The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  On June 6, Díaz Herrera told the editor of the anti-Noriega newspaper La Prensa that if he sent a journalist to the colonel’s house, he would make some stunning disclosures. The editor was skeptical, but a reporter and photographer were dispatched anyway. When they arrived, they found the colonel under a sort of spell. First, he made a confession. He’d helped rig the 1984 election, he said—the final details of the plan had been arranged right there, in his own home. That home, further, was half-stolen, bought largely with Cuban bribes. Finally, he admitted, he’d helped force President Barletta out, twisting his arm—he mimicked the gesture—when he resisted.

  Then came a fusillade of accusations. Noriega, he said, was responsible for Spadafora’s murder. The dictator had stolen the twelve million dollars that the Shah of Iran had paid to Torrijos in exchange for giving him refuge after Iran’s revolution. Most shockingly of all, Díaz Herrera accused Noriega of working with the CIA to kill Torrijos by putting a bomb on his plane.

  What Díaz Herrera was doing was unprecedented. “The Godfather’s second-in-command was ratting on the mafia,” wrote Kempe. Journalists, supporters, and curious onlookers flocked to his house, where the colonel repeated his charges to anyone who cared to listen. Among them was Winston Spadafora, brother of Hugo, who had dedicated himself to finding justice for his murdered sibling. Díaz Herrera started referring to his home as the “headquarters of dignity.” He stood outside, giving out photocopies of handwritten anti-Noriega pronouncements that recipients were supposed to duplicate and pass on. One of these screeds referred to Noriega as Cain, sinful brother of the biblical Abel.

  The middle-class people massing in the suburban streets of Altos del Golf were not accustomed to blatant shows of political violence. Panama was a placid country; when Noriega used force, he did so behind the scenes. Thus the people outside Díaz Herrera’s mansion were shocked when black-clad riot police in storm trooper helmets appeared on the scene and attacked the crowd with bird shot and teargas. It was, wrote Kempe, their “political baptism.”

  Protests spread all over the country in response to Díaz Herrera’s charges—though, for a would-be revolution, it was a bizarrely tame and bourgeois one, led by middle-class Rotary Club types who were no longer able to tolerate rule by an uncouth and epically corrupt thug. Demonstrations often happened during lunchtime and cocktail hour. “It’s like watching your mom and dad riot at the mall,” wrote Rolling Stone’s P. J. O’Rourke.

  This does not, however, mean that the standoff wasn’t serious. Amid intensifying violence, Noriega declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution’s civil liberties provisions. Opposition newspapers were shut down. More than fifteen hundred protesters were arrested. Some were tortured, and more were tossed into fetid, filthy cells with the general prison population, who had tacit permission to rough them up. There were rumors that Noriega was arranging to have dissidents raped by carriers of HIV.

  The violence put the United States, Noriega’s patron, in a difficult spot. “In the good old days in Panama, nobody seemed to mind that the military ran the nation; that elections were routinely rigged to place the Panamanian Defense Force’s candidate in the presidential palace; that banks laundered millions of dollars of Colombian cocaine money; that business people with the right connections made fortunes selling U.S. goods to Cuba, circumventing the U.S. trade embargo,” wrote the Miami Herald’s Andrés Oppenheimer. “Washington dealt with this by looking the other way, content with keeping the strategic Panama Canal immune to the political troubles of neighboring countries. And then Díaz Herrera held his little press conference.”

  Inside Díaz Herrera’s blue chateau, hundreds of people camped out amid the deepening political crisis. Among them were anti-Noriega activists who, only days before, had considered the colonel their enemy. Priests came to serve as human shields; one looked for handcuffs so he could attach himself to Díaz Herrera in the event of a raid. The mood was charged with spiritual fervor. Some supporters rested on prayer rugs unfolded on the lawn. A Panamanian Hindu convert dressed in white robes wandered around chanting mantras.

  The colonel, reported the New York Times, “sits cross-legged, speaking in cryptic phrases punctuated by long silences. Associates advise visitors that when he feels positive vibrations, his palms face upward; he turns his palms down if questioning becomes too aggressive.” Díaz Herrera claimed to be receiving psychic messages directly from Sai Baba. “I have no doubt that he, not I, is in command of everything,” he said. At his feet sat a golden plaque with Sai Baba’s lotus logo on it.

