Ames Progressive

For Kim

In one instant Sheng is in Chataranga, perfectly parallel to the ground, supporting himself with his arms bent at a 90 degree angle, his elbows against the side of his torso. And in the next instant he is in a Crow arm balance, his knees up in his armpits and his weight balanced on his palms. Jesus Christ, I think, but I shouldn’t be thinking at all. I should be focused on my breathing. Oh yeah, there it is. My Ujjiya breath.

I often find myself violating yoga etiquette by glancing up to see Sheng’s execution of certain poses during yoga practices. The first time I ever went to a yoga class at ISU Sheng was there, and he has been at most of the practices I’ve attended since.

Well, I couldn’t go from Chataranga into Crow, like Sheng, but I could go the other way, from Crow into Chataranga, and that surprised me. I couldn’t wait to show my dad. When I did, he was pretty impressed.

“Yeah, but Sheng went the other way, from Chataranga into Crow,” I told him. He nodded and we agreed that that would take a lot of control. My dad admires Sheng’s skills, too. Everyone does.

I was talking to Sue at Kim and Ashley’s going-away party and Sue agreed with me when I said that yoga at ISU is better this semester than it has been before. There is a new feeling of love and camaraderie among the people in the room, especially in the upper-level classes. Sue thought that Sheng had something to do with this. The yoga instructors are attending one another’s classes now and Sue and I agreed that this was essential to the improvement in the yoga program. And Sue thought that maybe the instructors were motivated to attend more classes because Sheng has become an instructor this semester and he regularly attends the classes of the other teachers. So now the teachers are teaching each other. The student-teacher divide has been breached and the students can feel the effects of the breakthrough.

Karyn is one of the instructors and she agrees that there is a new camaraderie in the yoga classes. She attributed it, in part, to the new yoga club. At the club, the instructors have been gathering to practice with one another and to develop a routine to exhibit at Veishea. In previous semesters, she said, the instructors all knew one another but they didn’t hang out together; they didn’t do yoga together. But now the teachers are growing and improving and physically moving and breathing together as a group: their practice has become communal and there is a resulting dynamism in the gym, believe me.

Well, I don’t know what it is exactly that has made ISU’s yoga so much more fulfilling this semester, but something’s happening. And, really, in what other class would you be learning so much while at the same time relaxing? I have learned just as much, and in some cases a great deal more, in ISU’s yoga classes than I have in any other of my classes at ISU but with one significant difference: my education in yoga has been constituted of stress-reduction. Indeed, the yoga classes have allowed me to manage the stress that is generated by all my other classes.

But to say that yoga is relaxing and that it reduces stress is not to say that it is easy or that a yoga practice is not strenuous and challenging. You wouldn’t know it if you’ve never tried it, but to hold your body in one position, to engage your muscles and preserve the engagement through stillness, to discover new regions of inflexibility and then to stretch out to meet them takes a tremendous amount of self-control and power. And, too, it takes a careful and disciplined attention to one of the most ignorable of life’s indispensable workings: breathing. “Breath, turn the old blood over,” Theodore Roetke once implored his wind. And it will - you can count on breath. The breath will rotate the blood and the blood will come fresh to the brain and the brain will relieve itself of its most-familiar thoughts, and good riddance, too.

At Suzanne’s final Wednesday night Power Yoga class before spring break we began the practice with wall-supported hand stands. Upside down, my body’s weight in blood surging down to my brain, I looked around the room at my classmates in a variety of bodily upheavals: some feet well-above head-height, some legs at waist-height and perpendicular to the wall, some pony-tails hanging down in front of faces, that sort of thing.

Suzanne walked past me, looking amused.
“Nothing changes your perspective quite like inversions,” she said.