Abiding

 

Abiding is an in-between experience. Because of that, it gets less attention. It’s not a peak event such as arriving or departing or even an intentional action such as accumulating or releasing. Lacking obvious drama to pull you in, it is easy to miss or ignore or avoid.

But if you do place your attention on the liminal, allowing yourself to feel the threshold-space richness of neither here nor there, you discover that this is where the magic happens. It’s when things start to cook.

A good yoga brew is made of the universal elements of heat and exertion, breath, sweaty muscles, and strong bones. In life, these same ingredients show up as tears and love, anger and fear, hope and confusion, sometimes nausea, sometimes heartbreak, sometimes joy.

The thing is, the alchemy only happens if you include everything. You can’t leave out the dirty stuff that makes you antsy or scared or ashamed. It all goes into the pot, and then you watch and wait.

If you are impatient or pushy, the flavors won’t blend properly, and you’ll end up with clumps of unprocessed emotion. Sadness won’t temper the anger, kindness won’t quiet the boss of the brain, the fragrance of delight won’t seduce the fear.

What do you get in the end? Nothing. Nothing solid, that is. Just a gut knowing that everything is really a ’tween, anyway. This knowing, which helps you stay the course no matter what, is the knowing that arises from abiding.

My mom takes her time pushing her rollator onto the industrial-sized elevator in her assisted-living home in Dallas. I bring up the rear. Possibly the slowest elevator in the world, there is enough time for a meaningful conversation between the lobby and my mom’s apartment on the fourth floor. But naturally we slip into a variation of a conversation we’ve had my whole life.

Mom lifts her old lady hand off the handle of the walker, turns her palm up, and says, “Look,” jiggling her forearm.

I say, “What?”

“I hate it.”

“Hate what?”

“My wrinkly arm. I hate it.”

Sigh. “You look great, Mom. And your outfit is adorable. You know they call you the best-dressed lady in the whole place!”

She smiled at that, but immediately got distracted by the mirrored elevator doors and began fidgeting with her Audrey Hepburn haircut that shows off her high cheekbones.

At eighty-three, my mom is still concerned with her looks, constantly fussing with her lipstick and necklace and always wanting to buy new clothes that are more flattering. Today she is wearing a pair of slim-fitting Eileen Fisher capris and a black-and-white-striped T-shirt sparkling with black rhinestones. She really is adorable. Even though she’s not very steady on her feet, we still figured out a way for her to have attractive footwear. No old lady clunkers for her; I bought her pretty patent leather ballet flats with one little strap to hold her ankles tight. She needs that strap because we had to buy a bigger size after she had one big toenail removed. The other one is half fallen off, but even so she still likes to get ballet pink—and sometimes bubble-gum pink—pedicures.

My very feminine mom did a good job of teaching me how to be ladylike and strong at the same time. Every Sunday morning she sat at the dining room table doing her nails while she prepared the lesson she would teach to her Sunday school class. Her hands are so wobbly now that it’s hard to believe how dexterous she once was. One of her most magical skills was that she could make a sewing knot with one hand just by manipulating the thread between her thumb and index finger. She showed me how to do it many times but I literally couldn’t even see what happened, it went so fast. My attempts always resulted in a tangled mess of loose thread. Millie would laugh at my frustration and then show me again. Pulling a length of thread off the little spool, she would cut it with her teeth. Then holding the thread in one hand, she’d say, “Just go like this,” and her thumb would swoosh a circle over her index finger, “and this,” and there was the knot. She was showing off a little bit when she did this and I liked that part of my mom, too. The part that felt good about being able to do something slick and hyper-facile.

The strong things she taught me were fun, too. She showed me how to turn cartwheels on the beach, leaving sandy marks—handprint, handprint, footprint, footprint—in a straight line. She sang “Hey, Look Me Over” in the car to keep my spirits up on the way to the doctor. With my leg full of those fifty-six stitches, she egged me on until I joined in on the last line, “Hey, look out, world, here I come!” Like many moms, she was rarely ever sick.

Maybe that is why I didn’t recognize something was seriously wrong when Millie started falling down. Or maybe I just didn’t want to admit it. First, she sprained her ankle walking down the church steps, and then she fell and broke her arm in the Whole Foods parking lot. The worst was when she tripped over a door sill while carrying plates from the table and fell flat on her face, humiliated that she couldn’t even manage that simple task and mortified that she’d broken all the plates.

It wasn’t until years later after she’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s that we recognized this pattern and knew that she hadn’t been spaced out or clumsy; she’d been getting sick. The heartbreaking part was how she would cry out, “I hate myself,” every time she fell down. Not knowing a sickness had been growing in her, Millie assumed that falling was her fault, that she was uncoordinated, ungraceful, out of control, that she had ruined the evening for everyone. And that made her hate herself.

Shortly afterward, everything changed. The doorman at her apartment told me she went out shopping one morning, and when she came back, her head had dropped down to her chest. My phone started ringing with reports of her growing confusion, and when the manager of her apartment building called to tell me that Millie was wandering the hallways at midnight looking for my father (who had died several years earlier), I jumped on a plane and rushed to Dallas.

Now we know that my mom has Lewy body disease, which presents as a cruel combination of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The tremors in her hands, feet, and neck are causing her to collapse sideways into herself, as if she were starting to fold up in readiness for being put away for keeps. She has had a series of mini-strokes, which, according to her neurologist, have left Swiss cheese–like holes in her brain. That has created holes in her understanding of concepts like time and space, where and when, morning and night, days, weeks, hours. “Where are you?” she asks every time I call her from my home in Manhattan. “Oh, in New York? Can you come by for lunch today?”

My mom’s interests have shrunk down to what she can handle and what matters to her, on a daily basis, whatever day or week it might be—and her primary interest is her appearance. If she can’t feel good, at least she can do her best to look good. Even though her ankles are uncomfortably swollen and she is often cold, she mostly complains about her hairdo and how her clothes fit. I wonder about this. I’m not interested in blaming my mom for creating my body-loathing habits, because it’s bigger than that. But now that I’ve started to recognize my own self-obsessive judging, I see it in her, too, and I wonder if I am genetically predisposed to this way of thinking.

Finally, back in her living room, I help my mom transfer from her walker to her recliner. This involves more physical intimacy than we’ve ever had in my memory. The Parkinson’s creates cramping, so my first job is to pry her tightly curled fingers off the walker arms and place them onto my arms.

“Hold on to my wrists, Mom.”

As she grapples for me, she loses her balance and starts to cry.

“No, no, we’re not falling! It’s okay. Hold on to me, Mom.”

I manage to swing my body under hers just in time to stop her downward momentum. I’d rather have her tumble onto me than onto the floor. Please, don’t let her get any more black eyes or purple bruises. My husband says I am literally carrying my mom on my back these days, and it’s true. She appears frail but her dead weight is heavy and I’ve started having low back pain, which I know is not caused simply by the physical work involved in caring for my mom. But it’s okay. She carried me when I was a baby, and now it’s my turn to carry her.

We get upright again and start over. I lean back as if I were water-skiing to counterbalance her weight as I slowly lower her onto the maroon corduroy recliner. This time I’ve got a firm hold of her forearms; except for a bit more give in the skin, they feel just like my own arms. Another inch to go and she’s down. Plop. We made it. I’m pleased, but Millie has a weird intense look on her face.

“What’s the matter, Mom? Is something hurting you?”

“There’s a bug.”

“A bug?” I follow her gaze. “I don’t see a bug.”

“It’s there on the carpet. It’s been there for weeks.”

Lewy body gives you hallucinations. She sees bugs on the carpet and holes in her closet floor and she hears invisible children playing in the hallway at night.

“I don’t think there’s a bug there today, Mom. It just looks like that sometimes because of the way your wheels flattened the carpet.”

She doesn’t really believe me, but she’s willing to humor me and lets it go for now.

I slide the walker underneath my seat and perch there. Time to distract Millie. Reaching forward, I extend my hands to her, palms up. “Let’s do some yoga.” She never wants to do yoga, never has, never will. But she smiles anyway because she loves me and it’s fun to do things together. When I’m not here she is stuck in this chair alone for hours. She takes my hands.

“Inhale,” I say in my yoga teacher voice, lifting her arms up.

“Exhale,” and I lower her arms.

“Inhale, exhale.” I repeat these instructions on a lilt, my voice going up on the inhale and down on the exhale, to indicate her arms should do the same thing. Millie’s arms don’t go up very far, only about halfway up to shoulder height, but any movement is good for her. We do this four times, and then I alternate, taking her right arm up and down four times, and then her left arm up and down.

She follows my instructions, breathing in and out, and seems to be fully engaged. To me, this is a completely manifested vinyasa yoga practice. A common misconception about vinyasa yoga is that it is a kick-butt, super-sweaty form of yoga that can only be done by hard-core athletic yogis. But Millie is matching her breath to her movements and paying attention to the entire experience, not just the up position or down position, but the path all along the way. And now she is done and I’m tired, too.

I slide off the walker, kneel on the floor beside her, and open the box of family photos, getting ready for another familiar conversation. We both get a kick out of the fact that my mom and her three sisters, Donnabelle, Betty, and Beverly, all look so much alike. And all the girl cousins—Kelly, Sherry, and me—look like one another and we each look like our moms. And the whole bunch of us looks like Grandma. There are variations on the theme, of course, depending on age, diet, exercise, hairstyle, and which families live in the city or the country, but the genetic inheritance is clear. We all have the same defined cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and squarish chins, and if you turn us around, we all have the same upside-down heart-shaped bottoms, too.

“I think you are the prettiest of all the sisters, Mom.”

She smiles, eyes lighting up and cheekbones coming into view. “I always thought so.” Somehow the way she says that isn’t mean or arrogant. It is sweet, and I am glad my mom thinks she is pretty. It’s so painful to hear her complain about her body, but in the meantime, she’s already forgotten what we were talking about and wants to know if I can take her to get a manicure.

After our manicure we went to dinner at Good Eats, a neighborhood place that nicely accommodates old folks and walkers, especially at five thirty P.M. As part of my research into how other women have dealt with the issue of body image, of personal perception and self-confidence, I’d decided to start with my mom. I remember my dad telling me that the very first time he saw my pretty mom with her shy smile, crossing a footbridge at the church summer camp, he decided right then he was going to marry her. But I’m not so sure that my mom always felt beautiful and I know she’s struggled with her weight for my whole life. After moving into the assisted-living home, she lost almost thirty pounds but not in a good way. Depression can make you stop eating all together. She was picking at her plate now, because she likes chicken fried steak and she was managing to eat the tiny bites I’d cut for her.

After I told her a little bit about my dilemma, the whole body drama, always wanting it to be different and never being satisfied with my body as it is, I hoped she might have some advice. Or that at least we would have an interesting conversation. Miraculously, we’ve never really talked about this in any significant way, just always talked around it, as I’ve done in most of my female relationships, all of which have been based on an unspoken agreement that it’s natural to be unsatisfied with our bodies/hair/face in some way. Millie appeared to be listening as she ate her mashed potatoes and white gravy.

“So what do you think about this, Mom?”

“If you are pretty and thin, you get more attention.”

I tried to go further with this, asking how she felt about that, but she didn’t respond to my question. What was I thinking? Of course her brain is no longer configured in a way that allows her to follow a train of thought. That conversation was over and I was left to ponder that one telling statement.

The next week I asked her neurologist about the chances that I will get the same disease she has; am I genetically predisposed to Lewy body? I guess it isn’t good news because he didn’t give me a straight answer, although he did give me some advice: “If you do aerobic exercise, you will cut your chances by fifty percent.” That was some kind of answer, I guess, and I made a promise to myself to renew my lapsed gym membership and get back to working with Smith. In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder as I watch her decline what will become of me.

I step to the front of the studio and say, “Everyone, please sit in Vajrasana.” The students know this pose and take a few moments to reorganize their postures. Because I have trained them this way, they include moving between poses and arranging their mats and yoga props in their mindfulness practice, acknowledging that the in-between moments are as important as the asanas themselves. They neatly fold the Mexican blankets they were sitting on and stack them at the end of their mats. I laugh as I tell them, “Based on what my high school bedroom looked like, my mother would be shocked to hear me say this, but ‘Form Creates Space.’”

The form, or posture, called Vajrasana is very simple. The students kneel, fold their legs beneath them, and sit down with their hips over their heels. They know that if it hurts their knees, they can place a blanket under their shins or in the fold between their calves and thighs. They take their time to set this up with clarity so that they can feel balanced and at ease in this position. They do it this way because I’ve taught them to do it this way. It’s a reminder that at their core is Basic Goodness. They sit quietly like peaceful warriors, their palms down on their thighs, faces open, eyes soft and steady.

“Who knows what Vajrasana means? This word is actually made of two words—vajra and asana. The Sanskrit word asana typically refers to yoga posture or pose. But a more literal translation is ‘to sit down.’ I also think of it as meaning ‘to sit with what comes up when you put yourself in this particular neurological pattern, this precise energetic circuit.’” Sitting in this position is not complicated. All of my students can do it easily.

“Vajra means ‘diamond’ or ‘thunderbolt.’ When we sit like this, we are reminded of what about us is diamond-like, adamantine, indestructible. And that is what is deep inside all of us. It’s called Basic Goodness. Everyone has it. You were born with it; it’s your heritage and it can never be taken from you. When we start to connect to our own Basic Goodness, to really feel it, we then begin to recognize it in others. Because everyone—including your noisy neighbors and their yapping dog, that aggressive person on the subway this morning, your ex-husband, and anyone else who is on your shit list—everyone has Basic Goodness. Including you. The Thunderbolt is what happens to us when we have a sudden moment of clarity and awakening. Traditionally, that is called a ‘Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night’ and this is what pulls us out of our thick mind soup and reminds us again: At our core we are made of Basic Goodness.”

The students sit quietly throughout, although I see a few tears.

My dog, Leroy, turns in a circle eight times, each one getting smaller until he finally spirals into the perfect position for a poop. When he finishes, he makes one more circle, and then because he feels so good now, so nice and light, he wags his tail and kick his legs in a Shave-and-a-Haircut-Six-Bits rhythm. This routine never varies. He never thinks, I’m just going to squat down here and go. Leroy is a very bright poodle, definitely the Einstein of the dog park. Yet he lives in a choice-less world, his behavior dictated by habit and the fact that he is a member of the animal realm.

