoga studio in the city. I was desperate for those ninety-minute opportunities to really breathe, but far too often I found myself distracted by the shiny objects for sale in the gift shops, which were tantalizingly situated so that you had to walk through them to get anywhere. I wanted to breathe, but the classes were as crowded as the subway platform at rush hour. In the subway, I quickly grew accustomed to the inevitability of inhaling my neighbor’s breath, but in yoga classes it made my heart race and my chest constrict—the exact opposite of what I was there to achieve. And what was worse, when my fellow students complained, loudly—I didn’t, I’m from Seattle—it quickly became apparent that the most important consideration for studio owners was the bottom line.
Which made sense, up to a point. Yoga teachers have to pay rent, too. And I had to admit that it was probably good on some level that so many people were willing to pack themselves into an oversold yoga class. Maybe studio owners simply wanted to give the greatest number of people a chance to practice yoga. But even so, I began to understand how early Protestants might have felt regarding the excesses of the Vatican. Every studio I visited had commercial tie-ins, endorsements, plans for expansion. And one day, leaving an enormous gym-like studio in Union Square after the owner invited me to the launch party for her latest line of yoga-pose flash cards,
it dawned on me that my time in Bali might have been the end of yoga as I knew it. The spiritual practice I had known was undergoing a transformation as profound as any I’d ever sought for myself. It was becoming an industry.
For most of my second year in New York, I stopped bothering with yoga studios and tried to keep up my practice at home. Jonah was out most nights, so I had a quiet place to meditate, even if there wasn’t enough room for a proper asana practice. On the nights he was home, he’d lock himself in the bedroom so that I could meditate. Separated from Jonah by a thin partition, I chanted quietly, knowing we’d both start laughing if I did too many lang-vang-rang-yang-hang-ang-Oms.
I managed in this way for a while, but then, one evening in mid-November, a friend took me to a studio downtown that I actually liked. Sure, there was a huge boutique right in the entrance that sold everything from magnets with yogic aphorisms emblazoned on them to T-shirts that read BODY BY YOGA. But I liked it anyway. I needed to.
Jonah and I had been fighting about Christmas. I wanted to go home; he wanted to stay and have a real New York Christmas, just the two of us. Neither of us would budge, and that afternoon I went ahead and booked my own flight home, telling Jonah that there was no Christmas for me in New York.
Somehow, in the moment we began our breathing exercises at the start of class, I knew that Jonah and I would work it out. Maybe by next Christmas I’d be ready to stay in New York. Or maybe he’d be willing to come home. I didn’t think about the eighty-dollar tanks in the gift shop or the fact that the yoga teacher had cultivated her teaching voice to sound like butterfly kisses. I even told myself that I could use the claustrophobia of the overcrowded class to teach myself to relax under strain.
I left feeling expansive, invigorated, at home in my adopted city.
I resumed my asana practice with zeal. It was such a relief to breathe and stretch and clear my mind. I wanted to feel that way all the time. I wanted to live in my yoga studio. Soon, even the boutique felt like an extension of my practice. Each time I went to class, those expensive yoga tanks called to me. Those après-yoga sweater wraps whistled at me. Books and CDs and DVDs made declarations. The sirens of oils and neti pots and candles lured me over to the rocks—or, rather, to the smooth river stones on sale for sixteen dollars, just the kind of feng-shui “texture” to place around your home to improve the flow of ch’i!
I wanted to improve the flow of my ch’i.
As the prodigal daughter returning to her practice, how could I not give in to my inner spiritual slut? She wanted to be loved, and the things these yogic toys said to her! The promises they made!
I read Yoga Journal like it was the Bible and the QVC network rolled into one. Its articles made me think about the way I could employ yogic concepts in my life and in my relationship with Jonah, and the shopping section filled me with lust. I wanted those objects, those expensive, natural-fiber and essential-oil-filled objects, because I was told, and I believed, that they would make me feel holy, reverent, sacred. That in lieu of any specific God, they would satisfy my need for ritual and serenity.
The thing is? They did. Sometimes the candles, the images of Ganesha, the river stones, the endlessly reinterpreted bum-hugging yoga pants, sometimes they reminded me of a state of mind that I wanted to go back to, the same way the crucifixes in every room of my aunt’s house remind her to be Christlike. I’d sit in our apartment, counting the days till I could go home for a visit, and those objects would help me remember to breathe. But then, one night after an evening with my lovely friends, I opened the latest issue of Yoga Journal to find an advertisement for a credit card called the “Visa Enlightenment” card. One of the most famous yoga teachers in the country was its spokesyogini, posing beatifically among silvery birch trees. Having recently bought one of her yoga DVDs, I considered, briefly, the merits of such a credit card.
For twenty-percent interest on my purchases, I could get discounts on sacred vacations and earn points toward massage, yoga clothes, organic beauty products, and decorative Buddhas. The idea was that this card would help me to consume mindfully. And the more mindful things I consumed, the more points I’d earn toward even more mindful consumption.
