NEWSLETTER

Yoga 108
by Molly Fisk

I just finished a yoga class, led by my friend Marilyn. I was the only student and we convened on the floor of her bedroom in San Francisco. She's 68, slim, and after three years of regular yoga, incredibly limber: she actually did the splits yesterday, while showing me how much she's changed, something she could never do in childhood. We both collapsed in giggles. I am 51, quite round, and about as flexible as an I-beam. Nevertheless, I am trying to learn some yoga because it has increased Marilyn's levels of serenity and joy so markedly.

In Nevada City, I take classes at a local studio. There are several postures I'm naturally good at: lying flat on my back with my eyes closed at the end of the class is one (that's Yoga Nidra). Sitting with my knees open and the soles of my feet together as in prayer is another (Butterfly). Every other posture, however, is generally beyond me. When the class is doing Downward Dog, I am doing Dying Garter Snake. While everyone else rests in Child's Pose, I'm trying to figure out how to move my stomach out of the way so the pressure of lying directly on it doesn't inspire me to invent a new posture called Barfing Poet. I can't sit cross-legged without a pillow. My knees don't want to be drawn to my chest, and they certainly don't want to stay there. Through a complex system of straps and blocks I can accomplish it, but I feel like Sir Francis Drake's war horse being lifted off the dock and lowered into the hold of his waiting ship: helpless and ridiculous.

I've been doing yoga so infrequently, like once every three weeks, that there's no accumulation of flexibility. But I persevere, and this is why: yoga is teaching me to breathe. Even as my mind reports that I'm not doing it right, even though I can't differentiate between the lower part of my lung and the upper and my inhalations last a nanosecond at best, I am breathing in and out on purpose, and that has changed everything.

I have no idea why this is true. Maybe slowing down enough to do any routine thing on purpose puts us in a state of awareness that calms us down. We can't worry about the kids or the mortgage when we're trying to push out the last ounce of breath with our abdominal muscles. Or maybe the general breathing we do here in America is so shallow and high in the chest, constricting blood flow to the brain, that when we take air deeper into our lungs the oxygen has an immediate beneficial effect.

Whatever it is, I'm grateful. I take this yoga breathing with me now: I practice at stop lights, in line at the bank. I take a few deep breaths when I get into bed, to remind my body to keep breathing this way as I sleep. Deep, slow, measured breathing helps me feel like myself. It makes me laugh more, and already I feel more joy and serenity.

And maybe by the time I get to be 68 I'll be able to do the splits, too.

Molly Fisk began writing at the age of 35. She's the author of Listening to Winter , Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer), the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems and the CD of radio commentary Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace . (See Books/CDs) www. mollyfisk .com

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