Hell-Bent (31 page)

Return of the Jedi

I arrive at 1 A.M. to another Backbending. In another oversized suburban home, after driving through another webbed private community of culde-sacs. This time in New Jersey. This time it’s snowing.

Once again, I find the front door unlocked. Now, however, I thrust it open with a honey-I’m-home confidence. The first person I notice is Fiona from Ireland, and I feel relief with her gigantic openmouthed smile. She wraps me in a bear hug. Then while still hugging, I hear yelled only slightly sarcastically, straight past my ear: “Are you guys talking about yoga??” And she darts through our hug off into a conversation in another room.

I drop my bags and look around. Every time I walk into one of these—inhaling the squalor of protein mixes and supplements, scanning the stacks of cucumbers and bananas, the dorm room scampering of women in boxers—I have a flash to some late-night docudrama on meth labs. The kind that always reminds you that secrets lurk behind every ordinary home. Nobody rolling down these suburban New Jersey streets in their Audis and Infinitis would guess that behind those quiet hedges and tall white doors there lurked a full-blown yoga refugee camp.

Our host is Brigit, a young local studio owner. Brigit is also organizing the New Jersey Regional Asana Competition, and a key superficial difference between this Backbending and Charleston is we are training specifically to culminate in the New Jersey competition.

Under the surface, there are other differences. As soon as I see Esak, he slaps a surprisingly soft purple shirt against my chest. “Check it out!”

It is a more professionally designed incarnation of the Backbending shirt he was given at the end of Charleston. On the front, there is a series of extreme yoga poses. On the back, written in the style of the upward-scrolling
Star Wars
prologue:

JEDI FIGHT CLUB:
CHANGE YOUR MIND.

I decide I love it.

So does everyone else, I realize quickly as it ends up being pretty much the only top anyone wears for the rest of the week. Beyond the shirt, there are other improvements. The DIY mentality is here but streamlined. A schedule has been produced so we know what we are doing ahead of time. Esak has convinced a masseur-friend to tag along, and he is occupying a room in Brigit’s basement doing brisk business. There are fresh juices prepared for us after class if we want to buy them. Then protein smoothies after the morning workout. Even crazier, there is a small crew of yogis who are practicing half-time. In Charleston, it was apostasy to sit out even a single workout. But now there is a whole crew who do only morning work with the Backbenders, then go off to prepare the juices, smoothies, and dinner that keep the rest of the benders bending.

All these services demand separate payments, so Esak has assigned people to collect money, and one of the big themes of the week is people coming up, trying to collect dues. Dinner dues, juice dues, smoothie dues, seminar dues, T-shirt dues. The experience is still pay what you can—now there is simply a lot more you can pay for.

But in-house masseur and post-class smoothies aside, in all the essential
ways, all the ways that occur inside the hot room, Jedi Fight Club is still identical to Backbending. It just got an upgrade.

Given the opportunity, I quickly fall into the group doing half lessons. This is not out of weakness so much as because of finances. I still have a nonyoga job. And, as this incarnation of Backbending/Jedi Fight Club is located within the reach of my New York home, the lure of work proves more powerful than the lure of endless back pain. Every morning, I wake at 6 A.M., get in my car, and drive the two and half hours to Southern Jersey. Then I take class with the group, do the morning workout, take the second class, and drive back to New York to hunker down in front of a computer monitor. Or I do the reverse—stay the whole day, do the night workout too, and find myself awake until 2 A.M. with implausible backbending energy, only to have to wake up four hours later for the reverse commute back to New York City in order to gingerly slide my sore shoulders into a suit jacket to attend a meeting.

My yoga becomes not falling asleep on the New Jersey turnpike.

Unlike Charleston, where I would have killed for this type of relief, I find I am annoyed by being unable to participate fully. My body has changed. The backbending itself, while not easy, is no longer crippling. In fact, a set of thirty backbends begins to feel almost inadequate. Just a bite. My spine never achieves more than a mild discomfort rather than the barbed wire bruising from before. Best of all, instead of being the grumpy old man, I get jacked on the backbending energy too.

Unlike Backbending in Charleston, where I was just trying to keep up, in New Jersey, my mind is set on competition the entire time.