People are animals, too, but we live in the human realm, a world full of options. The thing is that it’s up to us to try something new. We all get stuck in Leroy-like ruts, but since we are humans, we have the ability to recognize and then shift things, theoretically.

So why do I still start off every morning by recycling this mental broken record: “Okay, last night I had two pieces of bread and one glass of wine and extra shavings of Parmesan on my Caesar salad. Why? Why did I do that? I feel so fat now. It’s going to take me another whole day just to get back to non-bloatedness. Okay, today I’m going to do better. I’m going to have oatmeal with flax seeds and blueberries for breakfast and lunch will be a medium soup from Whole Foods and then if I really want to I can have a nonfat cappuccino in the afternoon. Ooh, what is that squishy bit over here—ugh. Maybe I’ll go shopping and find something that makes me look good…or not. Shit, I’m so fat!”

Mark Bittman writes in Food Matters that eating food is not an addiction like cigarettes or coffee or alcohol. If you eat a little bit too much one night, it’s no big deal. Just get back on your healthy program the next day and carry on. No guilt necessary. No drama necessary.

This is so hard for me to do. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been stuck in a circular animal-realm-thinking pattern that whispers, “It’s your fault. Your body is out of whack, out of control. Whatever you are doing, eating, not eating is wrong. You can’t control your body, it doesn’t respond the way you want, and it’s your fault.”

What a double bind. Of course, in those moments when I’m thinking straight, I certainly agree with Mark Bittman that if you overeat one day you can modify the next and just get back on track and it’s no big deal. But when you start thinking your body is something separate from you, logic goes out the window and things get complicated.

I remember the days when I used to eat whatever I wanted without a second thought. It was during my early college days in the seventies, which meant there was a lot of dope smoking going on, always followed by an irresistible case of the munchies. My buddy Terry and I knew the secret to satisfying the munchies was just the right balance of sweet (chocolate, chocolate, chocolate) and salty (Doritos). Lots of soda to wash it down. I realize now that this was how I trained myself to act and think. My philosophy then was if you have a craving, then do what you can, as quickly as you can, to satisfy it. I wasn’t interested in curbing my urges, and if I was a slave to them, I wasn’t that uncomfortable about it yet. Maybe that’s denial, but I never once thought about changing that syndrome. Why should I? I was having fun and never gained one pound, even though Terry and I did obsess about the size and shape of our thighs.

Even then the drama was really the addiction. I’m hooked on the self-loathing, judgmental attitude that goes around and around in a circle, just like Leroy, telling me if I don’t like the way I look, then I must be doing something wrong, or there is something wrong with me. Either way, I am a wrong person. This leaves me feeling helpless and hopeless.

This misguided thinking kicked into full gear when my naturally thin body started filling out in my early thirties. I had already developed a fear of fat and a fear of food. I had also developed a daily habit of starting the morning with a negative chant of regret, recrimination, and a vow to do better—a million variations on the above. Yet the changes I wanted never happened. What was I missing? I don’t eat fried foods. I avoid gluten. I rarely eat dairy. I exercise pretty much every day and I haven’t eaten red meat since 1971. Why have I gained weight every year for the last fifteen years? Hearing me complain about this, a yoga colleague told me about an unusual nutritionist who had helped her eat better and, in the process, she’d lost a lot of weight. I made an appointment immediately.

On my intake form I revealed that the last time I’d been to a doctor had been twenty years earlier. When Dr. Jairo Rodriguez raised his eyebrows I admitted that I really don’t like (as in trust) doctors. Perhaps in an effort to relax me, he changed the subject and asked me how I was feeling.

“Exhausted,” I answered, but quickly qualified that. “I have a small business. Don’t you think most people who have small businesses in New York are totally exhausted all the time?”

He smiled and said, “Oh well, would you like a drink of water?”

“Um, sure.”

As he handed me a glass of water he asked me to drink it slowly with my head tilted back. When I put the glass down he said, “Well, you’re really not going to like doctors now because I have to tell you that you have a tumor on your thyroid gland.”

Just like that I found out I literally had a lump in my throat, which was clearly visible, moving up and down, as I was swallowing the water. Dr. Rodriguez told me that we wouldn’t know how serious it was (cancer versus no big deal) until the results of a thorough blood test came back. I started sweating and wondered how much blood is required for a thorough blood test.

After the needles went in and back out, I was invited into Dr. Rodriguez’s office where he told me it might be possible to dissolve the lump in a natural way, through diet and supplements. He pulled out a folder and wrote my name on the top of it. He wanted me to start the extensive program of food and vitamin therapy that was outlined in detail in the folder.

He opened to the first page and I saw a long list of foods. He began personalizing it for me by crossing things off the list. “Dairy is out, beans are in, sugar is out—and that means no fruit, no carrots, no beets, or corn—meat is in, olives are out, salad dressing is out, and alcohol is out!”

His pen was zipping across that paper so fast I think I was in shock. Finally he flipped back to the cover and wrote at the top: “1,300 calories a day; lunch and dinner allow one serving of fish or chicken no bigger than the size of your palm.” He looked up at me and, perhaps in response to the expression on my face, said sympathetically, “You may have one piece of bread at dinner and one portion of rice or potatoes the size of your fist.”

He patted the cover of the folder with upbeat energy, ready to send me off on my new life. “Any questions?”

“Well, at least I’ll lose some weight.”

“Oh, you will!” He scribbled something on the booklet cover again and turned it toward me. TLG. “That’s what you are going to be: Thin, Lean, and Gorgeous!”

Ewww. Talk about a mixed message. Two minutes ago Jairo is telling me that I need to change my diet in order to save my life and now it’s all about skinny = gorgeous. Sigh. That thing again. I guess I set myself up for this by going to a doctor known for helping people lose weight. But this kind of approach was really not good for me, especially coming from a health professional. I needed encouragement to get healthy, not more reinforcement of my already troubled body image. Sure, I wanted to lose weight but I didn’t know if I was up for going on a totally antisocial diet.

In the meantime, Dr. Rodriguez was still talking so fast that I regretted not bringing a notebook along as my friend had recommended, warning me I’d never catch all his analysis and instructions otherwise. I think Dr. Rodriguez could see that I was spinning because he shifted gears and slowed down his pace. He actually took a breath, looked at me, and in a soft, caring voice said, “You know, it isn’t your fault.”

To my surprise, I started to cry. How did he know I thought that?

“Your thyroid hasn’t been working properly for a long time. Gaining weight is not your fault.”

His words helped me realize how mean I had been to myself. Just like my mom hating herself for losing control of her body, I had also spent so much time blaming myself for something I couldn’t control, not realizing that I’d been getting sick, too. These words from the doctor were an epiphany after all the frustration and confusion and blame I’d been loading onto myself for so many years.

Dr. Rodriguez understood this. He was intense but he was also kind, and his program gave me a clear path toward feeling in control of my body. He told me that depending on the seriousness of the official diagnosis, I might have to have surgery or take drugs for the rest of my life. I don’t know if I could have stuck with such a restrictive diet plan or managed to down ten vitamins every morning, noon, and night just for vanity’s sake, but highly motivated by fear of cancer, I signed on.

Part of the reason was I trusted Dr. Rodriguez. Not only was he kind and caring; he was handsome and fit and vibrant. That inspired me! Clearly he knew what he was talking about, even though it turned out that he was a chiropractor and not an M.D. He told me that his actual title was biochemical specifist, which means he was custom-making my special diet and supplement program based on my personal health scenario. After my blood tests came back, he would tweak it further, depending on what he learned.

Over the next five months, I lost nearly fifteen pounds, which isn’t really that much considering I followed the diet precisely. I never cheated even though I got so hungry at first that I had a headache and felt really desperate. As instructed, I called Dr. Rodriguez after the first five days and when he asked if I had any questions, I had just one: Can I have a snack? I told him that when most people were sitting down to dinner at around six P.M., I was just walking into my studio to teach an evening yoga class on a very empty, hungry stomach. He allowed me to have a bagel or a yogurt. I didn’t really understand why a bagel was okay, since he restricted both my sugar and carb intake, but I didn’t want to ask him about it in case he changed his mind. Oh, but I did have one more question: How long would I have to keep up this diet? He lowered his voice like a Halloween spook and said, “Forever.” Very funny, Dr. Rodriguez.

When my blood results came back, Dr. Rodriguez told me I had an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and he sent me to a thyroid specialist who confirmed the diagnosis. Jairo warned me that I would probably need to begin taking daily medication, most likely for the rest of my life, and he was right about that, too. I began a daily regimen of taking synthetic thyroid medication but I also followed Jairo’s recommendation that I stick with the diet.

And, surprisingly, I had gotten used to this diet. Even going to restaurants was no problem because I found it a fun challenge to see if I could create a “legal” meal from any menu. About two months after I started the Jairo diet, as David and I called it, we attended a fancy dinner and performance to benefit my Buddhist practice group. We sat at a table with the VP of Artists & Repertoire for a major record label; the producer for a famous classical composer; and a super-rich businessman focusing on green initiatives and his wife, who recently developed a health-care curriculum for trauma care workers. Everyone was a Buddhist and this was a high-end Buddhist schmoozatorium. There was nothing I could eat except half the breast of chicken and sparkling water. And I was fine with that. I didn’t mind the antisocial aspect of not eating like a normal person. In fact, I felt righteous and clean.

But, in the end, that just became another kind of craving. Because righteous and clean is not a balanced way to be, any more than feeling guilty and dirty. It didn’t allow for any slippage. There were no soft edges, no ease. It seems I felt safest when I was like Leroy: just doing—as in eating—exactly the same thing all the time. But life isn’t like that. Everything in life ebbs and flows, including my body, and that is how it should be. Stability doesn’t come from holding on to extremes. It comes from riding the waves, not holding the water. The very word balance comes from the Latin word balare, which means “to dance.” After a while, I needed more movement.

Over time, I began to replace the skim in my morning coffee with half and half, I allowed myself a glass of wine once in a while, and sometimes I would share a dessert with a friend. None of this is all that bad, and if I could have just relaxed, it would have been fine.

But along with letting myself go back to some comfort food now and then, something else came back, too—old feelings of shame. Whenever I veered from the diet rules, I got nervous. I would feel around for any new softness or bloating and the next morning that old recording would start to play, reviewing what I ate the night before and vowing to do better today. In a way, that is exactly what Mark Bittman is suggesting, only without the bad vibes attached. But since my addiction was to the drama of it all, it just flared right up again, like an addiction relapse.

Once I realized that I didn’t have cancer and that my condition was manageable, my intention shifted from being healthy back to the more familiar, more materialistic goal of TLG. I played right into Jairo’s trip, which played right into my addiction to wanting my body to be different.

At first, I experienced a certain sense of confidence just from feeling so thin and light, but over time this relationship inverted. The more weight I lost, the more fragile my confidence became, as if I were looking over my shoulder to see what might sabotage the whole thing. The great feeling of being a TLG goddess had been hard earned and I was paranoid that it would be taken from me at any time. I wasn’t relaxed. I was vigilant. I didn’t trust myself; I was afraid that I might lose my discipline, giving my power to the food instead of myself. This led me right back to an obsession, not with eating food but with thinking about food and constantly planning what I could eat when and how much. In the end, I felt the same way I’d felt before I lost the weight: totally preoccupied with my body. I might have felt a sense of detoxified cleanliness but it was tinged with the unclean feelings of shame that accompanied the tiniest cheat. Is it surprising that over time I gained back all that weight and more?

But I didn’t see this happening at the time. As instructed, I continued reporting back to Jairo every five weeks. He would take me into a little examination room where I took off my shoes and stood on the big medical scale for my weigh-in. Then I took off my socks and lay down on a chiropractic table while Jairo unwrapped the cords of a small electronic measuring device that looked like an EKG machine. He attached plastic electrodes to my feet and hands and asked me the same question every time.

“What’s your age?”

Every time I told him my age, he acted shocked, as if he had never known it before.

“You look fantastic! You’re a gorgeous woman!”

He inputted my age and weight into the device, pushed some buttons, and a piece of paper rolled out of the machine, like a taxi receipt. I got up, put my socks on and went back into his office for the moment of truth. The printout revealed whether I had eaten sugar in the previous twenty-four hours and other details such as my current fat content. He was pleased with my results. My thyroid numbers were within the healthy range and I had achieved the state of TLG. I always left the office of Dr. Rodriguez feeling as fantastic as he told me I looked. I’m not sure if he was flirting with me but it felt like it, and each time he told me how good I looked, his words gave me validation. I always walked out the door onto Central Park West feeling sexy and powerful, for the moment.

In the end, though, I stopped seeing Jairo because I couldn’t maintain the repressive nature of the diet, and I was gagging on all those vitamins I had to take daily. I did continue taking the one thyroid pill each morning, which perked up my metabolism. I’d told Dr. Rodriguez at my first appointment that I was exhausted and later I learned that it is not uncommon for people with this disease to be misdiagnosed as having chronic fatigue syndrome.

Although at first I was freaked out about having to take a pill every day for the rest of my life, I began to have more sustained energy and I wondered how I had managed to accomplish so much with an underactive thyroid. But it’s not a magic pill. It doesn’t make you thin. It just prevents Hashimoto’s from leading to something worse, like heart failure.

My failure was of a different nature. I’d lost what my Buddhist teachers would call primordial confidence. Primordial confidence doesn’t depend on us doing something worthy. This confidence is our birthright as humans; it is the confidence we deserve based on the fact that we are born and are good at our core. But my confidence was not primordial; it was conditional. And whether I was thin or not thin, whatever shape my body took, at my core I had no confidence. I didn’t trust myself to take care of myself properly, and I felt good only when somebody else told me I looked good.

I had lost trust in my own Basic Goodness.

One of the most important lessons in my teacher training program is called the 3Cs: confidence, clarity, and compassion. These are the qualities of a good yoga teacher and exactly what I am trying to exude as I lead my intermediate-level students into an arm balancing posture called Bakasana or Crow Pose. It’s a new pose for them and I know from experience that if I demonstrate it first, some of them will just sit down in defeat without even trying. So I’m not going to demonstrate it at all. I’m going to sneak them into this pose.