  In the end, they were holed up for six weeks. Just before the military helicopters came on July 27, Díaz Herrera called Shama on a secret line, terrified. “He was like a frightened rabbit calling me: What should I do, what’s going to happen?” she said. By then she was scared, too, because Noriega had started sending her letters through the Panamanian consulate instructing her to tell Díaz Herrera to get out of Panama. “I was saying, ‘Please, don’t drag me into this, because you’re putting my life at stake,’ ” said Shama.

  Soon after Díaz Herrera hung up the phone with Shama, elite Israeli-trained troops stormed the mansion, firing Uzis and hurling teargas bombs. They found Díaz Herrera and his wife lying on their bedroom floor. Above them was a photograph of a half-smiling Sai Baba in a saffron robe. The raid lasted less than fifteen minutes. The colonel, his family, and dozens of his supporters were loaded into Panamanian Defense Force vehicles and taken away.

  After several days in an undisclosed location, Díaz Herrera issued a statement recanting his accusations against Noriega. (He would later cite an Irish proverb, “It’s better to be a coward for one minute, than dead for the rest of your life,” attributing it to Napoléon.)

  Maigualida and their kids went into exile in Venezuela, where she was from. She lobbied incessantly for her husband’s release, enlisting the help of a former Venezuelan president and of politicians in Spain and Peru. After several months, her efforts succeeded, and in December 1987, Díaz Herrera was allowed to join his family in Caracas, where he struggled in his attempts to build a real estate business.

  He had failed; Noriega was still in power. Yet far away in Washington, Noriega’s support was collapsing. In the wake of the protests, Senator Edward Kennedy submitted a resolution calling for a “public accounting” of the dictator’s role in Spadafora’s murder and the fixing of the 1984 election, and in drug trafficking and money laundering. The resolution passed 75–13. America’s man in Panama had become an embarrassment.

  In February 1988, a court in Miami indicted Noriega on twelve counts of narcotrafficking and racketeering. The next year, in Operation Just Cause, American troops invaded Panama. Noriega was deposed, arrested, and brought to the United States for trial. Found guilty, he was imprisoned until 2007 and eventually extradited back to Panama to serve a prison sentence there. By then, Martín Torrijos, Omar’s son, was the country’s president, and Díaz Herrera was back in government, serving as the Panamanian ambassador to Peru.

  “For me, Indra clarified what I knew in my interior consciousness had to be done,” Díaz Herrera said in 2013, sitting in the living room of his condo in one of Panama City’s new luxury high-rises, a wall of windows looking out over the expanse of the Pacific ocean. Devi gave him, he said, “the courage to confront whatever consequence, because even death is not the end. The spirit goes on.”

  Shama, it seems, had been right.

  · CHAPTER 19 ·

  HERE IS the last astonishing thing about Indra Devi: she lived, for the most part, happily ever after.

  Few biographies have joyous endings, particularly those of pioneering, adventurous women. Even in the best of old ages, there’s usually some stoic, bittersweet acceptance of diminishing relevance and attenuated abilities. Yet, fortified by a lifetime of spiritual discipline, Devi largely transcended regret, learning to observe the world’s flux with smiling detachment. Further, because she seemed to float through life rather tha
n cling to it, because she was so rarely weak or needy or choked by nostalgia, she never became marginal.

  As global interest in yoga exploded in the 1990s, she grew only more famous, her vitality the ultimate testament to the power of the practice. She was adored for many reasons, but among them was the way her very existence suggested that, with the right regimen, one could indeed remain forever young, forever healthy.

  Devi enjoyed playing with people’s expectations of the old. As an act of service, she visited lonely people in nursing homes—people who were almost all younger than she was. Once, getting off a plane, she was offered a wheelchair. She consented to be pushed in it, but as soon as she reached the arrivals gate, she took off running and giggling.

