Читать книгу Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi - Brian Leaf - Страница 15
ОглавлениеNamed must your fear be before banish it you can.
— JEDI MASTER YODA
After graduating from Georgetown, I moved into an apartment with my brother for one last year of living together before he got married (we had shared a room in my parents’ house since I was one). We rented an apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. From our window we could see the Statue of Liberty and all of lower Manhattan.
I took a job as a high school math teacher. I had started Georgetown four years earlier as a champion debater and future corporate attorney, but I graduated as a yogi math teacher. You already know about the debater-to-yogi transition that happened on day one of Oskar’s yoga class. The other transition, from lawyer to math teacher, happened thanks to Ricky.
The story is this. During my first year at Georgetown, my business classes were not lighting me up, igniting my creativity, or capturing my heart, and I craved those things. Many business students in my Productions and Operations Management class felt the opposite, as if they were in exactly the right place.* But not me. So I looked around for somewhere to channel my energy, and I found Georgetown’s Community Outreach Club.
The club’s mission was to help out in the urban community, and I was assigned to work at a homework center in downtown DC.
My job was technically to help kids with their homework, which sounds nice, but in reality I spent all my time trying to keep order in the room. Someone else would have been better suited to the job; I imagined a big lovable-but-strict teddy bear of a guy, like the physical therapist character who looks like Sinbad in Regarding Henry.
At the homework center, I did, however, make a nice connection with a fifth grader in the group named Ricky. So I was thrilled when Ricky’s parents asked me to tutor him outside the program. He was getting old for the group, so they offered to pay me the $35 a week that they had been paying the center if I would come to their house and tutor Ricky after school three days a week.
Ricky and his family lived in a two-room apartment in DC. Not two bedrooms, but two rooms. His mother worked as a house cleaner, and his father was a huge man with giant hands who came home from work every day in a tux. I was convinced that he was low-level muscle for a local crime boss, but I think in reality he drove a limo or maybe bussed dishes in a fancy restaurant.
Ricky was a D student and had been labeled by his school a bad kid and future drug user. They had basically written him off.
Ricky had simply been caught between two languages: his family and community spoke Spanish, but he learned English at school. No one at home was able to help him with his homework, and he felt lost in school. Who doesn’t goof off when they feel lost, frustrated, and trapped? But once he had help with his homework, Ricky worked tirelessly, and his grades soared. I actually became worried that he was caring too much — in fact, he started reminding me quite a bit of myself.
Ricky and I spent many hours together each week. Sometimes on my days off, he’d call with a homework crisis, and I’d stop by for twenty minutes or we’d work together over the phone. Some days I just stopped by for no reason, and we’d hang out.
Ricky and his family were so proud of him, and so appreciative of me. His mom and dad loved me the way only a parent can love a complete stranger who helps their child. They treated me like family. I appreciated the $35 a week, and just as much I loved the homemade paella. A home-cooked meal is priceless to a college student on a meal plan, and even more priceless to a college student on the daily ramen noodles and mac ’n’ cheese of a non–meal plan.
Here’s how much Ricky’s mom loved me: She regularly committed for me the unpardonable sin of cooking paella without pork or beef, and without even understanding why this was necessary. She just went on faith. She’d cook their paella on the traditional paella pan that covers four burners, and on a very sad and lonely electric chafing dish she’d cook my anemic meat-free paella.
My vegetarian desires vexed Ricky’s mom to no end, but she simply acquiesced. The pork she easily wrote off to my religion (“Oh, es Judeo.”) — I believe that I was the first red-blooded, curly-haired, prominent-nosed, honest-to-goodness Jew to enter their home. Ricky’s dad once reassured me, “My boss is Whooish, and he’s very nice too.”
So while Ricky’s mom could rationalize my pork ban, she had absolutely no context for understanding my beef abstinence. I think she really worried about me.
The language and culture gap between Ricky’s parents and me caused many funny blips. One day I had a cold, and Ricky’s mom kept asking me if I was constipated. I assumed she was very nosy or at least very, very holistic, acknowledging the connection between healthy bowel movements and overall well-being. However, in Spanish, “Do you have a cold?” sounds like “¿Estás constipada?” This misunderstanding was not as bad as when in Spain, years later, in my rusty Spanish, I accidentally asked a bartender at a tapas bar for his penis (“¿Puedo tener su polla?”), when all I wanted was the chicken special (“¿Puedo tener su pollo?”). That lowercase o can keep you out of jail.
