10. Consciousness Makes Such a Noise

“It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.” —Carl Jung

During Jen’s second yoga class the next Monday, she felt like she was experiencing a breakthrough. She arrived early, while Paula was still fiddling with the sign-in sheet. Carefully, Jen unrolled her mat and straightened it until it was perfectly aligned with the floorboards. Then she pulled her water bottle out of her oversized designer purse and placed it on the side of the mat. The water inside was cloudy, flavored with lemon juice from a bottle. She was saving her fresh lemons for salads and tea.

Normally she felt restless waiting for the class to start. The yoga classes were the highlight of her day; she would have gone three or four times a day if it were socially acceptable. But today, her patience felt boundless. She took great pleasure in setting up her little area, which, she thought pleasantly, would be her home for the next hour and forty-five minutes. What a comfortable place to spend this time, Jen thought. She leaned her bag against the wall, centered her feet on the mat, and lowered herself into a loose, comfortable forward bend.

Looking between her legs, Jen could see the upside-down image of a girl entering the room and setting her bag down next to Jen. Jen pulled herself deeper into the stretch and passively observed the girl as she unrolled her own mat. The girl’s manicured fingernails clicked against the wooden floor, and Jen caught a flash of the large, sparkly diamond on the tapered finger. She was an engaged girl, Jen thought, just like she herself had been not so many years ago, at probably around the same age. But she didn’t think any of her usual bitter, spiteful thoughts towards the girl. Thoughts like, any man who needs to mark you with such an enormous diamond will never be satisfied with just one woman, especially when you get older, and angrier, especially when you’ve had a few of his babies. Any man rich enough to buy you that diamond can afford to arrange feigned “business trips,” to spend weekends at such classy hotels that the other woman would never feel the least bit like a hooker.

Jen didn’t think those things now. The shadowy suggestion, the merest wisp of these thoughts entered her consciousness, but she knew from so much daily meditation to just let them float by, unrealized.

The girl turned her head towards Jen, showing a face lacquered in heavy but tasteful makeup. The girl was new to the class; still, Jen wondered whether she had seen her at the health club before. All the women at the club looked fundamentally the same. Some had light hair, some dark, some were white and others were Asian or Latina, and a very few were black, but all of them seemed to share the same expensive haircuts, fashionable workout clothes, tidy groomed fingernails and shiny, well-moisturized legs.

Until recently, Jen would have fit in well with this crowd. During the last month, however, her grooming habits had diminished considerably. Her haircut, when it wasn’t hidden in a ponytail, was shaggy and overgrown, and she had stopped wearing makeup, which seemed unnecessary for days filled with nothing but yoga and reading. Her perfect workout clothes from the fancy yoga boutique, designed by a former supermodel turned devoted yoga practitioner, no longer held the crisp, flattering shapes that had justified their high price. Now, with twelve classes to attend each week, she could never manage to find enough clean, dry workout clothes in her closet. She had resorted to washing the clothes in her sink between laundry days and hanging them over the shower curtain rod to dry. Her cute capri pants were becoming baggy and shapeless, her stretchy tank tops frayed around the neck and armpits. Pulling her body against her legs, she could feel the stubbly hair growing on her calves, and she could not remember the last time her private waxer had visited.

Noting this change in herself, which she hadn’t recognized consciously until now, Jen felt quietly satisfied. The outer changes paralleled changes that she was making internally as she became more focused and detached. Raising herself out of her forward bend and squatting low to the floor, she counted the things that she no longer needed: haircuts, manicures, cute new clothes, leg waxings. She had simplified her food needs to lemon, maple syrup (which she was needing less and less of each week), cayenne pepper, spinach, tomatoes, brown rice, and, once a week, hard-boiled eggs. Everything was balanced and effortless, and there was absolutely nothing she needed. Reflecting on this balance, Jen felt wonderful, as though she were floating lightly above the earth, touched by nothing, more physically dirty but spiritually and ethically cleaner than she had ever been.

Even as Jen suddenly made eye contact with the engaged girl and realized that the girl was openly staring at her, her mouth open in a dumb look of surprise, she was not troubled. Let her stare, Jen thought. She can’t see me. I don’t exist to her; she is only seeing a façade, constructed in her own head, that she imagines is me. It seemed ridiculous that Jen had ever been troubled by people’s stares, by the photographers, by the lies and misrepresentations in the magazines and on TV. That world, the world of people who observed her, was in a different stratosphere from the one she inhabited, and they were as baffling and unknowable to her as she was to them. Jen had always thought of herself as the fish in the bowl, but there was no reason that it shouldn’t be the other way around. To demonstrate this point Jen felt tempted to mirror the girl’s gaping expression back at her, but she knew this was unnecessary, since, funny as it would be to Jen, it would hurt the engaged girl’s feelings and thus bring unneeded ugliness into the world.

