the habit of being

I tried to get a third bottle of wine on the way to the subway but it was after eleven and the store was closed. I wound up getting tonic and lemon from the bodega and a takeaway bag full of ice from the Bageltique in Park Slope, to go with the Sapphire Calgary stole from one of the million restaurant jobs she kept losing last year when everything was shittier than it is now and we used to go to the Magician for happy hour and one of us always got sick. We took their two bottles of white and the gin and the tonic and a corkscrew and a blanket and a thermos full of ice and my backpack and a computer and a camera and sweaters for if it got cold and a book to stick in the door so we weren’t locked on the roof. They poured the wine and I poured a very strong G&T because it was dark and I couldn’t see. Calgary taught me how to do kung-fu kicks and we talked about sex. Sex we’re not having and sex are having with people we shouldn’t be and sex we’ve had and sex we want to have and how bad kissers are just not worth the effort. We laughed and laughed and took pictures with the flash and the Manhattan lights were blurry and Carrie finally gave in and peed on the roof next door. We were 23 and almost-25 and almost-27. By two in the morning I was demonstrating yoga adjustments I learned in teacher training in 2003 and Calgary took pictures of me pressing on Carrie’s hipbones and she asked when it was her turn and apologized for not having shaved in a while. I wanted to get a bagel from the Bageltique which is open 24 hours but there was still another bottle. The computer took pictures of us and there was one spot where we could check our email, especially if I used my leg as an antenna. At one point Calgary said hey we’re having a good time, I’ve never had a group of friends. And I wasn’t sure three qualified as a group but we decided it did. Tomorrow we can get a manicure I kept saying. There’s this place on Christopher Street where there are manicures for $8.50. When we went downstairs it was after four and we needed to do handstands against the wall in the kitchen and that was when we realized how drunk we actually were. All three of us got up though. It was decided that I couldn’t go back to the West Village and we were having a slumber party and Carrie said I think I might take a shower and then the water was running. I still wanted a bagel but no one wanted to go to the Bageltique anymore so Calgary made me a minibagel with soy cream cheese but at first she didn’t turn on the oven. When she got out of the shower Carrie blew up the air mattress and gave me some yoga pants to wear and fell asleep in a heap. It was five and Calgary and I set two alarms for noon because she had to leave for the restaurant at 2:30 and we both went to sleep in Carrie’s bed. We got up at 10 or 11 and we were all hungover and hungry and Calgary took pictures of me and Carrie with rashyboo hair and sleepy eyes and it was Sunday so we needed vegan brunch. We decided to go to this place in the East Village which meant we had to go on the train and walk a ways and I kept asking are we there yet and then we almost didn’t know where it was but then we did. We had a cute waiter who was slow with the coffee and we all ordered the breakfast burrito with tofu scramble and vegetables and beans and guacamole and also the virgin sangria. Carrie couldn’t eat all of hers because she has a small stomach but Calgary and I did an impressive job considering the burrito was huge. Afterwards it was raining and we didn’t have an umbrella and Carrie forgot her leftovers but didn’t go back because that would be embarrassing. We weren’t far from my new favorite bus, the M8 that goes from the West Village to the East, which I had just learned about from Calgary who looked it up for me so I could come study with her at Sympathy for the Kettle. We found the M8 and got on it and they got off at St. Mark’s Bookshop and I went home to my apartment and it stopped raining and by then it was afternoon.

We were sitting after yoga and I was see-through. My skin was gone. I had my eyes closed and then I opened them and it was still the same. The room was dark and there were other people sitting and I was transparent.

The teacher said follow your breath but I couldn’t. I was barely breathing. I didn’t need to breathe because I didn’t have any skin and all the air was already inside. There was nothing between me and the air. It was inside me and outside me and in the other people sitting, all at the same time. I didn’t need to do anything about that.

I sat there and tried not to think of how I could not feel my hands or my arms or my legs or anything at all except the air. Then I started to get dizzy.

By the time we chanted “Aum” I was feeling downright sick. I wasn’t transparent anymore. I stayed on my mat for a long time after class was over.

When I changed out of my yoga clothes there was a mirror. I looked in it and smiled. I was very beautiful. The other people changing were very beautiful too. It was all the same beauty.

Amazingly, only a year ago, the studio where I work still rented a reception room at the Church of the Holy City - a beautiful room with big open windows on three sides and dark creaky wood floors. On Sundays, we’d have to kick old Mexican women having tea in their stockings and hats out of there so we could start class on time. Sometimes at night there were loud revivals with live music, the Gospel in Spanish blaring over a microphone out of the sactuary with its stained glass and impossibly high ceiling, into the yoga room, drowning out our pseudo-Indian Krishna Das and Deva Premal CDs.