This is where confidence, clarity, and compassion overlap. I have confidence that I can teach them how to do this pose or at least how to approach it. That confidence is built on the fact that I plan to take them along step-by-step with clear instructions and that I will let them know they can go just as far as they like and it’s always fine to go no further. That’s the compassion part.

The reason the 3Cs are so important for a yoga teacher is that these are the qualities I want to transmit to the students and Crow Pose is a good vehicle for this goal.

Thirty-five students are sitting on the floor with their legs extended straight out in front of them.

“Everyone, please bend your knees and lean back on your hands.”

They can do this easily and, in fact, love doing it because it is a good core strengthener and even yogis like having firm abdominals.

“Lift your right foot off the floor, and then your left foot.”

They follow along, so far so good.

“Now lift your arms up off the floor and extend them forward at shoulder height. From here bend your arms so your palms face forward and say, “Whoa”

“Whoa!” They all do it and start laughing, which makes some of the students tip over. No problem. They roll back up into position and join the other thirty people balancing on their sitting bones in a position very similar to my old John F. Kennedy President’s Fitness Club exercise, also called the V-Sit.

“Okay, keep your feet together, flexed, as if you were standing on them. Now bring your right elbow to the inside of your right knee.”

That elicits a few more uninvited whoas and even more when I ask them to do the same gesture with their left leg—at the same time! This is getting challenging but I know they love it and that this is actually part of the path toward developing the confidence they need to do the full Crow Pose.

“Good, everybody, yes! Keep your feet together…and exhale and release your legs back to the floor. Lean back on your elbows and shake your legs out for a moment.”

Didn’t have to ask twice. That was the compassion part, too.

“Now we will do this same pose only you will be standing on your hands instead of sitting on your feet.”

I’m not surprised that some balk at this while others pop up onto their feet ready to give it a go. They try tucking their elbows inside their knees and standing on their hands but most of them can’t get airborne.

“My abs are too weak.”

“My hips are too tight.”

“My arms aren’t strong enough.”

Experience has told me these comments would come up.

“It doesn’t really matter if your arms are weak or your abs are weak or your hips are tight. This pose, like every pose in yoga, is about how all things are working together. Have you ever noticed a person who has a great vibe, exudes friendliness and confidence, someone you feel magnetized toward? And then on second glance, if you felt like being hyper-critical and not so nice, you might notice that their chin is too small or their nose is too big or something like that? In other words, this pose is greater than the sum of its parts!

“In fact, you could even say that none of these obstacles exist because Crow Pose is about how all of these parts—arms, hips, abs, and legs and breath and concentration—come together for that moment, and that’s what makes it yoga.”

I ask them to come into a low squat on a yoga block and curl their back, making their body into a little round ball shape.

“Lean forward and place your hands on the floor.”

They can do this.

“Scooch your shoulders inside your thighs.”

They can also do this.

“Slowly, super slowly, begin to shift your weight onto your hands. Just a little bit. Now lift your right foot up off the block. Replace it to the block. Lift your left foot off the block for a breath…and replace it to the block. Relax.”

They step off their blocks feeling the beginning of satisfaction mixed with enthusiasm. They are almost doing the full Crow Pose but they still haven’t gotten both feet in the air at the same time.

“So how was that?” I want to check in with them before taking them to the next step.

“I’m scared of falling on my head.”

“Me, too!”

Lots of nodding heads.

“Yes, I don’t blame you. This is a pretty out-of-the-box thing to be doing and to tell you the truth, you might fall on your head. I fell on my head several times when I was learning this pose. But I have a tip for you. Fold up two blankets and put them on the floor in front of you, like this.”

I pull over two folded Mexican yoga blankets and squat down into a little ball. Then I shift my weight forward and lift one foot, then the other. I join my flexed feet together as if I were standing on them and say, “And then if you do fall over, this will happen.” And I lean forward so far that the top of my head goes boop, right down onto the blanket.

Everyone cracks up because the fall is so anticlimactic. I pop up with a big smile.

“Wanna try it?”

And they do and some get up and some don’t get up but I see their confidence showing. I think to myself, “They really were listening when I told them that practice is about expanding your comfort zone.” I watch them going slowly, working with clarity and curiosity about how to fulfill each step along the way, instead of trying to skip ahead to the end goal. I am happy to see them being generous with themselves, compassionate about what they are able to do today.

My friend Jamie has tons of confidence. She’s been in the public eye most of her life and has learned how to balance positive attention and notoriety. At fifty-two, she knows who her friends are and where her priorities lie. I know that she’s worked hard to create these healthy equations in her life, so I went to California to get her advice on the subjects of body image, self-confidence, and goodness.

Her sexy body is only one of the reasons Jamie Lee Curtis is famous. She is also known for her comedic talent; her graceful transition to middle age; and her relevant, inspirational children’s books. Among her friends she is famous for being generous, honest, and supremely organized.

These last three qualities were on full display the day I went to her house to talk with her about being a woman—a famous woman—in a body. We’ve been friends for nearly two decades, piggybacking on the lifelong relationship between our husbands. Not only had Jamie instantly agreed to talk with me about her relationship with her body, but she turned it into a special evening by inviting David and me to come by for another thing she is famous for among her friends, a healthy and delicious home-cooked meal.

Our flight from NYC was four hours late so instead of a refreshing few hours at the hotel, we shuttled to the rental car and called Jamie, who guided us along back streets to avoid the worst of the LA rush hour traffic. Although I felt crumpled and a tad travel worn, the fresh air coming off the ocean and the mellow early evening light was revitalizing. I rolled the windows down and got high on the SoCal ambience. There were the Pep Boys: Manny, Moe, and Jack; the friendly Giant Donut still sitting atop that tiny donut shop since the seventies; esoteric religions cheek-to-jowl with manicure salons; and bumper-to-bumper traffic with no pedestrians to be seen anywhere. We turned the corner past Bikram’s Yoga College of India and I wondered if Jamie was still taking yoga classes there.

We finally rolled down the driveway into a quiet, flowering backyard and as we walked up the steps into the heart of the house, the kitchen, Jamie greeted us with hugs and kisses. The four of us hung out in her spacious, hyper-functional, spic-and-span kitchen for a while having sparkling water, homemade hummus, and warm pita triangles. Then my husband pulled out his guitar, her husband pulled out his mandolin, and Jamie and I walked into her office as they started picking bluegrass in the background.

In the years that I’ve known Jamie, her body, like mine and those of all my women friends, has waxed and waned. She’s been on a diet now and then, got sober about ten years ago, sometimes does yoga—the same things that many of my friends have gone through but with one major difference. She’s done it all publicly.

I knew that Jamie wouldn’t hold anything back and so I started right out by mentioning “True Thighs,” the 2002 More magazine piece in which she modeled her “real” body. She would get there eventually but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that when the subject of body image came up, her first topic was her mother [Janet Leigh], who had very recently passed away.

“I just wrote a magazine article about my mother; about my mother’s body and her relationship with her body. I actually used the words ‘the most intimate relationship my mother had was with her own body.’ Then I changed it because I worried that it would become a pull quote. I didn’t want those words to become the cause célèbre of a loving memory of my mother. Yet it was intimate, her relationship with her body.

“When a woman’s commodity is her body…and she gains her fame from her body…such as athletes do—”

I chimed in, “Like me. I was a dancer and now I’m a yoga teacher.”

She nods but doesn’t stop. She’s on a roll with a subject that she has thought about a lot. “Their bodies—I don’t want to say betrayed them because they weren’t betrayed—their bodies changed as bodies change. But their mental relationship with the body is complicated, more complicated than necessarily for a normal woman who has had a couple of kids, went through the normal post-baby weight gain and attempted loss, and woke up middle-aged.”

Now it was me nodding. “Sure, I get it. The pressure is less intense for an ‘average’ woman because her body is not going to be the cause of her losing her job or having people write about her.”

Jamie tucks one leg under her and leans back to consider. “It’s the mental attachment to it. I saw it happening a long time ago. I wrote a poem when I was twenty called ‘I Felt My Body Go Today.’”

I felt my body go today,

or was it yesterday,

I don’t know

I just know it’s not the same,

you see it now in younger years,

they say it’s in the air,

I say it’s up here,

Your brain is where decay begins…

She peters out for a minute, trying to remember the rest of a poem she wrote thirty years earlier. And I’m as amazed that she picked this poem out of her memory as the fact that she was dealing with this issue at the age of twenty.

She gets the gist of it back.”And there was something about when old people show a picture to a young person and you’re looking at a paper bag who says that was me, and you go, yeah right—in your dreams.

“So I was aware of this from a young age when I was just starting to be known for my figure. It wasn’t for my great beauty; it was for my figure.

“There was Trading Places, Perfect, and True Lies—that triptych of film work sort of solidified my cinema body as being amazing, and believe me, if I watch Perfect today”—here she pauses for dramatic effect—“I sit there saying, ‘Unbelievable. That’s unbelievable…’ I would hate me! I would be saying, ‘I hate you!’”

We’re both laughing now because it’s funny and also it feels good to be so honest. It feels good to admit that we’re jealous of younger perfect bodies—even if one of those bodies was one of us!

Jamie can laugh at herself because she also remembers what it took to be so perfect. “I remember watching aerobics teachers who used to wear three pairs of those Lycra tights. It was the beginning of Lycra. I remember in the changing room seeing these women pulling on three pairs of Lycra tights to get that firm, smooth appearance. And I remember that even then Lycra was a tool to disguise.

“I remember going to Bikram’s yoga class. He didn’t let you wear anything on your legs. I wore tights and he said, ‘Take them off’ and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ and he repeated, ‘No tights.’”

“How old were you then?”

“In my early twenties. In a leotard with no tights on. I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ Even then in my twenties, I was like ewaahhh!”

“So, did you do it?”

“Oh, sure, you had to. And you know what? Somebody actually wrote anonymously in one of these Beverly Hills newspapers—I think it was the Beverly Hills Courier—‘There’s a young movie actress who’s supposed to be “perfect” and I saw her in a leotard and she certainly wasn’t.’

“It was so snarky. I pretended I didn’t even see the item, but afterward being outside in bare legs was not something that ever felt comfortable.”

As she got up to check on the progress of dinner, she turned back for one last word. “Ever.”

Jamie was preparing salmon to be cooked on cedar planks along with a veggie salad from a Jamie Oliver cookbook. As always her energy was high, her concentration was clear, and she was efficient at multitasking.

She looked better than ever, dressed in a navy blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to three-quarter length and matching capris. She looked relaxed with a light, springtime-fresh manicure and pedicure, and I thought, “Actually, the way she looks right now is perfect.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that just because she got such positive attention for her beautiful body, Jamie didn’t ever feel completely comfortable exposing it. People think the same thing about me. I’m a yoga teacher, for goodness’ sakes! I can stand on my head, hands, forearms, and shoulders for as long as I want and all the while appear to be calm and centered. No one can tell that when I’m doing a deep side bend I’m obsessing on that little flesh blob between my ribs and my hips. I don’t think about the sleek feeling of the other side of my body, the side that is getting stretched and lengthened. No, I always tend to focus on the squish, the “imperfection.” So why would it be any different for a movie star?

She came back with refills of sparkling water and I wondered out loud whether her physical discomfort led her to work extra hard on getting that perfect body. I wanted to know how she balanced the feeling of self-consciousness with being able to accept a starring role in a movie called Perfect.

“I didn’t work hard. I did a minimum amount. I was never an athlete. I never ran. I never got on a treadmill. I never broke a sweat. The only sweat I used to break was in an aerobics class where you jump around and you get your heart rate going and your hair gets wet and you feel good.”

“Feeling good is one thing, but did you also know you looked good?”

“Yeah, I knew that…”

“So you did have a certain level of confidence…?”

“I was not particularly comfortable in my own skin, but I could manage it. My metabolism was great. I have a lot of energy. I have more energy than any human being I’ve ever met. My metabolism is just burning it. I never have to worry about it. But when I made Perfect, I knew that if I ate too much I’d get a little poochy tummy. I knew it. So I sort of didn’t eat much. I mean, I was controlling what I ate even then and I was twenty-five years old.”

By her thirties, she was a mom, having first adopted Annie in 1986 and adopting Tom ten years later. Though she continued appearing in films—often, by her account, “wearing support panty hose”—as her focus shifted away from her own physical upkeep, she found she didn’t have the time or the inclination to exercise regularly.

“Support panty hose?” I made a face.

“Now people want to be in soft cotton clothes. But every foundation garment—like women wore back in the day—squeezes you. If you understand anything about physics, when you squeeze, something else expands. So many young girls are in these super-tight tank tops, but even those girls, if they’re wearing a bra, they have a little back fat because their clothes are too tight.”

I know exactly what she’s talking about, so I jump in.

“It seems to me that some women don’t care. They don’t care if their back fat shows or their muffin tops show. I guess they either think that’s sexy or that it’s just normal or they say sure there’s a little ‘pineapple’ there because that’s your bra, like it’s no big deal. But I always had this feeling that I would die of humiliation if I had back fat. Maybe they don’t have as much body awareness or they weren’t an actor or a dancer or—”

She sits up and interrupts. “Or”—important pause for effect—“maybe they feel so loved. And their husband thinks that they are the most beautiful woman that man has ever seen.”

Another pause. Of course, she’s right. Doesn’t that seem simple enough? If someone tells you that you are beautiful and very obviously loves you exactly as you are, why would you obsess about a tiny bit of soft flesh? As if that were the one detail that would make someone love you or not love you. I guess I hadn’t yet figured out that until we love ourselves, we can’t experience or accept the love of others. Until then, we can’t relax, even about a tiny bit of soft flesh here or there. We must be vigilant because there is a strong—even if it’s unarticulated—delusion that only when our body is perfect in every way can we be loved.

I asked her, “But why is that not always enough for everyone? I know that one of the things that creates suffering is when people put all their happiness eggs in one basket—when I have a baby, when I get a dog, when I get this job, when I have the perfect body, then I will be happy. It just puts all that pressure on that one thing, and nothing can fulfill it, especially no relationship. You wouldn’t expect that of your husband.”

Jamie was reminded of a particularly dark episode. “I was going to go do a movie where I had to wear a bathing suit and instead of just committing to three months with a trainer and saying to myself, ‘Cut out this, this, and this and you can drop twenty pounds. You can firm it all up, you know. You’ve got very good form under there.’ Instead, I went to plastic surgery, because it was the easy, quick fix…And, it didn’t work.

