Personal Lineage

Part I of On the Mat, Off the Mat

It has been over twenty years since I took my first yoga class. Last weekend I completed a twenty-five-hour advanced training in anatomy and assists, the latest module in a continuing education that began the summer I was sixteen.

That summer, my decidedly atheistic but culturally curious mother drove me and a friend to The Center for Yoga of Seattle five mornings a week. The Center was on 65th Street, and I believe it is still there. Aside from my friend and me, everybody in those classes was well over middle age. Mats and props were piled in the corner. Long heavy straps hung from the walls to support the inversions we would eventually learn.

We practiced the Iyengar method, taking poses with precise alignment and holding them for long periods of time. I remember our teacher, Richard, instructing the group into a standing pose, verbally cueing the adjustments, and then leaving to go to the bathroom for what seemed like an eternity. I stood there in a triangle shape with sweat dripping from my forehead. I heard the toilet flush and the door click open. Richard took his time making his way back to the front of the room before releasing us into the next pose. This was normal. We were acolytes, devotees to the exotic Iyengar method brought from India by the venerable B.K.S. Iyengar. Light on Yoga was our text. Lululemon, Yoga Journal, and the concept of "power yoga" did not yet exist.

Growing up, I was not athletic. I was not competitive in sports. I was not taught that athletics were a good way to build character. It was anomalous that I would take to yoga at sixteen, and to a method that asked for stillness and precision rather than performance. After Richard, a series of female teachers taught me how to invert into the straps on the walls and other interesting bodily manipulations. By the end of that summer, I had committed to a daily practice. My mother bought me a purple cotton yoga belt to mark the completion of the three-month module. I still use it today.

There was nothing sexy or popular about yoga in those rooms. Before the internet and the industrialization of modern yoga, it was a collection of middle-aged bodies in a space that did not smell like the essential oils in many contemporary yoga studios, but rather of an ambiguous combination of patchouli, sweat, and dried oregano — the smell of any health-conscious place in Seattle in the late 1990s. The teachers were exacting. The poses were held until they were felt. The point was not to look like anything in particular. The point was to learn what the body was actually doing.

Some kids went to summer camp. I went to yoga school.

What I did not understand then was that I was being initiated into a discipline I would still be practicing nearly thirty years later — not because I was good at it, and not because I had become more flexible or more enlightened, but because the lineage I had stumbled into, almost by accident, was not a fitness practice. It was an apprenticeship in paying attention. The asana was the surface. The study was something else.