Yoga and me

My new yoga book instructs me to lie on my belly, and be a beached elephant seal, wallowing in the sun. Right, I think. This is my kind of exercise.

Not something I think often. I'm not athletic. Some people are. I have a photo of my sister and step-dad side by side, standing broad and bronzed and grinning, each resting tennis racket on the jut of hipbone. My sister is graceful and strong. She can run a mile, swing a golf club, pound a nail.

Me, on the other hand: it's been awhile since I saw my hipbones, or since anything about me could be said to jut. My beauty is more like late Henry Moore: all roundness and curve. I can find constellations, do math in my head, and write. But at sports, I've been hopeless for years.

I played softball -- and batted .023 in my last season. I bowled -- my high score was in the 30's. I was better at golf if I picked up the ball and threw it. The first day of my cross-country track training, the coach took us out three miles from the school and dropped us off. He came to look for me eventually.

I've won exactly two athletic awards in my life. One was on that cross country team: at the end of the year, I was voted most improved runner. It was true, too: they didn't have to come looking for me at all.

But my first triumph came when gymnastics class held a contest to see who could hold a back bend the longest. This was back when I bent: I was six or seven. My body had yet to fail me. I held that back bend for what seemed like hours. It was just, it seemed to me, a matter of patience. With the heels of my hands pressed to the ground by my toes, my head hanging, I waited. My mom came to pick me up but I made her wait. The room turned pink, then red. I watched the other girl who was hanging in there. My black leotard had a white x sewn in the back collar so I would get it on the right way round, and the x itched. But I ignored it -- no pain, no gain -- and I won.

My body back then -- when I was that little, I was my body. Later, I developed a notion that I was some kind of alien, and my body was just borrowed, and didn't suit me very well. But back then, I had a one-piece body, like a kid's bathing suit, long before I fell apart, as so many women do, into breasts and stomach and thighs.

Anyway, yoga. In my studio this morning, I became an elephant seal. It was a good fit. Possibly my fellow aliens should have made me an elephant seal to start with. I lay on my sleek soft tummy and breathed big animal breaths. And then, the strangest thing happened: I stopped being an elephant seal, and for a moment, I was my body. I became at home in myself in a way I haven't been since I was five years old.

It was just a moment: my own wonder shook me loose from the deliciousness of just being. Wow, I thought. I should have taken up yoga long ago. Then, of course, I remembered why I hadn't.

The first time I took up yoga, it was at a doctor's suggestion: I needed to manage the pain associated with a brain tumour. It worked, too. The yoga let me not into my body, but out of it. For a moment, I could be a bridge, a staff. A warrior. All of which, I thought, beat being an oncology patient. Yoga let me out of the sense of wrongness that is the worst part of pain: the sense that you shouldn't be feeling this, that something is terribly wrong, that you are wrong, not what you should be. Yoga let me feel pain as animals must: just feeling it, that's all. Pain without suffering.

After I got past
the tumour, I gave up yoga, along with most everything else that reminded me of that time: eyebrow pencils, soy milk, and the city of Minneapolis. But that was all six years ago. It may be that I'm ready to come back. Come to think of it, I did by an eyebrow pencil recently. The last time I tried yoga, I was able to become something else, but I never found the other side of the transformation: the coming back to the self. It's time to look for it.

It's a slow thing, but I'm finding that I can delight in my body, can live in it like a good house, and be at home. I'm not a yogi and probably never will be, but I can touch my toe to my nose, and I can stand on one foot away from the wall. I'm slowly beginning to see what I can't do is just the outer edge of what I can. And within that boundary, there's a great field. I've been there, all my life, but I've always been pushing there at the edge. It's time to make myself at home. Time to turn my back to the fence and walk in the tall grasses, towards the one great tree.