“That was really the beginning of a downward spiral that ended after I got sober. It ended about ten years ago and it ended because I went to Greece.”

Great segue. She can really tell a story. Greece had come up earlier because that’s where she learned to make that delicious hummus, which reminded her to pop back into the kitchen and check on the dinner. Then, she’s back.

“On my trip to Greece with my sister and friends,” she reminds me, “I was so uncomfortable in my body. It was the beginning of paparazzi, and it was just when it was really getting kind of bad. I went to the surf shop and bought these full-length pants that could get wet. I wore them to beaches because I didn’t want anybody to take my picture in a bathing suit.

“But when I got back from that trip I was humiliated by my attempts to hide my body, and I was only forty years old.”

That was how More came to publish what might be the most famous article in the history of the magazine. “Jamie Lee Curtis wants to expose herself to you,” the piece, titled “True Thighs,” begins. “It is, she says, the only way to make things right.”

And that’s exactly what happened. “We knew the article was important,” Susan Crandell, then editor-in-chief of More, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But we didn’t know how huge it would be. Even a twenty-three-year-old assistant at the Today show, after we were on last week, said the article made her feel so much better about her body.”

Indeed, Jamie intended her bold statement to inspire. “I did the More photo session because I was promoting and talking about my fifth book, I’m Gonna Like Me, which was about self-esteem. I felt like it would be a real mistake to talk to children about self-esteem and not acknowledge that I had some issues of my own.”

I prompted her to continue. “So, even after the enthusiastic reception, you still felt like a fraud?”

She gave me a you-got-it look. “I’m writing about self-esteem and advocating that you like yourself and love yourself and are self-accepting. And, here I am…” She pauses.

I finish her sentence for her. “…wearing pants to the beach.”

“Right after the More piece came out, a tabloid published a picture of me from Greece, climbing out of the water at a pier, at a small little town in the middle of nowhere where we went to the water’s edge. I love to dive into the water, and I dove into the water and swam around in my pants. And as I was climbing out I was reaching up to somebody to pull me up and somebody took a picture of me and the tabloid wrote, ‘Weight a Minute, Is That Who I Think It Is?’”

As she scrolls her computer mouse to pull up the picture from her super-organized photo archives, she says, “It was a very unflattering photograph. I look as big as a house. It’s a bad angle and I’m soaking wet.” The photo comes up and I see what she means.

We sit looking at each other for a moment. What a drag that must have been! We’ve all had bad photos taken and in these days of Facebook, I know I’ve had way too many unattractive photos posted of me and I hate it. But still, not that many people really look at pictures of me. I could only imagine the level of unwanted attention that photo must have brought to Jamie. But just as I’m thinking this, she sits forward a little because now she wants to deliver the clincher, the punch line of the story.

“Had that photograph appeared and had I not made this commitment to kind of out myself for it, I think I would have been devastated. I think I would have felt such shame. Instead, I was like, ‘Fuck you!’ I already did it. I already got it. I already got this handled, thank you very much.

“And then the More thing was insane. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t go into that thinking, ‘This is going to be a big deal.’ I knew women would relate. I knew women would appreciate it. It’s like doing a kindness for something and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, in case you’ve ever looked at me and gone, like, whoa…’”

Yeah, I got it and I’m on board. “Don’t bother hating me because…”

“Yeah, don’t be a hater because I got it, too.” She sits back. She’s not smug at all, just feeling good about having delivered her message.

I loved the whole thing. She figured out how to encourage and help others and, at the same time, to grow her own power. Always one to acknowledge bodhisattvic activity, I complimented her. “Jamie, it was perfect because it was doing a good deed for everyone including yourself.”

She doesn’t want to go there. “But there was fraud with it, too. The fraud was, I was saying, ‘This is what I look like.’ I’m this age. I’ve got two kids. I have a marriage. I work at my kids’ school. I don’t have the time to do things like some of these actresses who blog and write about their workout regimes and their private yoga teachers and their colonics and their this and their that. I don’t have that because I’m like you. I’m a mom. I’m working and so ‘I’m unwilling’”—and then she pauses to emphasize—“not ‘I can’t,’ but ‘I’m unwilling to give the amount of time necessary to perfect my body. So this is what I look like. Here it is right there.’

“But what happened was women started coming up to me and saying, ‘High five, be the way we are!! Love you, honey. You’re real! Your shape doesn’t matter.’”

Now I was the one sitting forward in my seat. Why did that kind of feedback make her feel less authentic?

She continued, “Then, two things happened. One, another tabloid picture appeared that said, ‘Weight Watchers.’ They put a number next to my picture that said that I weighed a hundred sixty-one pounds.”

I felt outraged for her. “How can they know how much you weigh?”

“I went home, got on the scale. One hundred sixty-one pounds! And I thought, Oh my goodness me. This is what happens when you say”—she makes a kissing sound—“‘I am what I am. I eat what I eat. I eat what I want. I eat granola and Wheat Thins. That’s good for you and this is the way I am.’ And then”—she slows down the rant and gets reflective about how she hadn’t really taken care of herself during that five-year period—“I thought, I’m forty-five years old. What am I going to weigh at fifty-five? Am I going to weigh one-seventy, one-eighty? Am I going to get into my seventies and weigh even more?”

Her energy levels, she went on to confess, had flagged. She didn’t want to exercise. “My cholesterol level was ridiculous, and I was unhealthy.”

She decided to get healthy. Taking the approach of caring for herself, which included losing a little weight, began a real shift for Jamie. She realized that the amount of bread and flour and rice and pasta that she had been eating was not good for her, especially since without exercising it just turned into sugar and was making her overweight. She started eating a more protein-heavy diet, and slowly began to cut out what was bad for her. She did it in a reasonable time frame so that she didn’t feel deprived. She incorporated exercise.

“I have a layer of fat that will never go away. I also have completely understood that I am a Hungarian Jew from Budapest. I go to the gym now three times a week and”—she gestures to her triceps flap—“this will never go away. I don’t care if I lost thirty pounds; this will never go away. I rarely wear a tank top because I just don’t think it looks particularly attractive on me. But I don’t feel like I’m hiding anything. I feel like I look good. I feel good. I’m not obsessed about it. I get on the scale and I have a five-pound window.”

A five-pound window! She figured out what Collette—the silver-haired woman in the pedicure salon who’d told me she thought of women’s bodies like waxing and waning moons—had figured out; that five pounds this way and that is not drama worthy. It’s normal. Instead of freaking out when the scale moves around inside that window, why not build that into your list of appropriate body options?

I wanted to compliment Jamie again, to reiterate how great I thought it was that she’s learned to take care of herself so well, but the time for talking about it all seemed to have passed. Jamie’s attention was on her computer. She clicks to bring up another photo, this one of her diving off the pier into the water, instead of climbing out. She’s wearing a real bathing-suit bottom that beautifully highlights her sleek, well-defined hips and legs. In this picture, she looks graceful and elegant, flying through the air like a dolphin. She wraps up our chat with a happy ending. “Now I am much more comfortable in my own skin at fifty-two.”

And with that, we called the husbands and sat down to dinner. The conversation went in completely different directions at that point, but I was quiet most of the evening. As I ate the light summery dessert—a thin shortcake biscuit with raspberries and two drips of cream—I felt full of respect and admiration for my friend who had learned how to occupy her own body and maintain her confidence, whether nice or not-so-nice things were being said about her body.

Lola, Tia, Jules, and I gathered together around an earthy wooden table above the beach on the Nosara Peninsula of Costa Rica. We see one another for a week each year, as part of the annual Omega winter retreat. As our men gathered across the terrace, we sat down together, letting the warm winter night air thaw our cold Northeast bones.

One of the best things about our friendship is that since we don’t see one another very often, we don’t do small talk. We talk about what we’ve been learning and practicing; what we’ve discovered or created; and what we’ve been able to let go of. As part of my quest for advice from other women, I asked them how they felt about their bodies.

A silence opened up and we sat together comfortably, feeling okay with the spaciousness. Lola is a big blonde who didn’t seem to mind wearing a bikini when we went sailing last year, even though I knew from her husband that she was unhappy with her weight; Jules is a petite woman who got breast implants as a gift for her now ex-boyfriend; and Tia, the most voluptuous of us all, is a real dakini, with long hair and a zaftig body, always in red, black, or white flowing skirts and lacy tunics. These were my three annual female friends: a store owner; a massage therapist; an author. And then there’s me—the yoga teacher who hates her body, never wants to be seen in a bathing suit, and always wears baggy yoga clothes.

Lola answered my question by telling us a story about a woman who came into her shop in Rhinebeck. The woman tried on a dress and then stood right out in the middle of the store, admiring herself in the mirror. She ran her hands up and down her body and purred, saying, “Wow. I look so good in this dress.”

“And she really did look good! Everyone in the shop was looking at her and loving her attitude.”

I chimed in: “That’s cool. I mean, it’s practically illegal in our society to actually say right out loud that you think you look good.”

That’s when Lola delivered the kicker. “Yeah, and she was seventy years old!”

Oh, somehow that detail changed the whole story. I wondered out loud, “Do you think you would have had the same response to a twenty-five- or thirty-five- or forty-five-year-old woman who publicly admired herself?”

Lola thought about it for a moment and said, “I would still think ‘good for you!’”

I dared to be totally honest by saying, “Well, it’s not something I like to admit, but maybe at the same time I would be thinking, ‘I don’t like women like that.’ Right? I don’t know why women compare themselves to each other, instead of just having our own confidence.”

Perhaps I was just ranting on about my own internal drama, but everybody knew what I was talking about. Then Lola offered up another story. She told us we should make a point of going to this little dress shop in Nosara. “You have to meet this clothing designer. She is really good at helping you find things that look amazing on your body, usually things you wouldn’t normally even think of trying on.” Lola told us how the designer talked her into trying on a beautiful dress, although it was sleeveless, backless, and very cleavage-y—three things she never wears. To her surprise, she loved how the dress looked on her and she took the leap and bought it.

That night she went to a party and there was another woman in a red version of the same dress. Lola didn’t mind that there was another person in the same dress, but she didn’t like the way the dress looked on that other woman. And then suddenly she was sure she also must not look good in that dress. Her confidence tanked as she realized she was at a party in a sleeveless, backless, low-cut dress that was all wrong for her. She caved in her chest, hugged her shawl around her shoulders and decided she would never wear that dress again.

Yeah. Got it. We all got that whole story. We knew exactly how Lola felt. Why is our confidence so fragile?

I asked them, “Can you imagine what it would feel like to have the body confidence of the woman in Lola’s shop?”

As a rebuttal to the confidence comment, Jules said, “I think I look good for my age.”

Openhearted Lola said she thought we all looked pretty good for our ages and that, in fact, we were all exceptionally young looking.

“I agree,” I said, wanting to show that I can be positive and supportive to my women friends, “but what would it take for us to say we look good—period. Without that ‘for my age’ part?”

“Hmmmmm…” Jules squirmed a little bit.

I asked them to visualize themselves being happy in their bodies and what that would look like.

“What about you, Tia?”

I was so curious to hear what she would say. Tia has a completely adoring husband and sometimes after dinner she puts on her ankle bells and entertains us with ultra-womanly Indian Kathak dancing. When she’s not writing books and giving workshops, she designs her own white, red, or black lace tunics and takes care of her ponies.

She smiled. “I guess I should probably think about my body more. I don’t know….But when I visualize being happy what comes to mind is lightness.”

What did she mean by that? To feel light. When I looked at Tia she didn’t look heavy or light. She is not thin. But I don’t think that is what she meant. I’ve thought about this so many times since that night and now I think I understand.

I don’t think Tia meant light, as in poundage, but rather energetically light. Light in spirit. Not bogged down by things that don’t matter. And you know, that really is how I think of Tia. Instead of focusing on her body, like the serious meditator she is, she consciously places her attention on what is happening in the moment—dancing, creativity, family, being helpful to others. I felt inspired by her comment and secretly thought, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

But the part where she doesn’t really think about her body? It reminded me of the Buddha and his early cohorts who said, “Let’s deny the existence of our body because that is the source of our desire, and desire is the source of unhappiness.” Is there a way to feel a lightness of being that acknowledges the body, that delights in the body, but does not limit that delight by applying it only to one size and shape of body?

When I got back to NYC I decided that, in a similar way of doing a thirty-day yoga challenge, I would do a thirty-day positive visualization challenge. I would consciously visualize my body as I want it to be for thirty days and see if it worked. But then I got stuck. Because what do I want it to look like? I don’t know. I do know that I want to break out of the dead-end materialistic approach to life that feeds cravings, such as wanting to be more thin and more perfect. Wasn’t I going for lightness from the inside out? What does that look like? So, if I let go of my habitual picture of the “perfect” body as my goal, then what picture should I paint instead?

I thought of a healthy body and I realized that I have that. I thought of a strong body and I have that, too. I thought of a younger body and knew I didn’t want to go there. It was good to discover that I might envy younger women in a certain way, but I don’t have an urge to torture myself about being the age that I am. I have gray hair now, which I am loving. So if I am strong, healthy, and okay with my age, then why am I not happy about my body? Like Tia, I want to feel and be light from the inside out. Does that mean I need to change my body or my mind, or both? If the body is heavy, can the mind be light? If the mind is heavy, can the body be light?

This thirty-day positive body visualization challenge felt like a koan; one of those mysterious Zen questions that doesn’t have a straight answer. Instead of wondering about the sound of one hand clapping, I pondered:

What is the weight of one body of light?

or

If a body changes but no one notices, can it still become light?

Maybe, if the thirty-day challenge to visualize what my body would look like if I felt light is like a Zen puzzle, then I should try solving it like a Zen practitioner. That meant meditating.

When I first sat sessin, an intense meditation retreat, at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, I was amazed to discover what a total baby I was. By that point, I’d been meditating for several years, practicing the mindfulness technique known as shamatha or calm abiding. In Zen this kind of sitting meditation is called zazen, and the actual meditation technique is nearly identical.

