Hell-Bent (2 page)

Backbending Club is what happens when this community of loners crash together. We are here now in Charleston, South Carolina. Local studio owner David Kiser is hosting. To host, David has opened his home and
studio to the group for the next two weeks. We take class at his studio, carefully cramming ourselves into the back of the room so as to disturb his regular students as little as possible. In between classes, we practice further. Then we take class again. Then we continue to practice, often not returning to his home until after midnight.

In this respect, Backbending is the antithesis of those glossy lavender-scented
Yoga Journal
retreats. We eat; we do yoga. There are no catered meals, no spacious rooms, no hammock time, no sandy beaches. No refined sugar, no alcohol, no processed foods. No coherent schedule, no personal space, no sarcasm, and no coffee. There are also no fees. Participants pay what they can, when they can.

Right now, surrounded by those hallucinatory red and blue dots, we are wall-walking. For the uninitiated, this means standing with your back to a wall, reaching upward to the ceiling, dropping your head back like a Pez dispenser, and slowly curling your spine backwards. I imagine peeling a banana. To guide yourself as you peel, you walk your hands down the wall. First your head goes past your neck, then your hips, then your knees. Finally, your face ends up on a flat plane with your feet, and your chest is pressed against the wall. It is not a yoga pose. It is an exercise Backbenders practice to increase the range of motion in the spine. By leveraging the pressure of the floor and gravity, each wall-walk pushes the spine into a deeper and deeper backbend.

Michael Jackson is paused. The room goes suddenly silent except for our breathing.

“Everyone look at Karlita.”

Twenty-two heads turn. It takes me a second to find her because my internal gyroscope is spinning a lot faster than the room, which it turns out isn’t actually spinning. Finally, in the far corner, I find Karla González—a twelve-year-old who flew in from Mexico City. Karla, looking a bit like an insect, is in the logical conclusion of a wall-walk: on her chest, ankles on each side of her ears, feet flat on the floor. She has a sweaty agonized look on her face I usually associate with women giving birth. She does not look like she wants us to be looking at her.

“Now come up slowly. Finish with your arms last.”

Keeping her ankles in one place, Karla pushes up from her chest and uncurls to a standing position like a slow-motion pea shoot sprouting from the soil. Suddenly, she is a twelve-year-old girl again. Her face flushes as the entire room applauds. I have the distinct urge to tell her that I love her. Instead, I inhale and try to stabilize the internal gyroscope so as not to puke.

The voice instructing Karla belongs to Esak Garcia. At thirty-four, Esak is a legitimate Bikram Yoga celebrity, the guru’s favorite son. His body ripples like a snake when he moves, his torso the keeper of a thousand muscles I have never seen before. Esak attended Bikram’s very first teacher training as a teenager—just before heading off to college at Yale—and returns to training every year, twice a year, to, in his words, refresh from the source. More to the point, Esak is also an authentic yoga champion, the first male to have won the international competition, having bent his way to the top in 2005. He is one of the very few Bikramites authorized by the guru to run seminars and is constantly flying around the world giving lectures, demonstrating postures, and gently guiding the spines of the middle-age practitioners willing to pony up his speaking fees.

Backbending Club is a different space. Unlike his seminars, it is an invitation into his personal practice. It is the yoga community he hopes to build. The work here is a refinement of the program he used when training for the championship in 2005. That is the reason for the do-it-yourself mentality, Byzantine dietary restrictions, and the donation-only payment plan. Esak is here to practice; he invites like-minded members of the community to support him.

While we wall-walk, Esak bends along with us but out of time. We go down the wall, he stays up watching, giving corrections. When we come up, we see only his stomach and pelvis arching outward. His eyes have a peripheral vision that brings to mind a frog’s tongue zipping out to catch flies. He can be across the room, holding down a conversation, scrutinizing a posture, when suddenly he will yell out a correction in response to your first, tiniest mismovement. A slippage from exhaustion, a momentary cheat. A week into the training, these staccato barks are really the only one-on-one interaction I have had with him.

As we wind down tonight’s set of wall-walks, Esak puts Michael on pause once again.