Couples came in wanting to know how much it cost to rent the chapel for their wedding, and I’d have to explain that I didn’t actually work for the church, but since there was no other authority figure there, I’d show them around. The windows. The spiral staircases. Sometimes drunk homeless men came in looking for the minister. One such fellow walked past me at the desk and right into the middle of a yoga class, asking for coffee. Then there was “the stroker,” who liked to reveal himself outside the windows for all the lovely yoginis to see. And the kids who just threw rocks, leaving shards of glass to pepper our sticky mats.

The “boutique” was a rolling rack of logo tee shirts and yoga pants that always collapsed halfway between the closet where it was stored and the office, which was a library of old misogynist religous texts with a large desk. We kept a “change owed” log for clients when we ran out of small bills, and we kept people’s class histories on a rolodex. Sometimes in the winter the heat wouldn’t come on and we’d practice in 40 degree weather, and in summer we had bug spray available at the front desk. We made tea using water from the bathroom sink. We had to work the class times around the church schedule, but at maximum it was about twenty a week, and they were almost all packed.

I became the Assistant to the Director just as we signed the lease on what we then called the New Space - a permanent home with two studios, a tea lounge, a real office and boutique. The plan had been to move in January first, 2003. It took until June.

Getting a Certificate of Occupancy in the District of Columbia is not an easy thing. We had electrical inspections, plumbing inspections, fire inspections. They made us build new walls, install new doors, new toilets, a new “mop sink.” We had to clean, paint, build, decorate, transfer years of files into our new computer database, a program called OmSoft (straight out of California and especially for yoga studios, it’s as flakey and unreliable as you could possibly imagine). There were massive trips to Target, Linens and Things, Walmart, hundreds of dollars spent. It was a time of constant transit between the church, where we were still operating business, the owner’s home, and the New Space, where we were setting up everything as fast as we could, only to run into more and more problems with the building that needed to be addressed.

My boss and I broke down in tears together. I hauled bottled water from the New Space to the Church in my old hitch-hiking backpack, covered with signatures from around the country, and they’d fall out and roll down the street. She called me at all hours of the day; insisted I have a cell phone. I was making eight bucks an hour and could barely pay my rent. We held teacher training and workshops at the Space on the sly. It was so long between our “Open House” party and the time we were actually cleared to open for business, we had to have another one. But, somehow, with our gay male yogis trying to be manly and build us shoe racks, me with my pink hair even pinker from all the pastel paint going up on the walls, Kimberly holding back tears while talking to the DC government on the phone, it all worked out. Though in many ways things only got more stressful from there.

Now there are over 40 classes a week, many more students, programs and teams and managers and policies too numerous to count. We were mentioned in Lucky magazine last month. Students keep bar codes on their key chains, which we zap with scanners to sign them in. Teachers are starting to plug their iPods into our stereo systems to use favorite playlists during class. Things have changed so much, and though I’ve had a role to play in the studio’s success, it just makes me sad sometimes to see it become so obviously a business.

Yoga is supposed to be a “union with the divine,” not a commodity surrounded by promotional materials and overpriced clothes. I thought working for a yoga studio would take me just about as far from a corporate or capitalist environment as possible (while still earning me a paycheck), and to a large degree that is still true and always will be. All this time, my work day has begun with brewing herbal tea. I’m not allowed to wear shoes in my office. We’ve donated to countless charitable causes. Everyone who comes in knows my name. At the same time, one can’t escape the reality that we’re playing the same game as every other company out there. The game just seems lot more ironic in the yoga business.

I got up at seven yesterday to attend a workshop with Uma Nanda Saraswati, daughter of Sharon Gannon and David Life, founders of the Jivamukti Yoga Center in New York. I never get up at seven. Not during the week, and especially not on Saturday. I walked to the workshop, which has held at Georgetown University, in the rain, and my broken umbrella didn’t help much, flopping up and down with each step. I arrived damp and matless, having accidentally left mine at Tranquil Space after the meditation workshop the night before. I was the first person there. I borrowed a mat from the host studio. I was happy.

Uma Saraswati is very pretty. She is tiny, with very long dark hair, immaculate eyebrows, a million earrings, clear skin, piercing eyes. You can tell she’s been practicing yoga her whole life. I was told once that you can tell if you’re progressing in your yoga practice because your voice improves. Hers is gorgeous, confident, clear. Her presence is radiant, joyful. She is easy to adore, even while lecturing in no uncertain terms that there is no way to acheive liberation while eating a non-vegetarian diet and that an asana practice performed without the right intention is not yoga.

I’ve never felt very comfortable talking, or even writing, about God or spirituality. It seems silly and pretentious to me to even try to express these things in words. While I won’t deny that I think about religion, that I’m fascinated by it, and that I was even considering majoring in Religious Studies, discussing theories in an intellectual way and talking about your own personal experience of the divine are two completely different things. I am not confident in my understanding. I worry that it is just ridiculous of me to go around with Sanskrit chants to Krishna, Rama, Govinda, and Ganesha stuck in my head. I worry that I don’t have a good enough answer when people ask me why I want to teach yoga. And I worry about the fact that while I’m not very secure talking about liberation, enlightenment, samadhi, I’ll get up at seven in the morning on a Saturday to experience being near someone who is.