In yoga, David Foster Wallace’s self-competition—
what my favorite teacher, Courtney
Mace, calls “the battle between the ego and the soul”—is intensified even further. There is no opponent, there is no dance partner, before Bikram there wasn’t even a mirror. Yoga is just you: attempting to disappear inside yourself, break through the limits of your own conception, match your body’s actions to your will. The mat, the mirror, the instructor,
your fancy quick-dry attire, even the postures themselves are all only useful as guide rails. They channel you toward this meeting of the self.

Or as Linda put it to me, “No bats, no balls, no nets. Just you—yourself and yoga.”

This is one of the reasons we intuitively distrust ostentation in the yoga room (and why nonpractitioners have intuitively decided it is ripe for derision and claims of hypocrisy). If you want to avoid the self-competitive aspects of most sports, you can dodge it by focusing on an always salient external manifestation: beating your opponent. It’s an easy escape, one where buying a three-hundred-dollar tennis racket, a pair of two-hundred-dollar sneakers, or a three-thousand-dollar bicycle will always be justifiable. They help you win, after all. On the other hand, if you feel overcooked by the competition with the self in a yoga class and, in a desperate attempt at steam release, decide that a glossy pair of eighty-dollar ass-defining shorts will help, you end up looking silly and materialistic.

Unlike David Foster Wallace’s “tragic enterprise,” yoga pulls out a happy ending. In the end, yoga has a goal of union. Instead of vanquishing the self, Courtney’s battle between the ego and the soul yields an unfolding definition of self, the living curriculum as autobiography: you acknowledge all that you are, all that you were, and all that you can become and then get to work integrating those three selves into something like a cohesive person.

To fully understand, I return to Courtney. Esak may be providing the quickest route to a backbend, and he may be filling me with helpful techniques for stage presence, but Courtney represents—inside out—the competitor I want to be.

“I’m a great loser,” she says. “World class. When it comes down to it, I’ve never felt like I have to be better than anyone else. Never wanted to beat them. What I do care about is knowing what my best is. It almost sounds corny when I say it like that, but it’s true. I’ve never stepped onstage thinking about winning or losing. That’s not part of my preparation.”

Courtney continues: “That’s not to say I don’t get nervous. I don’t want to disappoint myself. I don’t want to disappoint all these people watching me. But nervousness can also be this great teacher. You get up on stage,
and your mind says, ‘I’m not nervous.’ But your leg is shaking all over the place. What type of yoga is that?”

In those situations, Courtney tells me she focuses on creating unity. But not by demanding her brain control her leg in some trance-focus. “I’ve always felt that competition, like any demonstration onstage, is a shared event,” she says. “Everyone is there to create this event. I don’t want to be a performer, I want to be a role player. I try not to feel separate from the audience and if I do, I try to push myself to connect.”

For Courtney, this is an internal shift. “As a competitor, you are the center of attention, but your role is to serve. I think one of my best qualities is that I can see that. I can step onstage and see that we’re all part of this one thing. … Suddenly, it’s not about you. It takes all this pressure off.”

And then, just in case I can’t connect the dots, Courtney moves from the internal struggle for self-transcendence to the out-through-the-indoor revelation of the
Katha Upanisad.

“You know, that pressure can really capsize people. It requires a lot of strength to deal with. And when you practice any discipline that requires this level of strength, you quickly discover that it requires you to forgive yourself.

“The discovery is really sink or swim. If you don’t figure it out, you can’t continue. You’ll quit or you’ll burn out.”

“And to forgive, you have to go outside of yourself. Forgiveness, surrender, the ability to see your actions without being at the mercy of those actions, being able to detach from your own expectations … It’s all the same. I think of my yoga practice as a way to go within myself to get outside myself. I assume a posture, but I am tapping into something greater—into source—and then concentrating on expressing that. People call it many things.” Courtney stops and tries to vocalize. “Although for me it is usually love. Love or the possibility of love.”