As my friend Enkyo Pat O’Hara Roshi says, “Begin with that part of your mind that you call your body.” That means you begin by taking a good upright cross-legged position on the cushion. Turn your palms up and place one on top of the other. Keep your eyes halfway open and allow your gaze to rest on the floor. Consciously place your attention on your natural breath, feeling the sensation of the air going in and going out. The breath is used as a home base for the wandering mind because breathing can only happen now, never in the past or the future. Whenever you realize that your mind has strayed, you acknowledge that activity by saying to yourself, “Thinking,” in a gentle, neutral inner voice. Then you return your attention to the sensation of the breath. That’s it.

It’s so simple that it’s difficult. We all want to do it perfectly and tend to interpret it as having no thoughts. But mindfulness meditation is not about that at all. It is a practice for noticing when our mind gets caught up in thinking, which is about being in the past or future—regretting and reliving, or planning and rehearsing. This is a way to relax that habitual activity and return to the present, again and again. It’s not about getting rid of thoughts, but about learning to work with the thoughts that we have naturally. The first step in doing that is to recognize when we have thoughts and how they pull us around. This simple technique involves noticing, letting go, and coming back—resisting attachment to any thought, whether positive or negative.

In this way, we begin to create a gap between a stimulus, like a thought, and its response, like saying something or doing something. Of course, we do need to think thoughts in order to function, but mostly our thoughts are habitual and are followed by speedy reactionary impulses. That is how those ruts we are stuck in get so deep.

We go through life bouncing around from one habitual reaction to the next and wonder why we feel powerless, unstable, and confused. Meditation practice is said to develop mental habits of strength, stability, and clarity, which are useful in off-the-cushion situations.

Even though my training up until this point had been in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage, I’d been invited to teach yoga as part of the zendo’s late autumn sessin. I was warmly welcomed, shown to my room, and then the next thing I knew a robe was thrown over my shoulders and I was sitting in Sukhasana in the meditation hall. This strict Zen retreat allowed no talking and no moving. Tradition dictated that there was also no electricity so as the sun went down, the room got dark and the cold set in. I was lucky that my cushion faced the window because it was beautiful to see the snow falling outside, but I wished I was wearing long johns under my cotton robe. The Tibetan Buddhist middle-path approach allows for some physical shifting and I almost got up to get a sweater, but then I remembered where I was and stayed put.

I sat perfectly still. Up popped the thought, “I’m freezing!” I came back to my breath. After hours of this, my commitment started to fade along with the winter light. I didn’t always want to come back to the breath. I preferred to indulge in internal whining. No one can tell what you are thinking anyway, right? I let my mind go. “Why didn’t they tell me there was no heat on this retreat? This isn’t Japan in medieval times. Please. I hate this. I’m probably going to get a cold now. This is a drag. I can’t believe this is just the first day.” Eventually those thoughts just played themselves out, and I came back to the breath.

Other times, when I had more energy, more courage, more curiosity, I thought, “Wow, what a baby I am. I’m used to having my every sensation satisfied. I’m cold. Then, I’m hungry. Then, I’m tired. How interesting!” Then, I labeled all that thinking and came back to my breath. I started to become fascinated with how these habitual urges arose and then amazingly, if I didn’t respond to them in any way, they passed on their own. Some took longer than others and it got increasingly more challenging to stay awake in the fading afternoon light after days of 4:20 A.M. wake-up gongs. But it was clear that feelings—emotional and physical—only do one thing and that is change. No need to get your knickers in a knot over an itch that is going to manage to scratch itself eventually.

In this way I started to gain confidence. I discovered that I didn’t have to be a slave to my thoughts. I didn’t even have to pay attention to them. All I had to do was stay steady.

On the middle evening of the retreat, the abbot of the temple, Eido Roshi, slowly walked through the meditation hall, followed by a monk who carried a paper lantern high on a stick. In his elegant, samurai-like brocades, Roshi passed by every meditator in the hall, making his rounds like a general inspecting the troops. As he passed me I felt moved by his grace and dignity. Nearly seventy years old, Roshi had been sitting this retreat along with us. Taking his place at the front, he let some moments of silence pass and then he gave us a Zen version of a pep talk. He acknowledged that deep practice was challenging but that many before us had done this thing, too. By fulfilling our commitment to create a quiet space and abiding in it together, we were developing spiritual maturity.

As a special treat, we were invited to hold out our empty cups. A senior monk spooned green powder into each cup held by two grateful hands over two crossed legs with aching knees, one after the next, down the row of cushions. Another monk passed along the line pouring hot water into each cup and a third monk whisked the green powder in every cup into a frothy green tea. We were offered one small chocolate each. Applying our mindfulness, we tasted our treats slowly and relished the intense richness of the green tea and chocolate. I felt content in this cold and dark, quiet, safe space.

As he got up to leave the meditation hall, Roshi’s kindness came through beneath his dharma warrior toughness, honed from decades of practice in the fierce Rinzai Zen tradition. In a typical Japanese movie actor growl, he delivered one final encouragement, “Do your best!”

While I might not have been able to figure out what body I was going for in my thirty-day positive visualization challenge, I decided that what I could do was begin applying the mindfulness meditation technique to my grumpy inner voice—the one that had somehow come along in my luggage all the way to Hong Kong and India. Why not use this method of labeling as an antidote to the unkind thoughts that arise about my body?

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that letting go of those thoughts was the only way to quiet the voice of my inner grump. I pledged to use my meditation practice to reduce the power of that worn-out thought path.

My thirty-day challenge would consist of allowing the sweat of my commitment to muddy those overused tracks, lessening their support for wrong thinking. If I could let the grass grow over those neuro-channels of judgment, eventually there would no longer be a clear way to cross that ground. Then, I could create a different map with a tender new trail, one that might not have a clear destination, but that held the promise of spacious, open-minded, non-judgmental positivity.

Isn’t this why I’m practicing? Sitting on a cushion watching my breath for hours and days on end isn’t so I can be the best meditator. It’s practice for applying mindfulness to things that matter, to my real-life issues. I know in my gut this direction will lead to lightness and freedom. This time-tested method, passed down to me by Roshi and Rimpoche and all my precious teachers, will help lick my habit of hard thoughts. It’s going to take time, but I’ll be patient, remembering Roshi’s advice. All I can do is my best.

After the first five-minute session of sitting meditation, Bob, one of the students in the Yoga Body, Buddha Mind workshop, raised his hand. “I’m no good at this. I can’t do it.”

The notion of having to practice in order to sit still seems alien. Don’t we all know how to sit still? Isn’t that what we do when we are watching TV or doing our email? “If you’re not good at this, what are you good at, Bob? What is it that you’ve mastered in your life?”

Bob sort of stared at me and everybody laughed, in a good-natured way, happy that they weren’t being put on the spot. But I liked this idea. “Let’s have every person here tell us what they have mastered!” I was excited!

At first, no one wanted to say anything. It’s hard to admit that we are great at something. So I started it off by telling the class that I have mastered lying on the couch with a murder mystery, a cappuccino, and Leroy. If necessary, I can do it for hours!

Turns out the class included a master sleeper who can sleep so much that she even takes a three-hour pre-sleep nap before she goes to bed at night. There was a fire juggler—I noticed she was missing a large patch of hair on her head. There was a great mom, a great doggie dad, an expert in giving flu shots, and a person who always finds the perfect-sized plastic container for leftovers. One guy said he had mastered the art of living a balanced life.

How did we all get so good at these things? Repetition. Just from the doing. It’s like yoga. In every class, day in and day out, I do the Sun Salutations. Over the years I’ve gained confidence in my ability to balance in off-balanced positions. I know I won’t run out of breath or fall over, and even if I do, it doesn’t matter. In fact that attitude is actually what makes me masterful in this arena.

As the students continued taking turns realizing and confessing their master crafts, my thoughts turned inward. I was not going to share this with my class, but I realized that repetition is how I’ve become such a masterful critic of every nook and cranny of my one precious body. Like any other skill set, if you practice it, you will improve it.

Science calls this ability neuroplasticity. That means that if we repeat a certain thought enough times, it creates a neural pathway. As we continue that thought pattern, the pathway gets stronger. The plasticity part is the good news: Because the brain is flexible—we can also change those pathways. If we shift our mind habits, we can create suppleness in the neural pathways and even create new ones that are more supportive of the way we want to be in the world. But like laying down a new road, it’s not so easy to do, and pulling out the old well-worn track is even harder. It takes commitment and, yes, practice.

Everyone felt elated that they had outed their own masterfulness, and there was a genuine sense of rejoicing for one another’s creativity and excellence.

“Okay, everyone. Let’s try sitting still again for just five more minutes. Place your attention on your breath. When you realize you are thinking, gently let go of the thought and return your attention to your breath. With practice, you can do this, too.”

Millie had taken a turn for the worse. Following another fall, her body went into renal failure and her mind went who knows where. The doctors told me she was definitely going to pass away in the next three days and that I should make arrangements. With quivering hands and tears in my throat, I called the minister and the funeral home and her sister, Aunt Betty. But then Millie stabilized. She didn’t pass away, but she hadn’t come back to the world yet, either. I sat with her every day. It turns out that hospital rooms can be a good place to meditate, although sometimes I had to take a break. One day I stepped into the elevator and there was a friend.

Running into Nancy was like getting an IV of prana, a straight-up shot of life force. We were both running errands for our moms, mine in a bed on the geriatric ward and hers in the VIP suite, four floors above. Really, we were escaping the disease-laden corridors of New York Presbyterian Hospital into New York City’s July heat wave. Normally oppressive in its thick stinkiness, on this day the slap of urban hotness felt good. Or at least it felt like something. Being in a hospital for a long time is like being in a bardo, the in-between place we hover in after death and before our next rebirth. Being outside and seeing Nancy reminded me that I was still alive, right here and now.

Theoretically a hospital is also a place of healing, and my mother was making minuscule improvement. But it is also a place that kills you after a while. Two weeks in the joint, and Millie had developed a patch of pneumonia on her lungs that Dr. Gopal, the beautiful dakini-faced child doctor, said she probably got from being in the hospital. I couldn’t take my mom home yet, but I had to get out of there and so did Nancy.

After comparing notes on our respective mothers’ progress, we went our separate ways—me to the bookstore and a cappuccino, Nancy off to the drugstore. But we ran into each other again on the way back into that white, noisy place, both pulling out our photo IDs as we walked past the security guards. She’d bought two tubes of arnica cream at the pharmacy, good for reducing bruising and swelling, and she gave me one for my mom. I’d moved my mom up to New York the year before so we could live closer. Since then, her mind had slipped away even more, and now her body was giving out, too.

Millie. There she is in the bed. Does she even know I went out? Where is her mind? She cries a lot, but when I ask her why, she doesn’t know. Sometimes I can distract her with chocolate ice cream although what I really want to do is hug her. When she cries like that, it breaks me open. It hurts so much. She has delirium on top of dementia, yet sometimes she is clear and bright and her quirky, quick, playful personality peeks out through the cracks.

Nurse Jennifer, my favorite one because she told me she does yoga and has a boyfriend, came in to check the vitals. My mom seemed to be in a semi-coma. She hadn’t moved, spoken, or really responded in any way for nearly eight days. It seemed as if upbeat Nurse Jennifer was used to that kind of situation because she just talked to us as if everything was normal.

“Your mom has amazing skin. It’s so clear and smooth.”

“I know. She’s always had a beautiful complexion.”

“I hope I have skin like that when I’m that age. In fact, I wish I had skin like that now!”

“Well, you know, she works on it. She always taught me to use a lot of moisturizer. Her technique is to lather it on so thickly that your face is covered in white goop and then just leave it there while you walk around the house.”

“And eventually it just soaks in?”

“Yeah. My mom started me on that kind of program by the time I was in junior high. In fact, we used to wash our faces with Noxzema back then. Remember that stuff?”

“Yes, totally!”

We both started laughing.

“Well, it’s still not bad!” Millie’s words popped up even though her eyes were still closed. I think she sensed that her opinion on this matter would be respected, confident that the testimonial of her own smooth face made the case for her expertise in this area.

“That’s right, Mom.”

Jennifer and I laughed again but Millie was already five feet underwater again. She can’t hold her mind and I can’t hold her. My husband says I have to let her go.

I can’t hold her in the world if she doesn’t want to be here. So I hold what I can. Her soft little hands, bruised from so many IVs, are still sporting girly pink nail polish. I rub the arnica cream on her arms, or what the nurses seem to think are pincushions for their endless needles. Dark purple and green bruises, painful-looking insults, pepper the backs of her hands and the insides of her soft old lady elbows. The texture of her arms—the same ones that she hates—is beyond soft; squishy like yogurt and totally yielding in a way that seems ultra-feminine to me.

Sitting at my mom’s bedside, I am grateful for my yoga and meditation practice. My meditation practice has trained me to move mindfully—sensitively feeling the texture of my yoga mat with each Downward Dog Pose; noticing my thoughts without judgment in each detoxifying deep twist; softening into a stretch rather than straining. As I stroke my mom’s hair and spoon-feed her tiny bites of applesauce, I realize that these delicate moments are what I’ve been practicing for all these years.

Millie’s been out of the hospital for ten days. She still can’t get out of a chair without help and she is barely shuffling along with her walker. Two weeks in a hospital bed takes a lot out of an eighty-five-year-old and we expect it will be a couple of months before she is moving well again. But I’m proud of her and I say, “Mom, you are amazing! We’re all so happy that you’ve improved so much. You look fantastic!” She smiles a little bit but then frowns and makes a slight gesture toward her lap. “Well, these pants don’t go with this top; it’s really not a great outfit.”

“Is your mother narcissistic?” Without waiting for my reply, Christiane Northrup answered for me. “Of course.”

Squatting on the edge of my bed, knees in armpits, wearing distinctly non-sexy sleepwear of a tank top and baggy sweats, I pondered this question without answering. It was eight A.M. in California, eleven A.M. in Maine, and I was on the speakerphone with America’s favorite women’s doctor and one of my personal idols. I was hoping my tape recorder was actually recording, and even more, that I’d be able to pull off an intelligent conversation with her this early on a Monday morning.

Over the weekend I’d attended the I Can Do It! conference organized by the self-help publisher Hay House in San Diego. David had a gig at the conference playing guitar with the popular kirtan singer Krishna Das, and I piggybacked my way onto the trip. Dr. Northrup was one of the speakers and the only person I’ve ever known who offers a bathroom break midway through her lectures. She refers to the bathroom as “her office” since she ends up taking so many questions while waiting for a stall. She schmoozed with everybody, easily flowing from questions about vaginas to “Where did you get that pink blazer?” I noodled my way up to the stage and shyly introduced myself. Even though she was friendly and open, I felt stiff and self-conscious.