“I know you all are in pain. I know because I can see it in your faces; I know because I am there too. But remember, this is why we are here. Each of us needs to find the painful place and go through it. Do not try to avoid it.” He pauses. “The pain is temporary. It is a phantom. But if you avoid it, you will never move past it.”

As he speaks, I look around the room. At least three of the women bending on the wall next to me have little blue X’s of surgical tape peeking out from below their sport bras. The surgical tape was put there by a chiropractor earlier in the day. The women are doing backbends so severe their ribs are popping out of place. The chiropractor pops them back in and the women return for more backbends. I know this because as one of the only people with a car, I drive them to and from the studio when it happens.

When I drive the women to the chiropractor, I worry about Esak’s pain rhetoric. It feels like the worst type of adolescent masochism, Nietzsche filtered through David Blaine. But at the moment, smiley and vibrating with joy, I know exactly what he is talking about. I know because if I let my concentration slip for a second, my whole body will scream in hammer-on-thumb-kick-the-nearest-object-across-the-room rage. Although my ribs are solidly in place, my spinal column feels like someone is driving a knife into it, like it’s wrapped in barbed wire. There are precise points that feel black and blue, other places that feel disembodied and almost silly. My fingers are numb. But I find myself backbending easily anyway. Buoyed by my incongruous elation, I find that if I focus on the pain, I can interface with it. It doesn’t mean that it stops hurting; it means that the pain shifts and begins to feels like a medium I am moving through. It feels like a melting. When I have melted through, there is another side where I can just breathe.

After the set of wall-walks, we run through postural routines. This is specific training for the Asana Competition. We are drilling seven of the most difficult postures. This is less overtly painful, more just exhausting. Each posture demands muscle contraction, concentration, and then an extended moment of stillness where you inhabit it. In many ways, the routines,
with their exacting movements and wild contortions, look like break dance slowed down to a freeze-frame pace.

Esak runs us through them with a stopwatch. At his direction, we repeat the seven postures again and again and again. He pushes us. Then he lies to us. The refrain “this is our last set” begins to signify that maaaaybe it is the fifth or sixth from last. Then he chastises us. Finally without warning, there is an actual last set. Esak announces this by telling us to work on any postures we didn’t get to. The room responds by lying still and breathing.

Then he reminds us to finish our chores.

The chores are one of the ways the community gives back to David for hosting us. All the yoga teachers have to donate a class or two to David’s studio. That is their chore, so they wipe themselves off the floor and hit the showers early. Those of us who are not yoga teachers have more specific chores. Laundry. Carpet cleaning. Stocking the studio refrigerator. My job is spraying down and wiping the mirrors. The sweat from the day has aerosolized and made them filmy. As everyone else leaves the yoga room, I spray each of the fourteen floor-to-ceiling-length mirrored panels and make circular motions to wipe them clean. It is surprisingly painful work.
Karate Kid
references dance in my brain. For the last few panels, I notice that my left arm is so tired that I have to physically support it with my right one. It feels like a puppy dog arm. Finally, well after midnight, we clamber into cars and drive back to David’s house to sleep on his floor.

How I Got to Here:
The Journey of a Skeptic Addict

In 2008, I arrived at Bikram Yoga Brooklyn Heights fat. Fat fat. About six months prior, I separated a rib in one of those ill-advised drinking moments that I used to specialize in. After somewhere between five and twelve vodka sodas at a good-bye party for a friend, I found myself on the iced-over campus of Columbia University, sizing up the relative merits of the campus hedges. And the merits of a hedge after five to twelve vodka sodas refers exclusively to the amount of potential cushion and elasticity it
will provide. That I found myself in this scenario was neither an accident nor a drunken inspiration—the good-bye party was for one of my premier drinking buddies, a freshman-year hallmate, and we had returned to our alma mater expressly to engage in a freshman year tradition: bushjumping.

