It Takes A Very Steady Hand

I usually get to my yoga class (what my teacher refers to as my practice) twice a week. I’ve been doing it for almost 2 years. That and this new cleanse I’ve been on have definitely had a centering effect. So why I haven’t been to the gym in months is a question with many answers, none of which substantiate the behavior or in this case the lack thereof.

Today, after a long hiatus I took a yoga class as a friend’s guest at the Equinox on 76^th and Amsterdam. By all accounts it is a beautiful gym, sleek design with wood floors and light fixtures, locker rooms with digital locks and Kiehl’s products.

It is surely worthy of some design awards and gives the impression that you are there to relax and have a drink rather than sweat your ass off. It is exactly the kind of place I would have loved years ago. The kind of gym I have been a member of in the past. However, after being downsized and then downsizing my life, I’ve been learning to live with less. And not only have I learned to live with less, I have come to enjoy having less and yoga has been a big part of that journey.

My gym, the dolphin on east 4^th street between First and Second Avenues is exactly the place I would have cringed at in earlier years. It’s a tiny bare bones muscle gym. Where Dolphin is the gym equivalent of 5 immigrants living in a studio apartment Equinox on 76th street is the gym equivalent to Graceland.

You’d think I’d have been happy to be in this South Fork Plantation after so much time of slumming it. But I missed my little gym where the form follows function theory of design is truly applied. Where nothing was designed that wasn’t necessary. And in many ways I believe that that’s what yoga is about. About simplicity, stripping away what’s on the outside to get to the inside and of course the hope of one day successfully doing a headstand.

While the yoga teacher, in between jokes of how hung-over Alice was, yammered on about finding our light, polishing it and then letting it shine even brighter than it had in the past, I missed my yoga teacher Sylvia. Sylvia does not encourage talking during the class, she speaks in a low voice and if we do end up laughing because she occasionally says right hand when she means left and people are futilely trying to perform physically impossible poses, she redirects our focus to where it should be, on being centered and quiet and within.

And then something happens. On the basement level of a dingy gym, without too much talking of light and polishing anything off, in a poorly ventilated room filled with old yoga mats, and occasional condensation dripping down from the ceiling, you have your own spiritual experience.

Sometimes I cry in yoga. I strain to hold a pose and as the physical seems impossible to endure, the tears well up in my eyes and roll down one cheek or the other. Though I’ve never noticed it happen to anyone else in any yoga class I’ve ever been in, my teacher says it’s quite common. “You’re working stuff out”. Shit. If I haven’t figured it out by now there’s little hope I ever will. I’m not sure what’s scarier, the fact that I cry in yoga with no emotional prompting or the fact that I don’t even know what I cry about when it happens. I barely cry in therapy, (I hear all you out there thinking, yeah, that’s why you need it).

Then at the end of yoga, something else happens. As I lay there in final relaxation pose, feet mat width distance apart, arms to the side palms facing up, I get the distinct feeling that I am the patient in that game operation. Anesthetized by my own fatigue, I lay there and wonder if there is a doctor with a very steady hand out there about to fix what I don’t even know is wrong with me.