Two days later David and I drove up the coast to Los Angeles. I was thrilled that Dr. Northrup had agreed to talk to me one-on-one, but I felt nervous about the interview. I wanted to loosen up and be more myself and I decided the best way to do that was to prepare. On Monday evening I climbed up on our big hotel bed overlooking Santa Monica beach and started to bone up for the interview.

I spread out all of Dr. Northrup’s major works—best-selling titles such as Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom; Mother-Daughter Wisdom; and The Secret Pleasures of Menopause—but somehow I got sucked into The Secret Pleasures of Menopause. It’s not what you think. It’s not about avoiding hot flashes or learning to become an awesome and powerful crone now that you are over fifty. No, none of that. It’s about nitric oxide and lubrication.

Dr. Northrup says bodies—like all machines—work best when lubricated. The best way to get our organs lubricated is to experience pleasure, which naturally increases blood flow, which in turn brings nutrients to your cells and removes toxins. She likens it to “stocking the fridge and emptying the garbage at the same time.” And it’s a natural thing that happens when we experience pleasure or feel relaxed or healthy (think sex, think yoga, think fresh air, think laughter) because of a little gas that gets released called nitric oxide. She has dedicated the second part of her life to helping women learn about everything that “can go right” in their bodies and her number-one recommendation is pleasure! What a perfect person to talk to about my body issues. Maybe she could help me learn how to turn this thing around and in turn, help my students, my friends, and women everywhere.

With high hopes and jittery nerves, I hovered over the phone on the bedside table and looked out at the ocean, trying to stay calm by breathing in and out evenly. I needn’t have worried. As soon as she answered the phone, my nerves dissolved. Dr. Northrup is light, bright, outrageous, bawdy, super smart, and such a good talker! I love that she said the word pussy within the first fifteen minutes of our call. But before that, she covered her Uranus-Saturn conjunction in mid-heaven, local politics in Maine, and quoted Deepak Chopra, saying, “You’re either part of the universal field of energy or you’re not. If you are not, try to step outside of it.” Then she exploded with laughter saying, “Of course, you can’t!”

As our laughter died down, I confessed to her that I’d really loved her talk on Saturday. I told her how strongly I related to everything she’d said. “It’s like you’ve been following me around my whole life!”

She wasn’t surprised by this comment. “It’s an interesting thing. In my astrological chart, there’s something I have that exactly matches that of the entire culture. Which means what’s happening in my personal life is reflective of what’s happening collectively for a lot of people. And so, I pay attention to my personal life and talk about it, because it will be relevant for the collective, for many people. My whole life I’ve known how to talk about what was going on for me personally, not because it’s personal, but because it’s really important for the teaching, the healing work.

“One of the things I was taught in medical school, and I think this came from some scientific paper in the fifties, is that in the tradition of science, for most of human history, you would write down your observations using the personal pronoun ‘I’ as in ‘This is what I found.’ Somewhere in the forties or fifties, they decided that approach was ‘not objective’ and the personal pronoun needed to be removed.”

And here she changed her voice to emphasize how ridiculous this next idea was: “As though we could separate our consciousness from what we’re observing.”

To illustrate the point further and to do what she does so well, combining science and medicine with soulfulness and gut wisdom, she continued: “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that when we observe something, we change it. That’s just science. It’s a scientific fact that the observer interacts with what is observed and that leads to a change in the experimental design. But they decided—whoever ‘they’ are—that we needed to separate ourselves from ourselves.

“All that to say, when we talk about anything including scientific studies or anything, we have to include ourselves as part of the vibration that’s creating the reality. So it comes back down to—which to me is a huge relief—if you want to make a change in the planet, work on yourself.

“The beauty of my approach, I think, is that it’s manageable. You work on yourself and see what happens. What a relief. You know, it’s very female. It seems that the male thing is to be disembodied.

“I don’t know if you ever read The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. It’s about fighter pilots crashing at the beginning of the space age. As they were augering in, they would report on what the instruments were saying—‘I did this and I did that.’ Somewhere in their mind they knew they were about to crash and burn, but they were reporting objectively from the front, and to do that you have to separate yourself from yourself. A right-handed, left-hemisphere-dominant, white male is good at that, and it’s very useful. But, for healing your body, it’s deadly.”

Speaking of bodies and healing, we very naturally meandered over to the subject of yoga and being embodied. That’s when I finally told her I was writing a book about how I hate my body. In an instant, Christiane was off and running.

“I believe you’ve touched on the core issue for women, and that is, we have learned to Hate. Our. Own. Flesh.

“It comes in part from the way that the patriarchal religions have brainwashed us. I love that you’re a yoga teacher because you’ve been steeped in the tradition that somehow we need to transcend the body. The body is a fundamental problem in most every religious text.”

This struck a familiar chord. Minister’s daughter learning about bodies from her minister’s-wife mom…Yes, I would say that my mom definitely wanted to transcend her body or at least was confused by her own sexuality. For a while during my junior high years, she worked as a waitress at the diner next door to my dad’s big downtown church in Seattle. The diner’s owner and his wife usually ran the joint, but he got sick and so my mom stepped in to help out. She ended up staying because she liked the warm, family vibe, not to mention getting to see my dad at lunch every day and making a few extra bucks.

But one night at dinner I remember her telling my dad about a customer who had upset her. I was only about thirteen, so I wasn’t sure I really understood the problem, but from what I gathered, a man had come in for a piece of pie and, in the process, flirted with my mom. He specifically mentioned her beautiful legs. Was that a bad thing? Evidently so. Was the man creepy for saying that? Evidently so. Was my mom in danger? Maybe. Then why did I also feel like my mom was bragging a little bit, too? Even while she was telling my dad what happened, she was turning red and kerflumping. I wasn’t sure if she had gotten scared or mad, or was it my dad who was mad? I think I remember him cautioning her in some kind of patronizing, protective-man way. Personally, I thought my mom was totally beautiful, including her legs. And I was pretty sure my dad thought so, too. But the whole thing translated into a message that being noticed and appreciated for your body was wrong.

At the same time that memory popped up, I responded to Christiane, “Yeah, well, I got over that transcending-the-body aspect of yoga philosophy a long time ago.”

In a low just-between-me-and-you voice, she said, “Yeah, I bet you did.”

I mean, I think I did. Wasn’t I a child of the sixties, after all? I might have been embarrassed to show off my naked body, but that didn’t make me a judgmental prude. And even if I did have a touch of sexual shyness back in the day, my new life as an NYC dancer unceremoniously gave that attitude a grand battement all the way back to Seattle.

The first time I went to Simone Forti’s contact improv class in a dark and dusty Soho loft, I asked another dancer for directions to the changing room. Pulling his pants off right in front of me, he said, “Well, I guess you can go over there in the corner if you want some privacy.” I also remember Simone giving an instruction that involved her touching her crotch, which she called “my sex.” That was also new. My teachers in California did not use the word sex in dance class. So I went along, pretending these liberated attitudes were normal to me and, eventually, they were…sort of.

“Yogananda.” I heard Christiane pulling a book off a shelf on the other end of the line. “He’s got stuff in here that you can’t believe on worldly pleasures. It’s like ‘please help me recover from my sexuality.’” She took a breath. “Here we go.” She read: “‘Teach me not to engross myself in passing pleasures. Teach me to discipline my senses that they may always make me really happy. Teach me to substitute for flesh temptation the greater evolvement of soul happiness.’”

Like an aha moment, she cried, “There it is, right there! Of course we hate our flesh, because we have been taught that the downfall of humanity came because of a woman’s body. Where else would we go from there other than hating our flesh?”

By this point, I was feeling elated from this phone call. It was massively validating to know that my hero, Christiane Northrup, immediately found this topic so discussion worthy. In fact, she was positioning the whole women-body-self-esteem issue as a fulcrum for women: Change yourself and change the world. That fit in perfectly with my bodhisattva ideal, which was kind of funny considering where she next took the conversation—out of the spiritual and into the street.

“I was on the Rachael Ray Show, booked to talk about the female erogenous anatomy inside the pelvis. I was waiting in the green room with the other guests, including several women, ages twenty-four to probably fifty-five, who were complaining about finding good men. I said, ‘I could take you out on the streets of Manhattan and find you a date.’ The producers called me later and said, ‘Could you do that?’ I said, ‘I could, but I’m not going to, because right here in Manhattan is the master from whom I learned—Regena Thomasauer.’ Mama Gena teaches flirting as a spiritual exercise at her School of Womanly Arts. She says it’s the art of enjoying yourself in the company of another. That’s all. It’s not to get anything. It’s simply to uplift the moment.”

Here she paused to let this concept sink in. I loved the idea that we can enjoy our bodies and engage in flirting, not to get anything, but simply to feel joy and hot energy and to raise everyone’s spirits. This was another new idea for me. Or was it? Isn’t that what we were doing for Larry Kirwan on his birthday in the St. Marks Bar?

I started to say something, but Christiane had already raced ahead. “Mama Gena told the women that the first step is to find a man who is not dangerous, and go up to him. You don’t have to make eye contact or anything. But you begin to admire something about him, maybe his hands, maybe his hair. Whatever.

“And while you do”—another pause to make sure I was ready for this—“you think about your pussy!” She loved telling me this. “I know, it’s outrageous, but in that one moment, it all came together for me. Oh. My. God. All the power of those old caves shaped like vaginas and covered with triangles—it’s not that we’re supposed to go back to that time when the female body was seen as sacred. We can do it right now!

“So, for the Rachael Ray Show, Regena took three women in their forties out to a drinking establishment in the Wall Street area. Before going up to the bar, she took them into the ladies’ room to take off their underwear. Obviously you can’t say ‘pussy’ on national television, even though you can talk about the female erogenous anatomy inside the pelvis! So, Mama Gena called it ‘their business.’ Think about your business.”

Here was another point she wanted me to hear loud and clear. “The trick is that energy follows awareness. The female anatomy is where the magic is. We’ve been talked out of it. But it’s where the magic is.

“And in the yogic tradition, we’re always trying to transcend our desires. Guess what? That’s a desire!

“As long as you’re on earth, you’re going to have desires. Where are you going to feel them? In your body. How are you going to know that you’re on the right track? You feel it in your genitals. Woo hoo! So we’re taught our whole lives, don’t go there.”

It’s the old starving-Buddha-in-the-forest story, only she’s flipped it on its head. Yeah, desire comes from the body, but instead of denying the body, we accept the body. We appreciate the body and even love the body. The lesson is definitely that whatever happens, stay embodied and aware. Where was she when I was a little girl? As I’m wondering that, Christiane is already going there.

“Oh, and by the way, I was showing the guy in my life a video of Regena taking the women into the bar. She gives them mantras—‘I am gorgeous’—things you say in your head before doing something scary.

“And the guy says to me, ‘I don’t understand. You’ve known this since you were a little girl.’ and I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ It’s like my guy thinks that somehow women know they have this power. They don’t! And I couldn’t convince him that they don’t. He said every woman knows this. That’s why they’re told not to speak to strangers.” She agreed with that part. “You’re told that before you have your frontal lobe intellect on board. You don’t even know that something is bad or wrong with your body.”

I thought back again to Larry Kirwan’s birthday party. We wanted to be brave and bold, but we were pretending, even to ourselves. We were supposedly giving him a present, yet we all held something back. Maybe we couldn’t give it all away because of the primal patterning we’d received as girls—that giving ourselves was actually having something taken from us. I wondered what Christiane thought about that, so I said, “And then if you let anybody go to that place with you, you’ll lose something.”

Of course, she got that right away. “You’ll lose something—right! You are allowing this person into the sanctum sanctorum. This is the source of God—right here. This is the quickest way to God Realization, when you understand the connection between spirituality and sexuality.”

Inspired but overwhelmed, I asked, “So how do we keep on the track with that? Because it seems like the negative thinking patterns that have been implanted are so powerful. Is there a path toward shifting the balance?”

“The beauty is that’s what happening right now on the planet. A woman sent me a Facebook link called Sex, Chocolate, and Your Pelvic Floor. I clicked on it and found that in Texas they’re doing these wonderful pelvic floor exercises and the women are starting to own their Shakti, their divine feminine power. Usually you can only do this in a group. A woman alone, it’s really scary. But when you get women together, they get really bawdy really quickly. They just go right there, and it’s hilarious because women egg each other on.”

“And we’ve been waiting so long.” Why did I say that? By we, did I really mean me?

She was nice enough not to say that. “Yes, we’ve been waiting, so now it’s happening. I believe this is where we’re going. It’s where we have to go—being that bawdy, wonderful Shakti.”

I loved that she was talking my yoga language. Yoga means the “union of opposites.” It says that we all have feminine and masculine energies. The divine feminine power of Shakti is just as essential as divine male power, but has different qualities. Shakti is about creation, fertility, change, liberation. Naturally, Shakti is most manifest in female bodies. Consciously tapping into this energy invites a big whoosh of earthy-body bawdiness to rise up from the cave-like power spot between a woman’s legs, “her sex.”

The subject of bawdiness brings Christiane back to Mama Gena. “At first I thought Regena was a nut bag. What kind of woman runs around in a pink feather boa?”

“I have a pink feather boa,” I said, and then my voice faded a bit, “but it’s in the back of my closet.”

“Well, yeah.” Her voice said it all, and I got the message. You may have the feather boa, Cyndi, but clearly it/you are still in the closet. But then she started to give me advice, which was the reason I had wanted to talk to her in the first place. I strained to open my ears wider.

“You have to have a sense of humor about it. I have this fabulous little tango top that came with some Tango Babe clothes. It was perfect for this woman I know who also dances tango. So I gave it to her. She’s just adorable. She’s about fifty and of course, she doesn’t know that she has a perfect body and is gorgeous. So I gave it to her and she said, ‘I could never wear that. Never!’

“I said, ‘Okay, could you wear it in the bathroom? Look at yourself in the mirror? Just look at that Tango Babe logo and say, “I’m a Tango Babe”?’

“She said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘Could you try it at least once?’