Ricky and I worked together for three years, from fifth through seventh. And at the end of sixth grade, after he had been tutored for two years, Ricky was honored as one of the twenty-five most improved Hispanic students in all of DC. At a formal ceremony, he received a savings bond, a personally signed certificate, and a hug from Washington, DC, mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon.
Ricky was no longer a D student or a “drug risk.” On the contrary, he was a straight-A student, a role model, and a class leader.
Ricky went on to great success in middle and high school. Unfortunately, a few years later we lost touch when he moved back to Spain. If you have exceptional Google skills, maybe you can help me find him. I’d love to get back in touch. Trouble is, every third male in Spain is named Ricardo García, and one particularly prominent Flamenco guitarist dominates the first few pages of hits.
My experience with Ricky sold me on teaching. I saw that I had the ability to help children. Plus, working with Ricky felt easy and natural, as if I was built to do it. So when I approached the job search during senior year at Georgetown, I decided to teach.
Being a member of the Georgetown University School of Business Administration senior class, but not planning an illustrious career with Arthur Andersen Consulting (wink, wink), put me in a funny situation. Suddenly, for me, all those mixers and dinners and cocktail hours where students networked with corporate recruiters were not sweaty, nerve-racking events, but free eats.
Honestly, I may have been a bit of an ass. I don’t know why, perhaps I was delighted to be free of their corporate grip, or maybe I thought I was a bit superior to everyone else in business school, but I’d show up à la Don Johnson in a T-shirt and sport coat. The simple absence of the collared shirt totally changes the outfit and its message at a corporate mixer. Wearing a collared shirt says, “I conform,” or at least “I respect you,” whereas not wearing it simply says, “Fuck you.” I also laughed a bit too loudly and ate food from the buffet like Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places. I was even known to wear leather sandals.
If this had been a movie, every recruiter would have been awed by my impertinence and brio and would have begged me to interview. But in reality recruiters probably didn’t notice my shenanigans, or if they did, they were probably just annoyed. I was like a drunk person who sees himself as impressive, charming, and witty, but to others just looks like a sweaty Kanye West stealing the mic from Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
I sent out résumés to every private school in northeastern New Jersey (I did not have a teaching certificate, so I could teach only at private schools). I interviewed with a few math departments and secured a position teaching algebra and geometry in Morristown, New Jersey. The apartment Larry and I found in Jersey City was twenty-five minutes away.
In Jersey City I found yoga classes being offered at the gym right in my apartment complex. The teacher, Janice, taught a toned-down form of Iyengar yoga, the same style I had practiced during sophomore year of college. This style focuses greatly on correct alignment. Put it this way: in his classic book, Light on Yoga, B. K. S. Iyengar includes five hundred pages of instruction and six hundred photographs.
Plus, Mr. Iyengar ranks the difficulty level of every posture. When I first read this book I was flummoxed to discover that the triangle posture, which I found difficult enough, earned a mere three out of a possible sixty, ahead of only a small handful of postures, such as mountain, the one where you stand with your arms overhead, as in, “Touchdown!”
I’m sure you’re wondering what Mr. Iyengar ranks as the most difficult yoga posture. It’s not the iconic leg-behind-your-head pose (called eka pada sirsasana, by the way) made famous by Yogi Kudu on TV’s That’s Incredible.*
To Iyengar, tiriang mukhottanasana rings in at a whopping sixty, the most difficult of all yoga postures. Tiriang mukhottanasana translates into English as “intense upward-facing pose.” Not for the faint of heart, this pose won’t be found in a level-one Anusara class. Even its name is no fun, unlike, say, upward dog, boat, or, my favorite, the wind-relieving posture — all child’s play at ratings of one, one, and one. Intense upward-facing pose is basically just touching your toes. No biggie, right? But it’s touching your toes from the wrong side, bending backward instead of forward. Yep, just bend backward until your hands are at your feet, and there you have a sixty!
