Right before that first yoga class I had been at the Georgetown University debate team building. I had not been recruited to Georgetown for debate, and I had not even contacted the coach; I was planning to be a walk-on to the team. But first I showed up anonymously to check it out. Really, I think I just wanted to make a dramatic entrance when I finally announced to the coach and to the team my true identity as debate royalty (being debate champ of New Jersey is like being ice-dancing champ of Russia).
But, during my anonymous tour of the place, I was appalled. One of the debaters, who resembled Draco Malfoy in every way, showed me around and informed me, “No one walks onto the Georgetown debate team.” Then I sat with Coach Snape and learned that debate team at Georgetown was a full-time gig and that the people I met, including Severus and Draco, would be my new family.
Here’s a transcript of my thoughts as I left the meeting to rush off to my first yoga class:
“I was debate champ of New Jersey, for sobbing out loud. I have to join.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“You have to. There are expectations. And you’re very good at it. ”
Enter Oskar in his sandals, beard, and all whites.
Yoga class began with the prayer of St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love” and ended with “Let there be peace on Earth. Let peace begin with me. Let there be peace on Earth, the peace that was meant to be.”
I imagine that these blessings were part of Georgetown’s compromise with Oskar in allowing him to teach yoga at a Jesuit school. For most of my yoga classmates, these prayers probably evoked thoughts of Easter bonnets and dusty church pews. But I had grown up Jewish and had never heard them before (I imagined they were straight from the Bhagavad Gita), so I heard them with fresh ears, and they, along with the yoga warm-ups, poses, and guided relaxation, awoke something in me. After forty minutes of breathing deeply and bending myself in all manner of new ways, I felt more relaxed and at ease than I could remember.
I felt like I was in exactly the right place. I had been faking it as a debater. Debate was work, and while I enjoyed the praise I received after winning, I had never enjoyed the actual debating. I don’t even like to argue.
Oskar’s yoga class touched the right chord and made my soul sing. I had signed up for yoga on a lark, but even in that first class, I knew what I had found.
Lying in relaxation pose at the end of class, I realized:
“This feels good.”
“I’m going to be doing this a lot.”
“Wow, I am not going to join the debate team.”
This was a telling moment of insight that describes how I have attempted to make decisions ever since. I seek not to decide but to relax and calm my mind enough to simply realize and feel the correct path before me. I know that this places me dangerously close to the decision-making behavior of an invertebrate, or even of George W. Bush, but I will clear that up later on.
I became a yoga zealot pretty quickly. I loved feeling, for the first time, the muscles between my ribs as I stretched in setu bandhasana (bridge pose). I loved the prayers — this was the first time I had taken seriously a charge to effect world peace — and I loved the relaxation. Oskar’s deep, euphonic voice soothed every muscle in my body, and when he said “relaaaax,” I melted.
One day after class I told Oskar about my colitis. He recommended that I practice “[insert deep, relaxing voice] moooola bannnda” sixty times a day. He explained, “Tense ouup and then relaaaax your anouuuse” thirty times every morning and thirty times every night.
Say again? Oskar had a pretty thick accent, and I was sure that I must have misheard him. He could not possibly have told me to tense and then relax my anus sixty times a day.
In fact, I doubt that I had ever, in my eighteen years, heard anyone speak about my anus at all before. Sure, I had heard the word used, but not in the context of my anus and certainly not by a bearded and sandaled yoga teacher dressed all in white.
Pursing my lips, squinting slightly, and bobbing my head like I was earnestly considering his wise counsel, I thanked him politely as I backed away. For days I shook my head and puzzled at what in the world he possibly could have said that sounded so much like anus.*
* There was no other explanation as to why a man at Georgetown would not be wearing either the 1980s-era exercise attire as described above or the requisite Georgetown men’s unofficial uniform of khaki pants, bucks, baseball cap, and tucked-in white, pink, or blue button-down shirt.
* Years later, in my studies of yoga, I learned of the bandhas, or “locks,” as they translate into English, and sure enough there was mula bandha, a practice of lifting the muscles in the pelvic floor, from pubis to rectum, as in Kegel exercises. And mula bandha, the book instructed, could be used therapeutically for, among other things, ailments of the gastrointestinal tract. So it happened that Oskar was, of course, spot-on!
All life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make the better.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal, November 11, 1842
Iwanted to practice and study yoga as much as possible, so I incorporated it into my Georgetown classes in every way that I could. For philosophy class, I wrote a paper entitled “Was Plato the Founder of Yoga?” (Unlike many modern philosophers, let’s say, for example, Woody Allen, Plato believed that a sound mind requires a sound body, and in fact, the word Plato means “broad shoulders.”) And for Catholic imagination class I wrote “Did Jesus Do Yoga?” (By the way, believe it or not, he did. Maybe. There is some pretty good evidence that sometime during his “lost years,” between the ages of twelve and thirty, Jesus might just possibly have journeyed to India and Tibet and intensively studied yoga and Buddhism.)
Sophomore year of college I moved with a bunch of friends into a house way off campus. To avoid the extra round-trips to school, I took a semester off from Oskar’s yoga at Yates and found a class right around the corner from my house. This class offered a different style of yoga, called Iyengar. Until then I had not imagined that there could be different schools of yoga. I thought, “Yoga is yoga, like basketball is basketball.”*
But I learned that Oskar taught a type of Sivananda yoga. A Sivananda yoga class includes a bit of everything: chant, breathing exercises, meditation, poses, relaxation. And if Sivananda yoga is the five-course meal, or even the buffet table of yoga, then Iyengar yoga is the curmudgeonly dietician who demands that you sit up straight while you chew.
My Iyengar yoga class