“And then she’s talking about how uptight she is, and she says, ‘I am so stupid. I am so bad,’ and I said, ‘You can say “I’m so stupid. I’m so bad,” but then why don’t you say, “How adorable is that?” That’s what you have to do. You have to take the Nazi in your head and put a feather boa on it.’”

Whoa. That was the best piece of advice I’d ever heard. I’m not even sure I understood what it meant exactly, but I was certainly familiar with that inner drill sergeant.

“It’s the only way. Nothing else works. Because remember the old feminist adage, ‘the father’s house will never be dismantled by the father’s tools.’ You’re not going to be able to fight your body hatred with the left hemisphere, with the intellect that’s always judging and cutting and all the rest of it. You can never do it that way. You have to come in from the right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere has connections to the body. You have to go back to being a silly girl.”

Looking back now, I cannot believe that this amazing, brilliant piece of advice seemed to go in one of my ears and out the other, but it did. Perhaps it was too deep, too juicy, too overwhelming. It was exactly the advice I needed to hear, but somehow I couldn’t take it in. For a while yet, I would still be in my head, labeling thoughts but not really feeling them; not allowing my energy to drop down to the warm cave of my heart or my Shakti. So for now, I just changed the subject.

I asked her, “One thing that you talked about on Saturday was biologic age versus chronologic age. That was interesting to me because I can stand on my head and do all kinds of great things, but there is a little voice that’s starting to say, ‘You know, you don’t look bad for fifty-six.’ You talked about the notion of self-limiting. Is there a way to accept your age without being self-limiting?”

Gracious as always, she replied, “You simply have to decide that age is irrelevant. I have come to the conclusion that ageism is the last big ism that’s acceptable. Racism is not acceptable and classism is not acceptable, nor is sexism, but ageism is acceptable. You’ll see people who are eighty-five and in nursing homes saying, ‘I don’t want to be around those old people.’”

With a knowing tone, I said, “My mother.”

“She doesn’t want to be around those other people, right?”

“Right, and yet she’s completely out of it. She has Lewy body. Her mind and her body are messed up, but she’s still doesn’t want to be around those other people. And she’s proud of being the best-looking woman there, with the nicest clothes.”

Without realizing it, I’ve just given Christiane something really juicy to bite into. Even though she was theoretically the interviewee, she was listening closely to everything I said. When she heard me describe my mom, she had another understanding about me and the whole topic of female bodies.

She was clear about declaring my mom narcissistic, but I hesitated to chime in my agreement. I felt so bad about my mom, I couldn’t bear to say anything critical about her. But then I did. “I think she is,” I said quietly.

Christiane did not hesitate. “I know she is or she wouldn’t be saying that.” Her energy had spiked up again. The doctor was on! “So! You are the daughter of a narcissistic mother. You can never be good enough when you have a narcissistic mother, because she has an abyss inside and no sense of self. No amount of external validation can fill that abyss inside her.”

“Yeah, you just totally nailed it.”

“I’m a bit narcissistic as well,” she continued. “I’m one of that group.”

Even though she was leading the way, I was not ready to stick that label on myself, so I waffled. “I guess I’m kind of that way.”

“Well, yeah.” Her tone implied that this was obvious. “Because our bodies were created within that consciousness, you see.” Was that my genetic inheritance? Did I catch my mother’s narcissism while I was still in the womb?

Okay, I admit my mother and I are akin in this way as well. But still, I qualified my admission by insisting I really didn’t want to be that way anymore. I’ve realized that being so self-focused is not healthy and that I want to change. “So what should I do?” I asked.

“You’ve been proving yourself and you’ve been surviving. Now, for you, it’s all about thriving. About age fifty-nine, sixty is when life really begins. You don’t take anything seriously anymore. It’s a very exciting time.”

Her voice got loud again to make her point: “From now on you have to be led by life force. You have to be led by Shakti, or everything will disintegrate.”

Then she got quiet. “You know that.”

“Yes, I can feel that,” I replied. “I don’t want to be shut off from my life force anymore, not just for myself but for every woman. I’m a yoga teacher and a lot of people are looking to me.” I just had to throw that in so that she knew that even though I might lean toward narcissism, I’m not selfish.

She heard that. She heard it all and framed her next bit of advice around my bodhisattva bent, reminding me that what’s good for me is good for everybody.

“The lighter you can become, the more open, the more luscious, the more giggling, the better for everyone. I want you to experience what I call the ‘placenta of Shakti.’”

There was that word light again. And Shakti. That had come up for me before, too. “I’ve been told by an Ayurvedic astrologer/palm reader that I’m sitting on a volcano of Shakti.”

Christiane said, “Yes, but it hasn’t been time. Now it is time. You had to create a sturdy foundation. The Shakti, as you know, can blow you right out. That’s why they say the tantric path has the most bodies littered along the way. But you have the discipline. That’s important. Now the Shakti has a strong container and that’s what the rest of your life is going to be.”

A few months later, I traveled back to India, the ancestral home of Shakti, the goddess of creative female energy.

Smith has told me that after a day of traveling it is natural to gain weight and feel bloated. He says it’s just water weight from sitting so long. In my case, it might be more than that. The fifteen-hour flight to India started out fine. David and I were ecstatic about our upgrade to first class. Holding hands as we reclined in the sexy pod-like seating, we said yes to everything on offer, starting with a champagne toast to ourselves to celebrate our first trip to India together.

But just as the curried shrimp appetizers were arriving, the pilot’s voice interrupted our movie to announce that we were going to experience some turbulence. He tried to downplay it by mentioning that this particular hurricane had just been downgraded to a tropical storm and by speaking in that mid-American twang that is meant to suggest the pilot is actually a cowboy and completely in control. None of that was reassuring. What reassures me when I’m flying over the ocean in a huge tin can that is bucking and rocking side to side is a glass of wine. Perhaps even a few glasses of wine. With every kerplunk I could just feel my cortisol going through the roof! You’d think with all the flying I do I’d be used to it, but I’m not and I know self-medicating is denial in action, but it’s the only thing that keeps me in my skin at times like that. The bumps didn’t last too long and I really didn’t drink too much, but the next day I woke up in India feeling fat, fat, fat. Again.

How did this happen? Two years after my first pilgrimage through India, here I am again. Back on a bus with no shocks, riding through the mountains of Darjeeling, and once again obsessing about how tight my waistband feels. These pants were comfortable four days ago when I was packing for this trip. But now as I bounced along the mountain roads of Sikkim, I felt miserable, disgusted, and frustrated and full of negative thoughts about myself coupled with those same old boring vows to eat less, eat different, exercise more.

A few days later I felt good again. I’d gotten over my jet lag a bit and after three bed-buggy hotels offering cold, watery porridge and cold-water showers, we’d checked into the Mayfair Gangtok—a shiny new hotel spa and casino that was a Sikkimese cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland. Around every corner of the maze-like complex we discovered bigger-than-life-size, rainbow-colored Buddha statues similar to the inspiring ones I’d seen in Deer Park, only these statues were done in high-gloss varnish, along with splashy fake waterfalls and real Hindu fire altars with real Hindu monks chanting real Hindu chants.

The hotel entrance welcomed us with a kneeling Garuda statue—the ancient birdman with a beak-like nose, regal crown, and large red wings. He is said to be a mythical protector and was, I thought, a charming balance to the more earthly armed guards and metal detectors. But those were signs of the modernity of this hotel and also meant that our bedroom floor was sparkly, clean wood and perfect for yoga.

Instead of replaying the same soap opera that arises over a mere five pounds, I brought to mind Collette’s words about the feminine nature of waxing and waning. I remembered Jamie’s five-pound window. I reminded myself that these new five pounds were impermanent. I reviewed the definition of meditation as a “placing of attention.” In fact, we are always placing our attention on something, but meditation is a conscious placing of it, or perhaps an un-placing of attention, away from things that don’t need more attention.

My old mental habits had been strong, but little by little, just like yoga, my meditation practice was weakening them. Even though it felt comfortable to berate myself, I recognized that I’d been there before and it felt like old news. This time, perhaps feeling safe in the mandala of Garuda or close to the energy bank of Shakti, I was inspired to keep my commitment to expanding my comfort zone by doing something different, something beneficial.

So, after a hot shower and a nap, I got down on my hands and knees, and reconnected to my body in a positive way. That sounds sexy and it was definitely sensuous. I started with a few cat and cow stretches to warm up my spine, then worked my way into a delicious Downward Dog Pose. Feeling energized, I rolled up to standing and moved into some powerful, strengthening Warrior Poses.

Inspired by my friend at the front gate, I did a Garudasana, which is a balancing pose with one leg wrapped around the other, arms intertwined in front of my face. When I teach this pose to my students, I always tell them that the inner quality of the Garuda is said to be Outrageous. The Garuda is outrageous because, although it is a flying being, it never lands. It never lands because it never gets tired. It never gets tired because it rides the wind. I take a deep breath in, remembering that the wind is my breath. When I resist the way things are going, I feel bad. This is not the same as surrendering or being weak. But it does mean that when I look at things as they are and work with the situation at hand, I am more likely to make positive choices that make me feel more grounded, healthy, and connected to myself and my life. I exhaled for eight slow counts.

Okay, Garudasana on the other leg and then down onto my back for some much-needed spinal twisting to detox my inner organs and soften up my back muscles that had been gripping like mad on that bus.

I finished my practice with my favorite pose, called Legs Up the Wall Pose. I bounced sideways onto the cushy, clean bed and then swung my legs like a mermaid’s tail up onto the headboard, just below a gold spray-painted Buddha print. I felt myself relax as the lymph and water in my legs reversed, de-swelling my ankles and feet. I love this pose because even though it is completely easy and absolutely anybody can do it, almost anywhere, anytime, it is extremely good for you. One of the most beneficial results of this asana is that because you are upside down, your heart has to work a little bit harder than usual to pump your blood. So even though you are just lying there doing nothing, your heart is getting stronger. A very friendly ratio of effort to reward. In almost every way, Legs Up the Wall Pose is a rebalancing, including that it is a restorative yoga pose. Once I was comfortably situated on the bed, a few fluffy pillows under my pelvis and a small throw folded under my head, my job was to just lie there and be open to the experience. This is the feminine aspect of yoga, the receptive element, which reminds us that sometimes doing less brings the most positive results.

By the next morning my digestion was back on track, and when I looked in the full-length mirror, my spirits lifted. I looked and felt much lighter and I felt pleased with myself for energetically embracing my body, instead of getting stuck in my head’s habitual stew of frustration.

As I got dressed in those cute purple pants, which fit perfectly once again, I recognized this whole drama as a very familiar roller coaster. When my body is in balance, my mind functions better and I feel upbeat and positive. It strikes me that my life walks a pretty delicate tightrope if my buttons are so easily pushed by something that is always going to change—the ebb and flow of tides in my personal aquifer.

But bit by bit, my mindfulness practice was proving effective. I felt some space opening in my mind, some kindness coming in, some willingness not to react in the same old way. I know in my heart that this is how suffering decreases, not necessarily in a sudden flash of awakening, but breath by breath by breath.

Before getting back on the bus for another bumpy forty-mile ride that would take at least four hours, I pulled one of the scarlet satin cushions off the glitzy love seat in our room. I wiggled my butt around on it for a few moments until I felt settled and grounded. I placed my attention on my breath and sat quietly. No need to rush to the bus yet. No need to fill space with activity, in body or mind, when receptivity will do. I just sat and breathed and when my mind strayed, I gently returned it to my breath.

While I was in India, Millie developed a life-threatening bedsore. She would need skilled nursing care going forward, and so I moved her to a new facility and hired Maureen, a nurses’ aide/personal companion to bathe her, dress her, feed her, and keep her safe. Feeling comfortable with me, Maureen didn’t bother to say hi when I walked into my mom’s room at the nursing home. She just looked up at me and said, “Now see, if I had a figure like that, I’d be showing it off!” I looked down at what I was wearing and my mind went blank. First of all, I thought it was a pretty tight sweater already; and second, I don’t think my figure is that great, not to mention that I was having an I-feel-fat day. But there was no way that I’m going to say anything like that to Maureen, and anyway, she might be right. She has a great sense of style and I love how she looked in her tomato-gold-and-green-striped blouse, sparkly stretch pants, green eye shadow, orange lipstick, and blond wig.

It only took two days after she first started working for my mom for Maureen to tell me the story of her body. I never asked her anything about it, but we were both sitting by my mom’s bed for hours and just naturally got to talking about the kinds of things that women talk about when they’re getting to know each other. Hair, skin, bodies. She wasn’t wearing her wig that day and I discovered we both have gray hair. That broke the ice. Then Maureen told me that she hadn’t always been at her current size; in fact, she had lost one hundred fifty pounds about eight years back. She did it by walking four hours a day for a year and a half. Two hours in the morning to get to work and two hours coming back home.

Now that I know how hard she works I am even more impressed. Maureen is the primary caretaker for my mom. She works twelve-hour shifts, eight A.M. to eight P.M., mostly unsupervised. She doesn’t need anybody to tell her what to do because she is a trained nurse’s aide, she has an impeccable work ethic, and mostly she is an angel. She cares. She is extra kind to me, too, because she knows my heart is breaking a little more every day as my mom diminishes. We found out today that my mom weighs eighty-two pounds.

But Maureen? Well, she gained those one hundred fifty pounds back and more. She can just barely squeeze down into the arms of the bedside chair. I’ve never seen her eat anything (which we all know is usually a sign of secret bingeing) but she doesn’t have a chance to get much exercise these days either. She has to take a couple of buses and a train to get to the nursing home by eight A.M. and doesn’t make it back home until around ten thirty. No time to walk.

She says to me, “You must eat really healthy.”

“Well, I try to.” And then I feel guilty because I know that I do sometimes have dessert or corn chips and guacamole or red wine.

Maureen says, “I’d like to eat healthier, but fast food is less expensive.” And then I feel sad, and I wonder if I can afford to give Maureen a raise.

Maureen says, “You must do a lot of yoga to get such a nice figure.”

“Well, but, there is always this bit of fat around my waist that I can’t seem to get rid of.”

Oops. For a moment I thought Maureen and I were like me and my other friends, all the friends I’ve had since junior high. We were not raised in a way that allowed us to understand the confidence of the seventy-year-old woman in Lola’s store. Women who did that were considered arrogant at best and, more likely, sluts. So I naturally went to a self-critical place. But then I realized Maureen and I are not in the same body ballpark, so I stopped squeezing my spare tire and instead I said, “Yes, I do yoga most every day and it’s fun! I’ll give you a free pass to come to my yoga studio.” She chuckled and it really did look like she was sitting in a bucket of Jell-O.

