Food and Footage

I need yoga. I need it right now and it makes me cringe to admit that. But why? In the 80’s I would have turned to aerobics, perhaps. In the 70’s I might have embraced modern dance. But the further down the historical line you go the less opportunities there were for women seeking health and recovery and that’s a scary prospect. What did women do in the 50’s do to clear their heads and center themselves? Bowling? Ballroom dance? And the 60’s? All I can think of is hula-hooping and swimming.

So here I am going through my little life crisis in the nascent years of the 21st century and I naturally turn to yoga. Or yoga presents itself as the natural choice. Yoga is like the anti-rave. It shares a fondness for trance like states and movement but where raves are about excess and abundance of feeling, yoga is about balance, about slowly heeling spiritual and bodily wounds, and yoga has adopted the language of religion. It is a ‘practice’ and a way to recover self discipline. The teachers are walking advertisements for their craft. They scissor and jump and hold themselves up by theirbig toe with cat like grace. They chant in a language that is usually not their own and they nimbly approach you as you writhe and pant, placing a strong steady hand on your shoulder and twisting you into a position that feels so much better and stronger than the one you were in, you wish you could take them with you always like a puppet-master. Just someone to pull the strings and remind me to stay straight, calm, centered.

I am bad at yoga. I never kept at it long enough to recognize the sequence of steps. I don’t know my right from my left. I always have to fart and then have to focus really hard on not farting for the length of the class. I have a weak leg from a broken knee and putting weight on that leg makes me fall down immediately like a stone figurine perched too far off a ledge. I spend most of the class berrating myself for how far I’ve let myself go. I worry about being a hunched osteoperosis granny. I get so frustrated I want to cry. And today I did everything in German, which was sort of like trying to follow a recipe while watching a foreign cooking show. There’s a woman standing in front of you, conscientiously going through a ritual and you can’t tell whether you’re making a stew or a cake.

When I finally paid my 9 euros for an hour of torture, got out onto the street and farted, I was very…depleted. Two days ago when I decided to do this yoga stuff I was feeling really empowered. I wanted to get it right this time. Stop drinking for a while, stop eating crap, cleanse myself with healthy exercise and massage. But the reality is so much more imperfect than I’d hoped it would be. My body, which looks fine in a dress and heels and even seems young at times, is revealed in yoga to be a rusty machine. Every deep breath makes creaky sounds escape from my shoulders. Each time I let the blood rush to my head, I get incredibly dizzy, and when I try to balance I realize that I have none, and a pot belly.

So why do people submit to yoga? Why has it become the antidote to all human ills? I find the chanting creepy and cult-like and yet at the same time, in my darkest hour, the idea that I would be able to Om with the best of them really made me feel hopeful again. I think it’s partly the promise that the body will fix the mind. For someone like me who can’t escape their thoughts, the idea that I could fixate on my muscles and my breathing, and that that would lead me to a more healthy balanced place seems as disingenuous and alluring as Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog.

On a more personal level, my cynicism toward anything that purports to bring health and wellness seems like a negative tendency, albeit rich material for dark humour. So I am turning over a new organic-rubber-recycled mat in order to test my strength of character and my weak leg.