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