This is the 21st installment of Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. I’m so grateful to you for giving this email a chance and continuing to read it. If you know an existing or would-be athlete, a creative person, or anyone who believes reality arises from stories we make, please forward this to them. And if you’ve received this email from someone else, please sign up to get ’em all. The full series is here.
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Yoga is one of those things for which there are a million definitions and a lot of them are right. The definition I will give it is: the practice of, just for right now, taking up one’s embodiment as the only object of concern.
People were telling me I would love yoga at least since I was 20 but … I didn’t. I understood the pitch: flexibility, ritual, balance, peace. But I am six-foot-three, and I think my hamstrings were switched at birth with someone who is three-foot-six. Fully straightening my legs, much less bending over them to touch my toes, is a physiological no-go. I never had much core strength or the appetite for building it. And my sense of balance was a thing of renown, in that it so often sent me flying off a bicycle.
But actually it was the bike injuries that opened the door to yoga. Do enough physical therapy and you’re going to emerge with some improvements in flexibility, balance, and core strength. Not enough to make an hourlong exploration of these qualities pleasant or desirable. Just to make it something you don’t immediately, reflexively, uncontrollably run from. And the not running from it? That is, as they say, the yoga.
It happened in a very low-key class on Sundays at 4 p.m. in a room in the Flatiron district which, as my gym modernized over the years, has changed into the glossy interior of a spaceship. Back then it was more homely, and we would spread out our mats and Brian, the teacher, would ask every single person in the class to introduce themselves and tell everybody else what was wrong with their body that day: head, shoulders, knees, toes, whatever. I was trying to get back into marijuana, which for years after college had made me catastrophically anxious, and I found that getting just a little bit high and going to that happy little class provided a ritual transition from the weekend to the week. It also introduced me to some elementary postures of yoga: spinal twists, backbends and forward bends, planks, push-ups, shoulder extensions, deliberate rest.
One of the things that’s always struck me about that time is how much it felt like yoga was pulling me toward it—when I was finally ready, and in fact very much in need—and not the other way around. Once it had got me in its grasp, it tugged me down to SoHo, to my still-favorite room in New York—floor-to-ceiling sash windows looking out on a big swath of sky, framed by buildings handsome as the minor gods—and to Stephanie, who took my gentle foundation and started shaping upon it a yogi. “Breathe in,” she would say, at times severely. “Breathe out.” And with a martial, dancing commitment she wedded the cardinal elements of yoga: breathing, movement, atmosphere. This class, too, was on Sunday evenings, and for the ex-Mormon whose grief about the loss of that tradition had never fully resolved, it was a holy observance.
The yogic pull then took me to Bee’s class in a seminal blizzard, Bee who carved into my brain as she said, “When you soften, the world around you softens.” To Cooper’s, where the enlightened himself administered ab torture. To Kajuan’s, where we danced in seventeen dimensions. To the Chrises’, where we chatted with toucans and savasana’ed in the afternoon rain. To Ariel’s, where my ex and I would fall out of pose after pose, giggling too hard not to break our necks. To Melinda’s, a changeless and brutal traverse: “Let’s begin at the top of the mat.” To Johan’s, week after week the same laconic affair until he said like a French savant, “This energy today: If something in your life is unresolved, it’s the kind of day to take care of it.” To Nick’s, where we practice refinement and practice it again on the other side, and repeat. To Marina’s, lit by a soul, perfectly serious, whose brightness blankets the whole East Coast.
Some credible people think it’s physical matter that arises from a substrate of consciousness, and not the other way around, and for various reasons I am sympathetic to this view. Yoga stuck at first because it provided me with relief from physical pain and anxiety; it opened the way to ease. And then when that way was more open than it had been, it helped keep it there. But it has stayed in my life, I think, because I kept finding more teachers who understood, and could express each in their own ways, the astonishing fact that for this vanishing moment we are material. The teacher who can help you to strip away everything else and just see clearly that you’re, holy shit, a body: That person is, to borrow a word from my upbringing, a prophet.
Yesterday, I started the training to become a yoga teacher. I don’t think it’s what I’ll do full-time, because I hope to make a go of it as a writer and that’s a time-consuming business of its own. But the thing about yoga pulling me to it more than the opposite is still true; it’s stayed true this whole time. The thing about stepping onto the mat is that you leave everything else behind, for a while; it becomes a life of its own. As if you were camping on an island, the rest of the world can snap into clarity—not by reordering the pieces you know about so much as by introducing a few you haven’t picked up on. These sorts of revelations, the new arrivals, are my favorite. They have a tendency to change everything.
Coming Tuesday: Water.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.