Bushjumping! Just writing it makes my heart leap (and my ribs quiver). The basic idea is self-evident enough: a long running start, a leap, a landing in the hedge. If it went Olympic, points would be allocated for form, difficulty, and volume of scream. But points are beside the point. Lying drunk in a bush, laughing about a new hole in your shirt, and discovering a new zippering scratch the next morning are what really matter.

From an outsider’s perspective, all this may seem debatably idiotic for an eighteen-year-old young man, fresh with the taste of freedom from moving out of his parents’ house. But the sad fact is that as I stared down this particular bush, on this particularly magic wintry night, I was twenty-nine years old. I had just broken up with my live-in girlfriend. A girl so wonderful and loving that she tolerated almost all my ugly failings so well that I found her intolerable and gradually chased her out of my life. My childhood friend was constantly asleep and living on my couch. I had a meaningful job that I was good at and couldn’t stand. Nothing in my life was correct. Anyway, it might make a better story if I separated my rib on that bushjump. But I didn’t. My jump that night was a reasonably fine backflip. I landed safely. My friend crashed next to me. We lounged in the hedges and laughed. Then I got up and ran straight ahead into the darkness and dove face-first against the icy ground. I think the idea was something along the lines of a Slip ’n Slide. But it was the dead of winter; there was no water, or ice, or anything except pavement. And so I crashed against the ground belly first, heard an audible crunch, and felt enormous pain before a uniformed officer came over with a flashlight and told me to get lost.

I spent the next six months milking that injury for all it was worth. By milking, I mean using it as an enormous excuse not to do anything physical. These were days spent sitting on my couch reading. Weekends spent at my friend’s house sucking up order-in lo mein. The closest I came to athletics was trudging up the stairs to my apartment and collapsing on the couch.
Conveniently, this was one of those marshy New York springs. The rain fell; I watched it from indoors. Soon I started ordering
Diet
Cokes and substituting Sweet’N Low for sugar in my coffee.

It’s pretty hard to totally destroy your body with genes like mine. I’m naturally lean. Not muscular-athletic, mind you, but tight-waisted, small-chested, and prototypically pencil-necked. Up to this point, I had led a moderately athletic American life: soccer through high school, occasional jogs to make up for occasional binges, and the standard intermittent commitments to local gyms. This meant the weight, when it came, didn’t come on easily or evenly. It took effort and follow-through: imagine a boa constrictor swallowing a sheep, imagine an R. Crumb woman as a man: weird areas of slender breaking into weird areas of sloth.

But determination eventually prevailed, and by month six or so, I was completely transformed. My face looked swollen, my gut smoothed and rotund. Startling things like my socks (!) had stopped fitting, while my new oversized T-shirts simultaneously stretched loose over my stomach yet clung tight to my nipples. Most disturbingly, my ankles started to swell and pulse when I stayed standing too long.

One evening at a party, I overheard a good friend say, “It looks a lot like Ben ate Ben.”

I tried glorying in my new physique, especially the belly. I would rub it in mixed company. Use it as a ledge for the remote control on the couch or as a kettledrum when standing above the toilet to pee. On the beach, I became that pregnant-looking fellow, thrusting my stomach forward with a huge grin. But no amount of faux pride could carry me forever. One day I realized I had lost sight of my penis completely.

Yoga wasn’t my first choice for getting back in shape. As with everyone who’s ever been horrendously out of shape, I spent considerable time fantasizing about the different methods and programs I would use to become fit again. I knew I wanted to change. I knew diet alone wasn’t going to be enough. And I knew I needed something low impact. To daydream of jogging was to daydream of stress fractures. Swimming seemed like a strong fit—my well-insulated body was just like a seal’s! But the prospect of endless laps bored me before I began. Then there were the martial arts. The
Internet certainly offered lots of commentary on the different styles. Unfortunately, the one class I attended spent most of the time going over techniques for eye-gouging. This felt a bit too pervy for someone close to thirty years old. Finally, there was yoga. I was definitely intrigued; yoga felt like one of those unambiguously good things, right up there with eating more fruit and being kind. But in Brooklyn, where I was living, every third human seemed to walk around with a rolled yoga mat strapped to their back. This type of elvish/archerish behavior didn’t inspire.