Jen looked around and saw that the room had filled now. Seven other students had set up their mats, five prissy-looking girls, one young guy with long hair whose tank top showed off his enormous muscles, and a black woman in sensible sweats and t-shirt who was probably Jen’s age but whom Jen would have called “older” next to the exaggerated youthfulness of the other students. This woman was such a relieving contrast to the other students that Jen found herself beaming at the woman, who caught Jen’s eye and then looked away, an embarrassed expression on her face.

Paula was already welcoming the class, giving a little speech about injuries and working within your limits that Jen had heard so many times that it had started to merge with the Sanskrit yoga terminology in her mind. But today, Paula added something new at the end, startling Jen out of her comfortable trance.

“Yoga is about self-discipline,” said Paula. “But it’s a common misconception that self-discipline is the same as self-deprivation. That might mean overtraining, like if you do a sport or work out in addition to your practice. It might mean holding your body to unreasonable standards. You might not believe it, but your yoga teacher does not expect you to be an olympic athlete or a fashion model.” A few of the students laughed indulgently at her joke; Jen noted that these were the class regulars. The new students, like the engaged girl next to Jen, didn’t laugh. The black woman, whom Jen also hadn’t seen in class before, smiled politely, reminding Jen that she should do the same.

“It might even mean believing that there are certain foods that you must never eat, or thinking that you must maintain a very rigid diet. But of course, this kind of self-deprivation is bad for your physical and spiritual health, just like any form of extreme behavior. It makes your health and your yoga practice into something you have to do, that you force yourself to do, like taking bad-tasting medicine.”

Paula wasn’t looking at Jen; in fact, she was facing the opposite direction. Jen recognized, however, that these words were directed at her. She felt embarrassed, but also oddly pleased to think that Paula cared about her enough to make a special speech. Her face felt warm, and she could imagine herself turning red at the unexpected attention. She lowered her eyes forcefully to her mat so that in case Paula turned around, Jen would not appear to be paying special attention to these words.

“Remember,” said Paula, “depriving yourself in the name of spirituality is as vain as pampering yourself for the same reason.”

That’s not what I’m doing, Jen thought indignantly, her embarrassment quickly overtaking her flattery. But she was able to calm herself quickly. I was being vain, Jen thought, with a rush of peaceful understanding. Vain to think that everything is about me. That speech had nothing to do with me; that is just how I interpreted it. I’m sure everyone in the class had some personal connection to that speech. She suddenly couldn’t believe her own hubris to think that Paula would make a speech just about her.

That’s my problem, Jen thought. I’m too self-centered. And she felt it deeply in her heart, and she wanted to spend this yoga class, and all the yoga classes in her future, curing herself of this shortcoming, which was the source of so much pain and humiliation.

Watching Paula demonstrate the opening poses for the class, stretching her arms high above her head so that her biceps pressed into the sides of her dreadlocks, Jen returned to her earlier state of tranquility, comforted by the familiar pattern of the sun salutations. She remembered how, when she started doing yoga, the beginning of each class was a horribly uncomfortable transition from her stiff regular life into the series of stretches and poses. Now, she realized happily, that boundary had blurred, had disappeared, so that there was no distinction between her yoga body and her regular body. She could have fallen into any of those stretches at any point in the day, sometimes did so in the hidden back aisles of the library as she waited for her next class.

As she relaxed into the final downward-facing position, focusing on rotating her arms, on pressing her heels down, on keeping the lowest part of her back curved, Paula appeared behind her, pressing on her lower back to force her deeper into the stretch. This was the best feeling yet; the tendons in Jen’s calves and ankles seemed to be opening up, melting into the air around her so that the boundaries of her own body no longer held and could not restrict her.

Paula lowered her head next to Jen’s ear as she pressed. “Your vertebrae are hurting my hands,” she whispered. She paused for a moment before adding, in an even lower whisper, “He’s not worth it.”

“Which one?” asked Jen, in a regular speaking voice, but Paula had moved on to the engaged girl, who had turned her head sharply in response to Jen’s question.

Jen thought about Paula’s words as she jumped lightly forward out of the pose and began the series again. Did they mean that Paula’s speech really had been directed specifically at Jen? And what was Paula implying? Jen felt her face flush again, this time in anger, to think that Paula was connecting anything about Jen’s body, Jen’s behavior, to a man. That was the last thing Jen was thinking of; in fact, except for her recurrent dreams, Jen had not thought of any man, of any romantic or sexual part of her life, for weeks and weeks. Paula had it all wrong.