  Another time, she traveled with Piero to Bogotá, Colombia, for a charity concert. After a few songs, he introduced her to the crowd as his master and friend, a woman who’d met Gandhi and Tagore and Krishnamurti. Devi had always refused to safety-pin her sari, insisting on tying it the old-fashioned way, without buttons or clasps. Toward the end of her life she became less dexterous, and her clothing less secure. On this occasion, as she walked onstage, the garment slipped off, leaving her almost naked before thousands of young people, like a scene in a common nightmare. She burst out laughing and, utterly unperturbed, put it back on as she continued talking. She was, marveled Piero, “above everything.”

  For much of her life, Devi’s only goal had been to make yoga known to the West. In the 1990s, as the discipline became a ubiquitous part of cosmopolitan urban culture, signifier of a lifestyle at once wholesome and sexy, her dream was more than fulfilled. In its latest incarnation, yoga is a holistic, authentic alternative to the aerobics boom of the 1980s, more grounded but just as physically challenging and far more fashionable. Throughout the last decade of the twentieth century a parade of celebrities, their star power matching that of Devi’s high-wattage Hollywood students, testified to their devotion to the practice—Madonna, Sting, Gwyneth Paltrow, Christy Turlington. In 1998, Madonna released her four-time Grammy-winning Ray of Light, a spiritually infused dance record; the track “Shanti/Ashtangi” sets a Sanskrit chant over a deep, jagged bassline. Yoga had arrived at the very center of American popular culture.

  The same year that Ray of Light came out, New York’s chic Jivamukti Yoga Center moved from the still-gritty East Village to a nine-thousand-square-foot emporium above a branch of Crunch gym. “Like some sort of millennial nightclub (there is a waterfall, plastic lotus flowers, a boutique), the fuchsia-and-turquoise Jivamukti studio is perfumed with the promise of pleasure,” Penelope Green wrote in the New York Times, continuing: “A sense of throbbing expectancy lends a charge to the place, just like at a disco.” For a while, it was among the trendiest places in the trendiest city in the world.

  Even as yoga assumed a high-fashion gloss, it was also democratized to an unprecedented degree, offered in suburban gyms and, as Devi had once hoped, forward-thinking offices, particularly in Silicon Valley. Four years before Madonna jumped on board, the stodgy U.S. News & World Report had already declared “Yoga Goes Mainstream,” noting that the number of Americans practicing yoga had doubled in only three years, to an estimated four million.

  That number has since quintupled: a 2012 survey commissioned by Yoga Journal found that 20.4 million Americans (almost 9 percent of U.S. adults) practiced yoga. Even if a good number of those have only dabbled in it at the gym, it’s clear that yoga had become an enormous American phenomenon as well as a global one.

  Devi planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s, training a host of teachers who would soon find themselves with throngs of new students. Yet the yoga that became globally popular in Devi’s last years was much more vigorous than the style she taught. Krishnamacharya had trained her in a type of asana practice suited to a middle-aged woman. When she taught sun salutations, she warned practitioners against exhausting themselves and even suggested they take a few minutes of rest immediately afterward. The yoga that spread rapidly in the 1990s, however, was based on a regimen Krishnamacharya developed for young boys, and it was all about testing the body’s limits. Sweaty and sometimes punishing, this yoga was, like the old hatha of India’s wandering ascetics, a way of mortifying the flesh, though it was often done in the service of beauty rather than ego annihilation.

  The man who deserves immediate credit for the new yoga explosion was a student of Krishnamacharya’s named Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. The son of a Brahmin astrologer, Jois began studying with Krishnamacharya as a schoolboy. Unlike Iyengar, he thrived under the master’s strict discipline and was often called upon to demonstrate advanced postures. In Krishnamacharya’s classes for young boys, poses were performed drill-style, linked by vinyasas, the flowing series of movements, familiar to most modern yoga students, that takes a practitioner from standing, through the half push-up known as Chaturanga, and then into downward-facing dog.

  Jois, who grew into a fierce but ebullient master, codified these teachings into a system called ashtanga yoga, in which a series of poses are performed in the same order every day. (There are six progressively more difficult series in the ashtanga system, and very few people have mastered all of them.) This yoga is self-guided—teachers are there to help students learn and perfect the poses, but students move through the routine on their own—and immensely challenging, creating a cultlike intensity among some adepts.