I worry that it’s just like all the bad relationships I’ve been in.. that it’s the same desire to just have someone else figure it out for me and tell me what I have to do in order to be a Good Person, so I won’t have to feel so guilty anymore. When I think about the Jivamukti Yoga Center, it really is like thinking about a lover I wish I could drop all the rest of my life to run away to. I’d be so much happier if I could just go back to New York and practice at Jivamukti every day.

And then there’s If I could only come up with $5000 to do Jivamukti teacher training, then I’d really be able to teach someone something.

And the absolute worst I wish I had another Jivamukti tee-shirt, so everyone would know how serious I am about my practice.

But maybe that’s a little extreme, and, honestly, I felt so wonderful after Uma’s workshop I couldn’t have really cared less about the possibility of innate hypocracy in my having paid $60 for it. Her asana sequencing was balanced and fun, she constantly brought back in themes of kindness, compassion, devotion, finding one’s art and being truly passionate about it, unselfishness… She encouraged us to enjoy our practice, and to tackle difficult asanas with a sense of light-heartedness. She gave me a helpful assist in bird of paradise pose and actually stood on my thighs in baddha konasana, which felt wonderful. The workshop was 3 hours long, and ended with what must have been at least 15-20 minutes in savasana, which brought up all sorts of wonderful warm sensations. I remember at one point feeling so deeply still and relaxed I couldn’t remember where my left arm was. I believe she gave every person in the room a savanasa assist (head and neck massage), and there were probably 50 people there. I went up and thanked her afterwards and she gave me a big hug, and I saw her do the same with several other students.

While maybe the idea of Jivamukti seems kindof phony and a bit cultish, you really can’t deny that the teachers there really are inspirational. They’re getting yogis to really look into the spiritual roots of their discipline, telling them it’s just not enough to have a nice-looking downward-facing dog pose. They’re making it hip to know Sanskrit and to read the Yoga Sutras, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. Even if that does kindof pervert something which should have nothing to do with “image,” it still seems better than using what was once a dignified practice to achieve the state of a nice ass. Maybe the ends justify the means, in this case. I know I’m definitely not the only person who’s ever stopped eating meat after a class with Sharon and David. I guess in the end, these people are activists. They have a cause, and they’re doing everything they can to spread their message. Our society makes it pretty impossible to reach a large audience without using the tools of the trade. You can’t sell “liberation” in America without giving it a brand name. As far as brands go, Jivamukti’s not a bad one.

lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu!

If you drink in the same house with others, but you don’t speak to any of them, is it the same as drinking alone? Does that make it wrong? Perhaps I should forgo the tonic run in favor of the keyboard - my original plan for the evening anyway, before I went to sleep at five in the afternoon, listening to thunder crashes and wishing the rest of the world might sleep too. I roused myself at nine, and reminded myself that after three hours and nearly $200 at the salon yesterday, I have very nearly the hair I have always wanted, and that should make a great difference in my life somehow, shouldn’t it? I also bought one of Kundera’s novels I’ve never read and The Artist’s Way at the charity used book sale for a buck each. Not that I don’t already have a pile of half-read and need-to-read books next to the bed, and the Japanese brush painting kit, and the 150 very small sheets of origami paper, the inch and a half thick September Vogue, the diary entries I haven’t typed up, the books to bind, and other projects contingent on my being home and planless and awake and not too depressed or uninspired to do something other than sit around thinking about how I don’t write enough/well enough/anything meaningful and how I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life, last some vague New York epiphany about how I could just keep studying the things I’m “studying” now (writing, yoga, Buddhism, etc) in college.

Monday night was Sex and the City, passed notes, Greek salad, and looking at teenage ice skating photos. Tuesday night was a non-corporate coffee shop, a massage, an attempt to spice up my sex life, reading Yoga Journal in the morning. Wednesday night was the Tori Amos concert, the third I’ve had tickets to and the first I’ve actually been able to attend. I know we’re not supposed to like her anymore, but I knew the words to every song she played, and sat there drenched and happy, feeling like a genuine long-time fan, quietly singing along. Thursday night I ate some sad egg noodles with Prego sauce, hormonal and pissy, my 1920’s finger waves mostly destroyed by a sweaty yoga 3 class all of an hour after I left the hairdresser, and felt better almost immediately after getting the hell out of his apartment around eleven, though I neither explained myself nor had much desire to have him understand my many and varied discontents. Tonight I slept, drank some raspberry vodka, was decidedly antisocial. Tomorrow, there’s sushi and a lesbian club. Such is life after returning from New York. The coming weeks promise long hours at the studio, and hopefully some much needed frugality after the insane spending I’ve indulged in these last few. I record these mundane things because someday they will interest me greatly?