The only source I’ve tapped into at the moment appears to be the air-conditioning system. My entire body is in goose pimples, no doubt screaming some Braille message about fear and anxiety. Which is unfortunate because I’m basically naked in the central rotunda of a shopping mall. The
2010 NJ/PA Yoga Asana Championships have arrived. Instead of a stage, Esak decided to bring the yoga to the people—and on a Saturday in New Jersey, he figured that meant performing in a mall. There is a buzz of ambient noise, escalators rolling up and down. Mall walkers on their weekend rounds give long up-and-down glances over my pasty body before continuing off to attend to their needs.

Esak is prowling around the center of the rotunda, microphone in hand, exhorting the benefits of hatha yoga. It is a rebirth of sorts, a window back to Bishnu Ghosh on the dusty Calcutta streets. Esak is dressed head to toe in a highly professional urban gray, his gleaming black loafers in stark contrast with the bare feet of the performers around him. He looks up at the crowd gathered on the second-floor balcony,

“A yoga competition might seem odd to many of you. But the decision to compete is simple. It means ‘I am not afraid to be my best in front of other people. I am not afraid to inspire.’”

He explains the rules of the competition. He explains the sequence of postures. He tells everyone and no one we are here to choose a champion.

“And by champion,” he says, “I mean a representative. We are selecting the single person who will embody the best of the beauty, skill, and dedication of the collective here.”

Esak keeps his attention skyward. From there, no doubt, it’s a great scene. But standing amidst it, on the ground floor, knees knocked and my arms self-hugging in my instinctual position of semi-nudity, it’s harder not to feel the social yawn at the core of the mall experience. On the ground floor, most shoppers barely give us more than a glance. The doors of the Body Shop, Godiva Chocolatiers, and Go! Games continue to swing open and closed. Esak is naturally undeterred. And so, with the escalators continuing their ambivalent scroll in the background, he calls up the first competitor.

In yoga, all lies are aspirational. Public prayers to our better selves, mission statements set in the weird liar’s tense of
I have done
instead of
I hope to.
I learned quickly in my yogic interviews that it is very difficult to call a completely earnest liar out. It’s unclear where the line between self-delusion, self-deception, and outward trickery lies. Especially when the lies
are completely mundane and harmless (a wakeup time, the extent of an old injury, the number of days a week they practice). At a certain point, I give up trying to understand these. I take them all as broken gifts and think of Viktor Frankl’s Goethe: “Treat people as if they are what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they can be.”

Which doesn’t quite explain what I was doing the night before that chilly over-air-conditioned Saturday in the mall: sitting at Brigit’s dining room table, lying my ass off.

Desperately saying things like: “First of all, regardless of where I file taxes, I consider myself—spiritually—a resident of New Jersey.”

Or, “I have roots in New Jersey! My parents met in Newark.”

Or, “Actually, when you think about it, I’ve been living in New Jersey for the last two weeks.”

Primarily, I was trying to convince Brigit and Esak to let me register last minute for the New Jersey Regional Competition despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, I live in New York City. As local studio owner, Brigit was organizing the event; and Esak, being Esak, was the voice of senior authority and wisdom. Either one could get me in with no trouble.

On a different level, like I said, I was lying my ass off. From the bottom of my heart, I can tell you I hate New Jersey. I associate the I-95 stretch through New Jersey with death itself. I once got a dick tick while camping in the Pine Barrens. And with the possible exception of “Thunder Road,” I think Bruce Springsteen is an overrated blue-collar hack who needs to take a long USO tour full of short sets. So yeah, me and New Jersey have no love. But I wanted into the New Jersey Asana Competition. I had a book to write. I had an editor who wanted a story. And god bless my cowardly unyogic sex, there were no men competing from New Jersey. As in zero. Which was in striking contrast to New York, where “I” “lived” and which had something near twenty male competitors. Male competitors whom I knew and who were very good. In other words, competing in New York represented a difficult gamble, and competing in New Jersey represented a craven ticket to the nationals level.

To me this was a no-brainer. The New Jersey competition was happening now. I was here and ready, coming off two weeks of Backbending. And most important, there wasn’t anything in the official rulebook prohibiting
me from competing. After all, yoga teachers—especially Bikram Yoga teachers—are an itinerant traveling bunch, many floating from studio to studio for years. Enforcing residency requirements would be madness.