  Most people lack the patience and endurance (physical or mental) necessary for a sustained ashtanga practice. In the 1990s, though, many teachers adapted ashtanga methods to create yoga classes offering sweaty workouts, often accompanied by a throbbing pop soundtrack. The power yoga taught in gyms and the flow style popular at fashionable urban studios such as Jivamukti are rooted in Jois’s system, even if Jois himself disapproved of would-be innovators. In a 1995 letter to Yoga Journal, written in response to a cover story on “Power Yoga,” Jois wrote, “I was disappointed to find that so many novice students have taken Ashtanga yoga and have turned it into a circus for their own fame and profit…It would be a shame to lose the precious jewel of liberation in the mud of ignorant body building.”

  No one would confuse Devi’s yoga with bodybuilding, which may be why her slower, gentler style fell out of fashion. Teachers whom she trained continue offering classes all over the world, but they’re older now, and so, in many cases, are their students.

  Yet Indra Devi’s spirit animates modern Western yoga, even more so than those of Jois or Iyengar or Bikram Choudhury, the Rolls-Royce-collecting creator of hot yoga. Today in the West, yoga is an overwhelmingly female pursuit—the Yoga Journal survey found that 82.2 percent of practitioners are women. It’s part of the same cultural matrix as organic food, holistic spas, and biodynamic beauty products—things that seem to go together so naturally that it’s easy to forget that they weren’t always linked. It was Indra Devi, more than anyone else, who turned a very male discipline into an uplifting ritual for cosmopolitan, spiritual-but-not-religious women.

  As a balm for the anxieties inherent in having a changeable and ever-scrutinized female body, yoga has become, among elite women, almost a requisite part of pregnancy, along with designer prenatal yoga clothes that have their direct antecedents in the “lotus suits” created by Devi’s students at Page Boy. Devi’s instructions for pregnant women in 1963’s Renew Your Life through Yoga—eat raw foods and juices, exercise daily, practice deep breathing to obviate the need for pain-relieving drugs during labor, make sure to breast-feed—considered quirky at the time, are today conventional wisdom in the circles where yoga is most popular. The lifestyle she promoted—a mash-up of Hindu practices, Western esotericism, health food, showbusiness glamour, and back-to-nature femininity—has become nearly ubiquitous in privileged circles.

  Anyone who practices yoga in the West knows, on some level, that he or she is involved in a hybrid culture. There is an immense gulf between the limber young women in Lululemon yoga gear rolling out rubber mats on the hardwood floors of modern st
udios and the ash-smeared half-naked yogins who contort themselves on the banks of the Ganges. They exist in two different conceptual universes; though they live in the same time, they’re as distant from each other as medieval mendicant monks are from the worshippers in suburban American megachurches. This disconnect makes some people uncomfortable, especially if they turned to yoga precisely because they were looking for something more meaningful and authentic than a gym workout. If yoga isn’t just exercise, if it isn’t religion, and if it isn’t, in its current form, even all that old, then what the hell is it?

  Every so often, Yoga Journal will run an article expressing worry that the true spirit of yoga is threatened by the practice’s exploding popularity. In a 2000 feature asking whether yoga was becoming “too popular for its own good,” the scholar Georg Feuerstein was quoted: “Even a tradition like hatha yoga, which had the body as its focus, always had the goal of reaching liberation and enlightenment. This has dropped away from many of the Western schools of yoga.” Part of the appeal of ashtanga yoga is the sense that it is real and unadulterated, unlike more fluid, improvisational forms.

  Here, however, is a lesson we can take from Devi’s life and from the friends, teachers, and gurus who shaped her: There is no such thing as unchanging authenticity. Far from a static repository of ancient wisdom, India is as culturally dynamic as any place on the planet, influencing and being influenced by the West in equal measure. Restless Westerners (and particularly restless Western women) have long gone to India seeking ancient spiritual treasures, only to find themselves instead part of a creative dialogue with people eager to innovate in their own traditions. That dialogue continues today, as practitioners all over the world develop new styles of yoga, which in turn influence the way yoga is practiced on the subcontinent. The Yoga Journal story about the Americanization of the practice begins in New Delhi, where the writer’s guide, a young woman enamored of self-help, tells her, “I love yoga so much. If only I had enough money, I would go to California to study it.”