8. Stretch Goals
Dearest Family and Friends,
December draws to a close, and with it my aspirations for 2025. I didn’t lose the weight I had hoped to lose; I will drag seven unwanted pounds into the new year unless the basal metabolism fairy pays me a surprise visit in the next few days. I didn’t become enlightened either. Becoming enlightened during 2025 was my stretch goal and I wasn't even close. Too much desire and too little kindness. I should be thankful I wasn’t done away with entirely and reincarnated as a hungry ghost or a toaster oven. I will reuse those two resolutions next year; they are untouched and good as new.
I am checking off one promise I made to myself last January — take a challenging class. For me, this will be group yoga, a stretch goal of a different sort. In fact, I just entered a large exercise room where my class is about to begin. The room is part of the fitness facility attached to Berkeley’s historic Claremont Hotel, three blocks from my home. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors cover two adjacent walls. The remaining walls boost shelving that holds weights and bands and rubber balls and other exercise accessories.
My first thought, even before class begins, is that the mats on the floor have been placed too close to one another. I select an inconspicuous pad next to a wall, but someone will still occupy the adjacent mat, hearing me grunt and watching me struggle. And when I topple sideways in the middle of Tree Pose, which is inevitable, I will take down my entire row like a collapsing cascade of dominoes and everyone will look straight at me on the far end of a tangled line of bodies, sprawled on top of my neighbor, wearing a silly grin that doesn’t begin to hide my horror.
Why am I doing this?
Our instructor is a wiry middle-aged woman with that distinctive sing-song yoga-teacher voice that lulls students into a relaxed state. Most students, that is, but not me. I know yoga is nothing to relax about. Yoga is pain and humiliation. This instructor — like all yoga teachers — learned her craft at an unmarked CIA rendition facility deep in the Yemeni desert. I am not fooled by her mellifluous voice. She will usher me into a world of hurt.
You, my reader, may wonder why I have such a dim view of yoga. I will tell you: I have been here before. Not here in this particular class, but here in group yoga. That class — my last before the one that is about to begin — took place in 1998, more than a quarter of a century ago. My memory of that lesson is fresh and crisp and floods my mind. Disquieting experiences have a way of doing that — sticking around instead of fading away.
My 1998 yoga class was held in the multipurpose room of the Zen Buddhist Temple on Packard Street in Ann Arbor. It was December, same as now. The sun had just set. Beyond the window I could see outlines of wet snow hugging dark tree limbs. A real wood fire popped and hissed in a rectangular fireplace that projected into the center of the room. Everyone lay on thick mats spread around the floor. The cozy scene reminded me of nap time in first grade.
Yoga began in the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago as a spiritual practice. The word "yoga" in Sanskrit referred to "yoking" or harnessing oneself to a devotional path that included meditation and other rituals. It wasn’t difficult physically. People enjoyed it. The abusive forms of Yoga we associate with fitness first appeared in the West in the 1930s, along with the Hindenburg explosion, Great Depression, and other errors of human history.
The instructor in my 1998 class was also a wiry middle-aged woman. Her program began innocently enough. (They always do.) We started in Downward Dog and were encouraged to pause and feel the energy in our liver moving down through our hands and communicating with Mother Earth. This was a revelation to me because I had seen my share of livers as a pathologist and none of them had ever communicated with me about anything. Not one. Perhaps I didn’t take the time to listen. Men sometimes do that, or so I am told.
We were then taken through a series of poses that everyone else in the room seemed to know — Mountain, Eagle, Crow. I didn’t know any of them and I had to turn my head to imitate what our instructor was doing, which caused me to lose my balance. I fell further and further behind with each pose and grew increasingly frustrated. I was just working myself into Warrior One while the rest of the class was moving out of Warrior Two and into something new.
The class then assumed a pose called Pigeon, which is a hopeless proposition in which the hip has an existential crisis while the rest of the body tries to maintain its dignity. To get into Pigeon start on hands and knees and bend one knee inward under your torso while laying the rest of your body down on top of your bent leg. If you have ever disarticulated a chicken hip prior to ripping off the thigh, that is basically what you do to yourself to get into Pigeon, but you have to do it while pretending to be “releasing tension” rather than creating it. It must have taken me ten minutes to get into some semblance of Pigeon. Everyone else had long since moved on, but I was determined. When I was almost where I needed to be, my body involuntarily rotated — I am not sure exactly how — and I ended up with my nose pressing firmly into my yoga mat. I tried to rotate back, but couldn’t. I tried to move my legs, but every effort I made to extricate myself from Pigeon was intensely painful. I was stuck.
The room was eerily quiet; the embers in the dying fire were silent and I couldn’t hear anyone breathing. Had everyone left the room? Was class over? I imagined my body would be found in the morning by a monk coming to straighten up. He would consult with the head monk and together they would summon the police. I needed to act now, but when I tried to turn to see if there was anyone who could help me I couldn’t lift my head off the mat. Embarrassingly, I was rescued by a nearby student who recognized my predicament and was kind enough to untangle me, but not kind enough to hide her grin of amusement.
Now, twenty-five years later I am at it again, for reasons that escape me. Am I trying to work through my trauma and put this memory to rest? If so, I am failing. Our instructor is encouraging us to leave our daily worries by the door and to be fully present, but I am not present. I am judging, defensively scanning her words for statements I can mock. I try to stop doing this, but instead of becoming “present” I end up judging my judgements, like an appellate court — a second order transgression. I am assuredly not in the moment. My moment, if I ever had one, was left behind hours ago. And now I am writing this blog entry in my head — writing about me judging my judgments. This is the third derivative of being present. I’m so un-present that they are going to kick me out of California and send me back to the Midwest if I don’t improve my attitude.
2026 will be better. I promise. It has nowhere else to go.
Paul
P.S.