“Maureen, you could start in the Brand New Beginners class where everyone feels self-conscious at first and nobody is in shape or knows anything about yoga.”

Her response to that is a combo of a sweet smile and a head tilt that says, “Are you kidding?” She doesn’t have to tell me with words that she wouldn’t be caught dead walking into a yoga studio with that body.

So I say, “I will give you a video and you can do it at home.”

She laughs and says, “I have a video and I like to watch it while I eat!”

“Well, that’s a start, I guess!” We both crack up.

I try another approach. Sitting up nice and straight, on the edge of the seat I say, “Well, you know what, Maureen? Yoga doesn’t have to be a big deal. Really. Just whenever you think of it and since you are sitting here for hours anyway, you can take a deep breath in”—I demonstrate by sitting up even taller and drawing in a long, full inhalation—“and then, as you exhale, do a little twist.” I carefully place my left hand on my right thigh and my right arm on the back of the chair. Then I do a small twist, as if I also had a very large body so that Maureen will get the idea that this simple chair yoga exercise is completely available to her right now, just as she is. But when I untwist I see that Maureen is just looking at me. She is staring at me but she is not following my instructions.

“You can also try breathing exercises right in your chair. Try this.” As I lift my arms up I say, “Inhale, one, two, three, four.”

Maureen does not move.

“And exhale, arms down, one, two, three, four.”

Laughing again, she pushes down hard on the arms of the chair to haul herself up onto her perpetually swollen feet. “There is no way that I am going to do that in front of anyone.”

But now Maureen has stopped listening to me. She is bending over my tiny mom, softly rubbing Vaseline on her lips. She bathes my mom every day, taking care with her feet where the skin is especially thin. She combs her hair and brushes her teeth with a Q-tip. She gently squirts Ensure between her lips with a turkey baster.

Maureen keeps busy all day long, turning my mom from side to side, picking her up and putting her in her wheelchair, getting her to accept one more spoonful of soup, wiping away any dribbles or crumbs on her bib.

Maureen takes care of my mom as if she were her very precious cargo, but like so many other women, she doesn’t have time to take care of herself.

Beginning yoga students almost always respond the same way to an instruction that they’ve never heard before. Perhaps they are in a familiar, stable lunge position, right leg forward and left leg extended long behind them, both hands firmly planted on the floor. So far they’ve been following along with my verbal instructions, but when I say, “Now, tuck your right shoulder behind your right knee,” they stop in their tracks. Some of them simply sit down. Others not only stop what they are doing, but look at me like I’m crazy. “What?” they might say, or “No way!” The new instruction doesn’t compute, so they basically freak out.

Advanced students react to unpredictable directives in the opposite way; their responses generally fall into one of two categories. They receive the instruction and simply give it a try. Or they may pause in mid-position/action and take a moment to consider. From that gap in time and space, they slowly start to wriggle their shoulder behind their knee. If that doesn’t work, they might lift their front hip a bit to create more room for their shoulder, take hold of the back of their ankle to create some leverage and then try it again. It’s fun for them to puzzle out this new instruction.

The beginners are coming from a goal-oriented perspective. They only hear an end-point position, which they immediately interpret as something out of the realm of their possibility—as if I had said, levitate into the air and hover at ten feet. They assume they can’t do it because they haven’t done it before and probably have never seen anyone else do it.

As the teacher, I may need to give them a demonstration but first I like to give the instruction and see how they respond. My job is to lead the students through clear, precise, and appropriate instruction. I create “dots” for them all along the way, but the real learning begins when they start to make their own connections.

This is what we talk about more than the actual yoga pose and it is the teaching that I think is most valuable. At the end of the day, who cares if you can put your shoulder behind your knee? But if you’ve strengthened your ability to listen well, cultivated curiosity in possibilities, and developed some confidence in your own wisdom, then you’ve really made a shift that is useful. This process is what we are practicing in yoga class.

The advanced students have already learned about the meaning of practice. They’ve embodied the knowledge that if they stay steady, stick with the process, and keep moving along, even if they are unsure of both the path and the destination, eventually the way will become clear. They learn to be comfortable with problem solving and, in fact, understand that that is a lot of what yoga or meditation or any kind of mindfulness practice is really about. Taking a look at any given situation and working with things as they are. Not just, how can this position turn into that position? But what is the process of transition for turning this position into that position, with this body (tight hips, weak knees, strong shoulders) and this mind (curious, clear, foggy, scattered) right now? Is there friction involved? Yes. The yoga word for friction is tapas, which really means that where there is heat, there is the potential for transformation.

For the super advanced students, this is where the practice begins. They are most interested in friction because that’s where the alchemy takes place.

“Just thought you might want to know what people are saying about you.” An email from a guy I’d met only once, ten years earlier in Germany, but of course, it was easy to find me through Facebook. He wanted to let me know that a former student of mine had moved back to her home in Berlin and had just published a memoir of her time in NYC, a dishy tell-all about the yoga gossip she’d uncovered. Wouldn’t I want to know about her published claim that “a friend of mine” who taught meditation classes had been involved in some “unsavory” activities? In less time than it takes to even have a thought, I had a sick feeling in my stomach. It was also a knowing feeling; I knew the unnamed “friend” was my husband.

I took a deep breath and shook off that bad feeling. What could I do about it right then, and anyway, I had to go teach a yoga class. But that night I showed my husband. “Look at this weird email I got today, David.” I read it to him, and he instantly freaked out. Generally David is measured in his responses, good at seeing both sides of things and not quick to judge. So when he had this over-the-top response—“That’s outrageous! Who is she anyway? I want to see this book! I want an exact translation! This is libel!”—I knew instantly that it was about him. The bad feeling was back.

I’ve learned to listen to feelings in my body, as another form of meditation practice. Often when I’m walking home from the studio, I’ll realize that I have a butterfly in my stomach or I’m gripping the strap of my yoga bag too hard. I practice being curious about it. It’s fun. I investigate by asking myself, “Okay, what’s bothering me?” The answer is usually right there on the surface and then I can puzzle it through, either coming to a resolution or at least gaining enough awareness of the issue to be able to table it for now and bookmark it for later. The body knows, the mind clarifies, and when I can get them to hold hands with my breath, things usually work out all right.

A couple of days later I realized that bad feeling—an eating-away kind of feeling as if I’d had way too much coffee—was still there. I’d been ignoring it, which is not the same as bookmarking something for later. It’s denial and it will eat away at you.

So I brought up the subject again, and again I was met with the same reaction from him and the same knowing inside me.

“Really?” I asked. “You really don’t know anything about this? Because if there is something true here I’d prefer to hear it from you.”

He sat back in his chair with a sigh and confessed that at times, he had gone to “gentlemen’s clubs” without wanting me to know. With that new information, off I went to teach a class.

That night at dinner he was especially gracious to me; standing up when I entered the restaurant and holding out my chair; his gentlemanly elegance on full display. He said he understood that I might feel slimed; that of course I would feel bad about the deception and so did he. I said it was really no big deal but I didn’t know why I said that. I didn’t really know what I thought, but I still knew what I felt: bad, coffee acid, icky.

When I woke up the next morning I was surprised to have the feeling still lingering. Somehow I knew there must be more. Once again I asked for his consideration: “Please don’t let me find out anything else through Facebook, okay?”

He took a hard look at me. “Do you really think you can handle the truth?”

“Go ahead.”

And then he told me about other women, several affairs, things I had never thought would ever happen in my marriage.

Whoa. I didn’t see that coming. It knocked the breath out of me. I was so shocked that everything turned to liquid inside me and I had to run to the bathroom. I came back to the living room feeling very shaky. I sat on the couch and waited.

He said that if I had been a more loving, more attentive wife, it wouldn’t have happened.

He said he’s always loved my body, always thought I was beautiful. Hadn’t he always told me that? But, he said, I just didn’t hear him and instead hid myself from him.

He said, “What do you expect? You’re the one who’s writing a book about how you hate your body.”

He said that I’d been obsessed with taking care of my mother, my business, even my dog—everything and everyone but him.

Was he right? It’s true that I had been overwhelmed with the care needs of my mother. And yes, my business is also demanding. Clearly I hadn’t been caring for David in the way he wanted, but I couldn’t abandon my mother, could I? She has no one else. I had to take care of her. And I couldn’t abandon my business, and who else would take the dog to the vet, and he might think I didn’t take care of him, but that’s because men just don’t notice all the things you do for them at home, right?

The coffee feeling in my stomach was gone now, replaced by a global feeling of pain and exhaustion. And then, I had to get up, put on my yoga clothes, walk up the street to my studio, and lead my teacher-training group. Thirty minutes after this revelation, feeling shaky, I started the class by ringing the gong for a mindfulness meditation session.

And there I sat. It was hard not to cry but that wasn’t the time or place. My body felt really weird, clammy and stressed. My mind was like the spin cycle, thoughts flying everywhere as I tried to understand that what I’d just heard was not a dream. It was real. My marriage was not what I thought it was. It was hard for me to maintain a good upright posture. I was being pulled down by a heavy feeling in my chest, which brought to life the worn-out phrase “broken heart.”

All I could do was sit with that. Conceptually, I told myself that this feeling would shift, but right then it felt like this was a kind of cellular ouch that wasn’t going anywhere soon.

During the lunch break, I went to my office, closed the door, and sat down on my red couch. I cried and cried and sat and cried and then a new thought arose. It occurred to me that I had gotten something wrong. It was the bodhisattva vow. In my efforts to be helpful to others, I had forgotten that this vow is supposed to be two-pronged. It’s a commitment to helping all sentient beings become free and happy, including oneself. In fact, the teachings say that if you can’t be compassionate to yourself, you can’t be compassionate and caring to others. You can’t be a schmuck to yourself and then be sweet to others. It just doesn’t work like that. You have to start with yourself. That is the only path. There is no other way. How had I missed that essential detail?

Menopause. It’s not an excuse but it is an explanation for much of what had been going on with me. In addition to grieving over my father’s recent death and despairing over the loss of my mother as I knew her, while still having sole responsibility for her care, I noticed that my sexual appetite had waned over the last several years. Mentally, I cared about this. Does anyone want to think of themselves as an asexual being? When I thought of myself like that I didn’t like it, but physically, I didn’t care. My groin-ycologist told me later that menopause creates a catch-22 because when you have no libido you also have no motivation to get a libido. Everything in the body is interdependent; the whole system is a vinyasa, really, so when your libido tanks it is indicative of what is happening throughout the entire network of your body and mind.

All the natural elements of your energy weaken, such as water, which evaporates, leaving you with dry skin, hair, and nails; your wind energy lessens, which makes it a drag to do aerobic activity and generally leaves you in a state of less oomph. The fire element hands you a double whammy: Your digestive fires cool down, giving you that menopause belly pooch, and at the same time, your internal thermostat starts spiking, giving you unexpected rushes and flushes at the most inopportune moments. You suddenly find yourself with a sweaty brow while giving a talk in front of a group of people, or being awakened by an adrenaline rush at three o’clock in the morning. It’s tough stuff.

I would try to make a little joke by gesturing toward my lap and saying, “You are dead to me!” And my husband and I would laugh, but not really. Yet there was a part of me that was okay with this new non-sensation. I remembered what I had learned in yoga philosophy about the four stages of Indian society: Youth is the time for education; early adulthood is the time for marriage and creating a family; the third phase of life is slowing down and getting your business affairs settled; and finally, one’s purpose in the last stage of life is to be old and asexual, naturally turning away from lust and sensuality and devoting oneself to spiritual pursuits.

I thought about this a lot. I thought why can’t I go with what feels natural and organic to me? Since turning fifty I’d been desperate to spend more time outside in nature and when I was inside, I found myself drawn to domestic activities such as knitting and making throw pillows, things I’d learned from my mom but had been too busy and active to engage in for decades. Now I was completely content to sit for hours crocheting sweaters for bottles, making cute flower vases that I gave to my girlfriends. I found this relaxing. Sex did not seem relaxing. It took effort and the other thing was, the really bad thing was, that it hurt. Nobody talks about this and so I thought that it was just me. Another wrong thing about my body.

There’s another catch-22 with menopause, as well; one that is a serious trap between a rock and a hard place. Women are faced with choosing whether to take hormones and potentially up their risk of getting cancer, or trying to have painful sex, or giving up on the whole thing all together. Another option is to silently freak out and avoid dealing with it, which is what I did. I didn’t know that going to the groin-ycologist is not just about getting an annual pap. I had no idea that she has lots of ways to help you feel sexual energy and arousal and attraction again. There are hormone creams and patches and small, safer doses and new kinds of tests to monitor your health all along the way. But I didn’t know any of this then. I just didn’t feel sexy and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know who to ask or how to ask. I felt embarrassed and like an Indian senior citizen, I turned away from my sensuality, letting it die a natural death.

So it was true that I hadn’t given my husband the sexual attention he needed and deserved and he was right to expect more from me. But I hadn’t taken care of him because I hadn’t even been able to take care of myself.

Isn’t the path of self-care what Jamie took when she outed herself in More? Didn’t Christiane support that notion when she told me to go for joy and ride my Shakti? Isn’t wanting goodness for yourself what Tia meant when she used the word light? My mindfulness practice was helping me, but it was still something going on in my head.

Crying on my red couch put me back in my body again and I knew in my gut that the root of the whole problem was that I had not been taking care of myself. I knew it because I also felt mad. I felt the tiniest little bit of protectiveness toward my own self, that self that was feeling so hurt and unseen right then. And that little seed, nestled in my second brain somewhere around my navel chakra, was trying to tell me something.

Gelek Rimpoche had taught me that the Tibetan words for mind and heart are the same: citta. As I remembered that, I had another knowing, more wisdom from the brain in my gut. It told me that I would get through this, that I just had to stay out of my head and stay down in my heart. And when I thought about doing that, the little seed grew a voice, which popped up and pushed itself forward, drowning out the other chattering voices expressing hurt and shock about a relationship that wasn’t the safe haven I had thought it was. This voice wasn’t the familiar grumpster, but came from a different, more friendly and confident place. This voice said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.”