Iyengar yoga, with its specific instructions and meticulous approach to alignment, is very effective in addressing injuries. So I was very lucky to have Janice early that school year, after a skydiving mishap in Southern California.
Let me begin by saying that when you are in a very small airplane halfway to a drop zone, you do not want your jump instructor to say anything like, “Shit, I forgot his goggles.” And you definitely do not want the pilot to answer, “Here, take mine,” as he swerves the plane while removing his.
Skydiving enthusiasts are, by definition, very cavalier. They are chill. They do tequila shots after a hard day’s work. I have my suspicions they do tequila shots during a hard day’s work. They’re half cowboy, half secret agent. They’re probably the toughest and coolest cats on the planet. They make Hawaiian big-wave surfers seem like Urkel.
And I am not like them. I plan. I analyze risk. I don’t eat chicken that’s more than three days old. I wear a belt from the Gap, for Pete’s sake.
But in college, two friends and I had decided to try skydiving. We had all backed out last minute, and so here we were a year later to make good. We met up in Southern California during a long weekend for one purpose: to jump out of an airplane.
Manuel flew to California first and rented a blazing yellow convertible Mazda Miata. He picked me up at the Los Angeles airport and we drove, top down, into the desert. Cordelia, who lived in Fresno, was waiting for us.
To save time and money we opted to jump tandem. That means we’d be strapped to the front of an instructor, like twins conjoined at the genitals. Because we were jumping tandem, we needed almost no instruction. So after signing a seriously long waiver that absolved the skydiving company for an exhaustive number of ways in which we might die, we received basic instruction and were ready to suit up.
My instructor was a slacker, and quite hung over, I believe. He lumbered off to wardrobe to find me a jumpsuit and came back with one that was much too small. But we were running late for the next take-off, so his attitude was “Ve shall make eet fit,” as he helped me stuff myself into the suit.
I couldn’t stand up straight. I hobbled over to the airplane and grabbed hold of a ceiling bar, and we were off. The plane fit eleven, plus the pilot. And since it was used only for jumps, there was no door.
Here’s what I remember. We take off. We get higher and higher. I look around. No door on the plane. The pilot gives me his goggles. Not an auspicious sign.
Cordelia jumps first. Then Manuel. Then it’s my turn.
My instructor mounts me. I’m his bitch for the next twenty minutes. We do an odd conjoined dance toward the door. I’m standing at the door, holding on to a railing, and looking down twelve thousand feet. I have never before looked straight down twelve thousand feet. That’s more than two miles. If you’re standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking over the edge, that’s a very safe one thousand feet. We are twelve times as high.
We had each paid an extra $80 to have a guy attach a video camera to his head and jump with us. He’s standing ready. By law, I have to be the one to jump us from the plane. My instructor can only follow my lead. I steel myself and leap. Obviously the plane is moving, so as soon as I launch, the wind takes over. I forget to tuck, and I kick the videographer in the head.
Fortunately, he’s okay.
Now I’m free-falling. I will free-fall for forty-five seconds and travel nine thousand feet in that short time. That means I’m falling at more than 130 miles an hour.
I forget to close my mouth. The airflow makes my cheeks look like Louis Armstrong’s. When I say that I forgot to close my mouth, that implies that I had thoughts. I did not.
For those forty-five seconds I receive a mental enema. It washes me clean. Usually I have no less than fifteen simultaneous thoughts, worries, and fears. Here I have only one, in the same way that a mouse being chased by a cat has only one. You could say that it was complete yogic one-pointed concentration.
Then, my instructor starts yelling something at me. I have no idea what he is saying. No idea even, until then, that he and I can communicate. No idea that such a thing is possible. I am primordial soup — precommunicative.
Luckily, though, there is no law that I have to be the one to pull the chute, which he has been shouting at me to do, because he then reaches past me and grabs the dummy cord. We lurch from 130 miles an hour to a leisurely 10 miles an hour. Not good in a jumpsuit that does not fit, and my lower back takes the brunt.
Running on adrenaline, I do not even realize I am hurt until later when I’m seated in Manuel’s Miata.
Really, I got off easy. I wasn’t hurt too badly. I had to hobble around for a week. I couldn’t run for a month. And I got to tell everyone that I had been skydiving — earning me a fair bit of clout with my teen students.
