17
Garbage on the Beach
I learned the Mysore practice of yoga when I was in Berlin, working on Hal Hartley’s movie Fay Grim. Yeah, you do get sore from Mysore but it’s the fundamental “self practice” yoga, which, if you learn it, you can practice anywhere, all over the world, and since Mysore is the basis of all yoga, if you can do Mysore, you can do any other yoga class. Oh my, I’m sore. My teacher’s name was Andreas Schnittger. He was in his early thirties, had trained in India with Pattabhi Jois (who founded the practice), and was intensely dedicated. He always wore the same thing to practice: tight black sweatpants with a white shirt and black sweatbands on both his wrists. And if this wasn’t cool enough, he played jazz drums in an experimental, avant-garde jazz band. When I asked if I could come to a show, he said I probably wouldn’t like it, that it was mainly “noise” and very loud. J’adore! A dedicated yogi makes-music-I-wouldn’t-understand avant-garde jazz drummer. Far out! He was so cool.
I started with “the primary series,” which is where you begin. Learning when to breathe and how to breathe is an integral part of yoga: there’s just so much breathing. Yes, that’s right, we are breathing the air at this moment, but I mean conscious breathing. Andreas spoke English really well but carefully, and he liked to say, “Free breathing.” I think he must have liked the elongated eeeeee sound, because German’s not a language that relaxes its vowels—when I tried to speak it, I had to purse my lips and push the O sound to the front of my teeth, and I did that terrible thing where you imitate the accent of the country you’re in and it’s annoying for everyone except yourself. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t invited to the jazz club. Anyway, Andreas said “free breathing” a lot.
After a few sessions, he caught on that I thought this was weird, and he said, “You don’t like it, ‘free breathing’?”
“I do, it’s nice,” I said. “But breathing being free? I dunno. It’s not like you charge someone, like money to breathe. In English, it can sound like you’re talking about commerce.”
But he loved it. “I like it. Free breathing.”
“Like breathing is in jail, and we need to free it from jail? Like put it on a protest sign?”
“I like it,” he said again. “Free breathing.”
“Of course it’s free. It’s breathing.”
We eventually dropped it. Put it on a protest sign.
Andreas taught me private classes. When I wasn’t working on the film, I’d walk to the studio, a few blocks away from where I was living in Mitte, and take class with not even ten students. This was in wintertime and Berlin was cold and snowy. The city didn’t pour salt on the sidewalks, because they were sensitive to the dogs, whose paws would bleed if salted. So the snow never melted on the sidewalk and you’d see people sliding and slipping and their dogs trotting along. Hardly any dogs had leashes, and they were allowed in restaurants and bars and it wasn’t a big deal.
My apartment was small, which I liked, and had efficient recycled modern-type furniture: a shower curtain made of sewn-together plastic bags, a bed on the floor, and a chair made of plywood that looked like it would break if I sat in it, which it did. Yeah, I leaned back and it broke, so I didn’t have a chair anymore. The place was simple, and it was a relief at that time in my life. I had broken up with Ryan and suffered a betrayal when a girlfriend slept with my ex, and another friend was having drug problems and was being needy and crazy. “Bye-bye, mein lieber herr. Farewell, mein lieber herr. It was a fine affair, but now it’s over!”
So it was a great time for me to eat alone and listen to the music of a language I didn’t understand, and get my body moving to the Mysore Ashtanga yoga practice.
Samasthiti, or Mountain Pose, is the starting position: you stand at the front of your mat with your hands at your sides and your eyes closed, neck aligned with your body, imagining a line or string of energy from the cosmos to the top center of your head, traveling directly down, straight to the center of the Earth. Don’t stick your belly out and become a hill. You find your center and pull it in, like a strong mountain. Be still. I’ll show you.
Now you start the breathing practice: Breathe in on the count of four, in what’s called ujjayi breath, and then breathe out. Do this through your nose only. If you don’t know what ujjayi breath is, contract your throat to sound like Darth Vader, and breathe in. Now breathe out, still sounding like him. Do it right now. Oh, who cares, you’ll never see these people again.
On the last count of this “ocean breathing,” at the end of the breath, in that space before the final exhale, bring your hands to prayer position at your chest—your “home,” or “heart center,” they call it. This is where you start the moving of your hour-and-a-half “practice.”