But Jen’s newly honed yoga skills would not allow her to remain annoyed; a yoga class, after all, was an exercise at not getting annoyed at all manner of annoying things, including prissy, show-offy, or smelly classmates, ringing cell phones, loud farts, and most significantly, teachers who often seemed more judgmental than compassionate. Of course, Jen reasoned, Paula was just trying to help her. And Jen had been rejecting her friendship for a month, turning down her invitations to spend time together between classes. I should go to lunch with her this week, Jen resolved. On Wednesday. Jen was anxious to clear up this misunderstanding sooner, but not so much that she was willing to break her fast.

She returned her focus to the standing poses. If she thought about how Paula was viewing her, it made her feel anxious and queasy, so she did her best to empty her mind.

“Parsvokanasana,” said Paula, walking between the students as she talked, the bottoms of her flowy pants dragging on the floor. “Take a longer stance and lower your right hand inside of your right knee. Try the clasp if you’re more advanced.”

Jen lowered herself into the deep lunging position, extended her arms, and reached them behind her. Instead of locking her fingertips together, as most of the students did, she stretched just a bit farther and grabbed her left wrist with her right hand. She remembered how difficult this position used to be for her in Becky’s class, how angry and impatient she would get waiting until it was time to let go. Even now it challenged her balance a bit, and she felt her ankles wobble as she stretched her top arm farther and farther down her back. She remembered how she used to always look at her toes in this position and, for old time’s sake, she shot a glance down at her feet. This time, she thought with an internal laugh, her pedicure really was ruined; traces of the burgundy paint clung to the center of each toenail, and old dirt from the floor of the yoga room had permanently darkened the calluses building up unchecked on the tips of her big toes.

Suddenly she felt herself tottering and beginning to lose her balance. From somewhere nearby, she heard Paula’s voice: “Don’t look at your feet, Jen,” it said, in a quiet, concerned tone.

Jen’s resolution not to fall suddenly became unshakable. “You’re floating,” she said to herself, pulling her back straight and looking at the wall ahead of her. “You’re floating and you can’t fall.” Jen really did feel like she was floating, like her body had become weightless as her skeleton aligned itself into the perfect manifestation of this posture. Her left shoulder was rising straight above her right one, her left hip was pointing up towards the ceiling, the top of her head stretched as far as physically possible from the bottoms of her feet. In a moment her feet would lift off from the floor and she would begin to rise like a balloon, slowly up towards the ceiling.

And then, in a transcendent moment of release, Jen did begin to float. She saw the ceiling flash in front of her, and then the room began to spin and turn like she was tumbling out of a cloud, except upwards. She laughed to herself, wondering what Paula’s hair would look like from up at the top of the room.

Then there was a loud crash and a snapping noise. It broke the spell that was holding Jen off the floor, and she landed hard on her side. She tried to look around for the other student who had fallen, the one whose crash had caused her to fall as well. It hurt to turn her head, though, because her arm was pinned under her in a funny way.

Paula was kneeling next to her. “Don’t move,” she said, quietly but emphatically, as though she had said it once already.

“It’s okay,” Jen said, embarrassed that Paula would be fussing over her. She raised herself up onto her elbow. Something felt sharp and stingy in her side, but she didn’t want Paula to know. “I almost had it. My balance is getting better.”

“Lie down,” said Paula, in a louder, more commanding tone. Paula looked odd; her deeply tanned face had turned pale and sweaty. Jen lowered herself back to the ground, not wanting to draw any more attention. She could see the engaged girl standing above her, her eyebrows furrowed and her painted lips pursed in an expression of concern.

The black woman appeared next to Paula. “I’m a doctor,” she said.

“I think it was just her rib,” Paula said to the woman. Paula stood up, giving the woman more space.

“What was my rib?” asked Jen, getting scared. Why was everyone hovering over her?

The doctor kneeled down next to Jen and placed her hand lightly on Jen’s side. Pain shot through Jen’s lung, and the room spun again, as it had when she had been floating. The doctor was so close over her that Jen could smell her spicy perfume. She coughed, and pain shot through her lung again. She wanted everyone to back away, to give her air.

“Did you faint, honey?” asked the doctor.

Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head up to face Paula. “Yeah, her rib,” she said. “There’s probably nothing to do for it, but she should get an x-ray just in case.”

“What,” said Jen, still having trouble getting a decent breath. “What’s wrong with my rib?”

The doctor turned back to face her. Her face bore a look of deep concern, or even pity, as though looking at Jen made her very, very sad. “It’s broken, honey,” she said. “Jennifer,” she added. “Didn’t you hear it snap?”

Chapter 11:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/08/11-result-of-what-we-have-thought.html