My God, I thought. I am such a chump.
In another issue of Yoga Journal I found a long apologia for the yoga industry. It suggested that I shouldn’t feel bad that American yoga had become so venal. So what, it said, if a prominent yoga teacher preaches austerity and yet enjoys expensive cars and country houses? So what if the most famous yoga teachers employ agents and publicists and think about marketing and branding as much as they think about the path?
The point, the writer argued, was that if these same yoga teachers lived in India, they would be sadhus, wandering monks, exchanging their wisdom and yogic knowledge for bowls of rice and berries. They would wear rags and be happy to do so, because they were in it for the wisdom. But in America, that’s not how it’s done. And let’s face it, you can only be as enlightened as the economy in which you live!
The spokesyogini in the Visa ad was one of the most admired yoga teachers in the country. The curl of my lip as I regarded her meditative posture reminded me of the Annual Appeal at my church when I was growing up. I hated it when the priest I despised told everyone in the pews to open their pocketbooks. But what if instead of reminding us to tithe in support of the church’s school and charity programs, he had invited us to apply for the Visa Catholicism Card? How would my fellow parishioners have reacted then? If, when the ushers did the collection at Mass, you could swipe your Visa Catholicism Card for points toward decorative crosses and designer rosaries and five-star vacation packages to Lourdes?
If I bought in to this, I would be the biggest fool ever to be duped by an oligarchy of yogic charlatans. And as if roused by the snap of a hypnotist, I woke up from my yogic spending spree and realized that this brand of yoga, this American yoga, was just a business, pure and simple. And it was ingenious.
Here’s a combination of exercise and practical philosophy that can make us healthier, happier, more relaxed and beautiful. You can get your yoga with or without God. Yoga memberships are already insanely expensive, so that self-selects for a certain class of woman. And that class of woman—middle class, upper middle class—likes to shop. She gets a spiritual hit off of shopping. So, in this yoga, she gets two spiritual practices in one. An astonishing commercial success story! Create a need? No need. The need is an eternal one. It’s been filled by countless religions, and they’ve often asked us for money in exchange for our serenity. But yoga’s got them all beat, and they don’t even try to hide it. They put those boutiques right out front.
I thought of Lara, back in Bali, when she complained about her London studio being full of pretentious, designer-clad yogis, and felt a pang. I missed my yogamates. I missed the simplicity of our practice, the earnestness of it. The thought nearly made my eyes cross, but I longed to go back to practicing yoga with people who drink pee.
I decided I needed my practice to mean something. I needed it to be something more than just a commercial transaction or a self-help program for the privileged.
I wouldn’t do yoga anymore unless it was free or by donation. I wouldn’t buy yoga toys I didn’t need. And for the first time I found myself right at the intersection of orthodoxy and cynicism: the more yoga studios confirmed for me that this yuppie feel-good catchall commercial spiritual practice was cynical to its core, the more I told myself that only the purists really got it. None of these famous yoga teachers got it, none of them understood what yoga was about. In fact, it would appear that nobody got it but me. And so I decided I would ascend the mountain alone, the last living yogi—but I couldn’t sit to meditate without dwelling on how much money I was saving by not going to a studio, without congratulating myself on being so much more enlightened than the yoga industry, and soon it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t get it either. In fact, maybe this spiritual practice was too open to interpretation not to be easily corrupted. A s
piritual practice for people like me, who sometimes like the idea of God and sometimes don’t, who can’t seem to tell the difference between a spiritual epiphany and a shopping high? What the hell kind of spirituality is that?
So I stopped practicing. And though I thought about it, dreamed about it, wrote about it, and complained about it, I had no intention of ever going back. After all, why on earth would I want to be a part of any spirituality that would have me as its practitioner?
April 21
It’s past dawn. Roosters and dogs are competing with fireworks that sound like gunshots. Like the Japanese are back to reclaim the island.
Just reliving class yesterday makes me want to weep. But I won’t let myself, because I want to get the rest of the day down. The day was epic. I lived a thousand lives in one day, and I’m still awake enough to live one more.
After class I wanted to go home and go back to bed. I wanted to sleep the day away, wanted nothing more to do with it. I had forgotten that Noadhi was at the house, carving ginger amulets to place over all the doorways and windows to protect us from our Mop Ghost. He didn’t want us to come back to the house till sunset.
To say that I was displeased when Jessica reminded me of this would be an understatement. I was furious. And ready to call bullshit on this whole “spirits” phenomenon. It was fun to think of spirits when they weren’t inconveniencing, but I had cried my face off through class, and then again with Indra afterwards, and now I had to entertain myself in town all day because of a possessed mop? My eyes were swollen and red and my head hurt. I was humiliated. I was pissed. I hate crying in public. Hate it.
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