When you move, your body becomes an architectural form traveling through space: angles, symmetry—harmony on the earth. It becomes a vessel, which the elements of nature pass through within the mind’s thoughts or meditation. Yoga is the practice of the body so that it can become light, providing your thoughts with light so they don’t stick to ideas that the mind creates for itself. You want your mind to float, or to at least create more distance from its attachments.
In class with Andreas, when I put my hands to my chest in prayer, my mind got quiet enough to hear a meditative voice say, “You’re home. You’ve been running so much.” Tears fell down my face and onto my mat, like rain. This is not unusual and if you’re not drunk, I think it’s kind of fabulous to be free enough to cry in front of other people. Yeah, it’s written all over you that you cry when you fly.
There’s a quote from the writer Joseph Campbell that I love because it’s easy to remember. “I don’t have faith, I have experience.” My uncle Tim turned me on to Joseph Campbell with The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, which was on PBS when I was around eighteen. I really dug it. Uncle Tim died of an overdose when I was in my twenties. He’d become addicted to opiates over the years and the trauma of Vietnam had been like a powder keg inside him. He also raged against small-town religious conservatism and returned to Shreveport to confront Nonnie—to find the mother within—but she wasn’t easy with her heart because her feelings probably scared her. She’d become an icy queen.
As I stood there in Mountain Pose, more memories and repressed feelings came up. The biggest thing, probably, was that I recognized myself—or my life. I stood there in prayer, with hands at my heart center, and just felt my life up to that point. I saw the speed of my life and all this running. How I’d grab on to parts and my work as if it were real, as if it were something I could hold on to. I just wanted to be distracted and absorbed at the same time and have it be about something or someone else. I was reaching outside myself, mostly. It’s so weird because really I want to disappear and acting allows for that; but at the same time you can see me on the screen on this airplane. Anyway, I started to realize stuff.
I heard my inner voice saying, “It took you so long to get here, but it’s okay.”
“It takes courage to live a life” is something Mildred would always tell me. You have to take the courage, though; it can’t just be an idea. “Hold on to yourself,” she said repeatedly, and anyway, it was on the yoga mat where I held on to myself. Stop digging when you find yourself in a hole. Just cut that string. “Free breathing.” Put the shovel down. Isn’t the dirt great around this mountain? Isn’t this view amazing?
So the first movement you will do is part of what’s called the “vinyasa flow,” and it’s the Sun Salutation. Okay, I’m getting up.
Your hands move up while you breathe in on the count of four (with your still-steady ujjayi breath), and you reach your palms over your head: your arms have made the circle of the sun. The movement or gesture is a worship to the sun. Again, a slow deep breath.
On the next count of four, you bend forward as your arms brush down and pass “the landscape” in front of you.
Then your palms are placed directly in front of your feet as you fold into a sandwich bend (a completed bow to the sun).
If your palms don’t hit the ground, don’t worry, it’s not a competition; be calm about it. You see your limit and acknowledge it, and get over it.
On the next count of four, look up to “see” the “horizon,” and then bow your head down on the next count of four, forehead on your shins again. Another bow to the sun.
The first big move comes next: your feet step or jump behind you to a push-up position, or Chaturanga, or “chat to Rhonda.” You somewhat float down to the floor, for just a millisecond, landing with your torso an inch off the floor, your arms and toes holding you up. You scoop up to a back bend, with a long inhale, and then you’re positioned facing up, like a seal.
On the count of four, the breath of your nose comes shooting out again, like water from a whale’s spout, and then you push your butt into the air and make a triangle above the earth: you settle into Adho Mukha Svanasana, or Downward-Facing Dog. I met a standard poodle named Jackie O at the Chateau Marmont who did this posture on command.
In this posture, breathe four long breaths again. If you were going to practice with Pattabhi Jois, the father of Mysore, you’d spend months practicing only the Sun Salutation.
The next move is the first big sweep with your foot. It begins with the right foot. With your left foot planted at a solid quarter turn, swoosh your right foot back (the sound of a wave), then swing it forward, and plant your foot in front of you in a forward-facing lunge. Your arms come up, tight to the head, palms in prayer— the pointed arrow of a bow, reaching up to the sky. This is Virabhadrasana, or Warrior One. