A few weeks ago, New York Magazine ran a cover story entitled “Yoga Now,” which purported to follow the author’s personal yoga journey after the events of September 11. Yes, you read that correctly. “Personal yoga journey.” The resulting article is pretty much the navel-gazing, disorganized mess you’d expect. Vanessa Grigoriadis’s personal yoga journey is probably fascinating — for her. For the reader, said journey alternates between arbitrary and boring, consisting primarily as it does of unconsidered confessions about tree pose, interviews with Russell Simmons, and “observations” (read: sneering) about how the post-terrorist-attack classes at Jivamukti have gotten too crowded with non-Paltrow proletarians. According to the piece, Grigoriadis used to attend two- and three-hour yoga classes daily, toting her mat around with her and evangelizing about “the lifestyle” to the point where her friends thought she’d joined a cult. She claims to have put that behind her, but the admiring account of her former yoga instructor, Kelly, barking at students to “commit to the posture” leads me to believe otherwise. The whole thing befuddled me — why had New York run the piece at all? The promised insights into the city’s changed yoga scene never arrived; the article had about as much point (not to mention narrative skill) as a journal entry, and I don’t pay for a subscription so that I can workshop eight pages of Iowa-School-esque musing on “getting centered.” Who could possibly care about Vanessa Grigoriadis’s personal yoga journey except Vanessa Grigoriadis?

The basic uselessness of the article got on my nerves, really, not the fact that Grigoriadis takes yoga so very, very seriously — but the taking of yoga so very, very seriously mystifies me. I practice yoga myself, at home, and I enjoy it. I get the breathing and the releasing and the unlocking and all of that; I understand how yoga works, and what attracts people to yoga as a discipline. But certain elements of yoga defy my attempts to treat it with any sort of gravity.

Elements like, say, downward-facing dog. For those of you not familiar with yoga postures, downward-facing dog is like an inverted V — the arms and back form one stroke, the legs form the other stroke, and the butt is the point of the V. So the butt sticks up into the air. Straight up. All alone, the butt. In the air. For minutes on end. I grew up in a family that punctuated any form of bending over, by anyone — other family members, characters in TV shows, complete strangers at the mall — with a fart noise, followed by illicit snorfled laughter appropriate to a third-grade field trip. An ass in the air is like a lightning rod for immature tittering. It’s one of the many reasons that I do yoga in the comfort and safety of my apartment and not in a class setting; presented with twenty other butts held resolutely aloft, I don’t think I could resist the urge to press my lips together and conjure up a mouse poon. And what if a yoga practitioner actually does float an air biscuit? It happened to me earlier today. I transitioned from upward-facing dog to downward-facing dog, settled into the pose, and promptly farted — and not in a subtle ffffooooffpfpt fashion, either, but in a nice loud ladies-and-gentlemen-back-by-popular-demand-rice-and-beans bbbppppppttt! way. Nothing punches a hole in a meditative state more effectively than flawlessly timed flatus, and I can’t focus on my breathing and guffaw at the same time.

Many of the poses have humor built right in, actually. In half-camel pose, you start in a kneeling position and do a back bend with your hands on your heels so that you look like…well, duh, a camel. Every time I enter half-camel pose, I think of the song Ernie and I used to sing in college when one of us donned a push-up bra, to the tune of “Meet The Mets”: “Meet my breasts, meet my breasts, come on out and GREET my breasts!” I mean, talk about a lightning rod…well, it’s more like “a lightning blob,” what with the sports bra, but you get the idea. I can’t take triangle pose that seriously, either, because it reminds me of the time Bounder and Mr. Bounder and the Biscuit and I went to the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford and clowned around taking pictures of ourselves imitating various statues, and there’s one picture of Bounder pretending that she’s about to spear something and Mr. Bounder laughing too hard to pretend that he’s about to spear something and the Biscuit off to the side not knowing that he’s supposed to pretend that he’s about to spear something while wearing a pointedly droll pair of Ambervision sunglasses, and I can’t help feeling a little bit silly. I don’t look like a triangle, for God’s sake; I look like a girl in a bleach-spotted Count Chocula shirt and sweatpants, looking up at her hand and snickering because her mind, far from achieving a state of stillness, has skipped back to the time that Mr. Bounder peered into a Roy Rogers bag and exclaimed, “Hey, a curly fry!” in a tone of childlike joy so hilarious that we all laughed until we cried. I have the same problem with proud warrior pose. “Proud warrior”? Me? With my quadriceps muscles emitting a twanging noise audible in neighboring apartments? Against what, exactly, do I make war in that pose — the threadbare remains of my dignity?

