Listening
Part III of On the Mat, Off the Mat
It was the second summer of COVID, hot and humid, my Brooklyn apartment dim with the lights low and the fans running. I had just come back from a cross-country road trip and was settling back into the city. I could not sleep. Something was bothering me that I had not yet named, and I was running my hands over my body the way one does when trying to come back to it — to feel the edges of oneself, to find ground.
I had noticed the lump before. Left side, same location as the lumpectomy I had in 2014 for a benign mass found by a physician during a routine exam. That earlier episode had taught me the territory — what a biopsy and a procedure feel like, what my own breast tissue feels like in the months and years afterward. I had been watching this new lump for weeks. It was larger than it had been the last time I checked, and it felt as though it was changing by the day.
What I felt that night was not panic. It was confirmation. I had been keeping a record in my own body, and the record said: this is not the usual. This is not the territory I know. This needs to be read by someone else.
I scheduled the screening. The imaging confirmed what my hand had already told me. The mass required removal.
There is a word for the discipline that gave me the language to do this. It is the same word I named in the last piece — Svadhyaya, self-study, the slow practice of becoming legible to oneself. Twenty years of paying close attention to a single body had produced something that, in that humid Brooklyn summer, looked like a clinical instinct but was actually inventory. The body had told me. I had been trained, by accident and by intention, to hear it.
This is the part I do not say lightly: what the practice gave me was not survival. It was a method. The same method that read a slipped vertebra in a hotel room in Germany read a growing mass in the dark in Brooklyn. The mat was where the method was learned. The rest of the body, and the rest of the life, is where the method is used.