And luckily, Janice was a genius at therapeutic yoga. So two months later, I was completely healed. Well, sort of. I think the injury shook up some things in my lower back and abdomen, because something odd began to happen. In Janice’s class I would be enjoying warm-ups and standing postures, but then, when led into belly-down poses (cobra, boat, bow, locust), I would become agitated and emotional and sometimes downright pissed.
I came to expect this and would leave the room for the belly-down postures. I’d take a stroll and then watch from the window to return when I could see Janice had moved on to the shoulder-stand series.
At the time, I did not wonder too much about what was happening; I just knew I was uncomfortable. One moment we’re doing mountain posture and I’m focused on my breath and the alignment of my feet and shoulders, and the next we’re in cobra, and I’m Fred Flintstone about to blow his top. I was angry at the hard floor, the noisy guy next to me, and even Janice. I blamed them all.
I see now, though, that a great storehouse of stress, agitation, and anger in my gut — I’d say the very angst that had caused the ulcerative colitis — was being tapped and primed for a more thorough release.
In college, I had stretched and relaxed my muscles. I had improved my circulation. I had straightened my posture and improved my diet. I had even experienced periods of mental calm for four or five seconds in a row, and I did not seem to have colitis anymore. And now I was tapping its deeper roots, tapping the twenty years of repressed angst that still lived in my gut.
In new age circles, the kind of circles in which we say things like, “I love your new amber necklace, did you make it?” we call this process of releasing old strains and habits “peeling back the layers of the onion.” The idea is that when a layer is removed, a subtler layer underneath is exposed. Stretching and strengthening my muscles and learning to deal with stress had eliminated the outer layer of colitis. Removing that layer had exposed the subtler roots underneath — my habit of repressing angst and storing it in my belly — the root cause of the disease.
When the roots are exposed, yoga helps to eliminate them. It’s like pressing on a knotted muscle in your back. Most of the day you might just say, “My back feels stiff.” But when you give the muscles a little massage and feel around, you find a knot. When you identify this knot as the source or epicenter of the stiffness, you open up a possibility for its release.
If you press right on the knot and breathe and wait and breathe and watch, you’ll find that eventually you sigh or moan or laugh or cry, and the knot releases a little bit or even completely. That’s what yoga was doing for the tension in my gut. It had identified the source knot in my belly, and it was pressing right on it (literally, in cobra, boat, bow, and locust postures). Eventually I’d be sighing, moaning, laughing, and mostly crying as it released. But not for another year or so.
In the meantime, my discomfort in Janice’s class during belly-down postures eventually passed. I chalked it up to getting stronger and therefore less frustrated as I attempted the postures. And I think that was true, but I also think that my body had done its work accessing and unveiling the tension for the time being and was waiting for the right time to unleash it.
The body really does possess a kind of intelligence, such as the ability to wait for the right time to unleash. Think about how you can wait until you are alone in the bathroom to bawl after a big confrontation at work. Or imagine you’re on your way home from work and sense the stirrings of a very large bowel movement. Haven’t you ever noticed that your urge grows as you get closer to home? Unless you’ve got a stomach bug, it never gets unbearable until you’re within range of the bathroom.* Now, that’s pretty intelligent, if you ask me. So my body knew that this was not the time to unload my angst. Not yet.
* Actually, to be precise, while some people did feel that way in certain business classes, as if they were in exactly the right place, no one felt that way in Productions and Operations Management class. The professor was horrible, and since attendance was mandatory, students would sign in and then literally crawl out the window when he turned around. One time a friend and I conspired to make a run for the door. When the prof turned, I sprinted. I made it through the door and watched from the hallway as Midge followed. As the prof turned back around to face the class, Midge was caught midstride. She froze, eyes wide, panicked, deer in the headlights, and then she dove, headfirst, Pete Rose–style, through the open door and into the hallway to a standing ovation from the rest of the class. Needless to say, she was a legend after that.
* On the show, Yogi Kudu would contort his body to fit into a two-foot-square Plexiglas box. Then Cathy Lee Crosby, John Davidson, and Fran Tarkenton would toss the box into a swimming pool or bury him underground for fifteen minutes.
* I once saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “I’m only speeding ’cause I really have to poop.”