I guess I don’t breathe properly or concentrate hard enough. It’s not my impression that I should think about vacations I took to California years ago while attempting to emulate a cobra. But I can’t help it; my mind just…wanders off, twirling its hair around its finger, probably because it doesn’t want to deal with what’s happening to my hamstrings at the same time. Not that much happens to my hamstrings, really; my hamstrings have about as much give as steel rebar, and one hamstring is less flexible than the other. I don’t know why. I can sort of do a one-legged forward bend with my right leg out, but then it’s time to switch to the left leg, and it’s like that joke they used to trot out on The Monkees when one of the other guys would yell at Davy Jones to stand up and he’d say, “I am standing up.” If I can get my torso and my left leg to a ninety-degree angle, it’s a good day, and it looks like I’m just sitting there when actually it requires every ounce of pain-management effort for me even to sit up straight in that pose. The breathing helps a bit when I try to stretch, but I inevitably start obsessing about the breathing itself — the sound it makes — and that’s good, but not the way I do it, because first I’ll notice a little whistling as I breathe through my nose, and then I’ll think to myself, “That’s really more of a wheeze than a whistle…it’s wheezing. Oh my God, it’s wheezing. I’ve never heard a sound like that before. It’s the sound of death, obviously. Obviously, I have nose cancer; obviously, I am going to die of nose cancer. Of course! Of course I am. What a perfectly unbecoming end to a perfectly unbecoming life. Yep, there I’ll be, flat on my back in a hospital bed, tubes stuffed up my — well, stuffed up something besides my nose, which they’ll have amputated already, dying the exact opposite of a beautiful wasting Ali MacGraw death, rasping at my friends to stop and smell the roses because one day you might not have a nose sonny boy and Jesus Christ what is that sound? It’s like a goddamn York Peppermint Patty ad up there! Maybe I should just stop and blow my nose. Okay, after this set of sun salutations, I’m blowing my nose. But then I’ll have to start all over, right? You can’t just stop in the middle, can you? It’s like saying ‘hel…’ to the sun and then just walking away, kind of. Right? George Harrison would have kept going. Hey, did they figure out what became of his ashes yet? I mean, not that I care and I don’t understand why it’s even considered a news story — and you know what else is weird? Now that he’s dead, almost nobody is mentioning the ‘My Sweet Lord’ plagiarism business, like it’s disrespectful or something? I’ll bet Rolling Stone mentions it. I don’t have time to read Rolling Stone right now, I haven’t even finished last week’s — oh crap, I have to go to the post office today. Did I remember to buy black tights?” Welcome to my mind at its most serene and still. Seriously. That’s as yogic as it ever gets in there.

And I defy anyone to enter a deep meditative state of any sort in a studio apartment that also contains two cats. I have horrible balance to begin with. It took me weeks to get into tree pose and maintain it for more than a tenth of a second. I finally nailed it a couple of weeks ago, and no sooner had I found my stability point on the horizon and entered the posture than the Maharishi Mahesh Hobey strolled past and trailed his tail along the back of my knee and I windmilled for a second, squawked, “Hee hee hee GODDAMMIT,” and hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. Any sort of pose undertaken on the floor is undertaken with the “help” of at least one cat. I put my feet together in cobbler’s pose, and the cats see a lap and climb into it. The time in downward-facing dog that’s not occupied thinking about farts I spend looking at the cats walking around upside-down underneath me. Plank position, which I dislike because a newborn has better developed triceps than mine, is seen by the resident felines as the perfect time to hop up on my back and bathe.

In short, it’s a Cathy cartoon around here, yoga-wise. I don’t think I could ever take yoga as seriously as that New York magazine writer does, though, even under ideal conditions. It’s just so earnest sometimes, so hippie, so sincere about becoming one with the air and the earth, and I can’t respond to a vibe like that with any sincerity myself — it feels fake. My mind doesn’t work that way. I like yoga, and it relaxes me, but I don’t do melting and centering. I wish I could; I wish that whenever the cats and I have assumed corpse pose and Rodney Yee tells me to feel the bonds that hold me from the earth falling away, but unless Rodney Yee wants to come over here in his little black shorts and fill out my corporate tax return and maybe pitch in on some laundry, that’s just not going to happen.

December 10, 2001

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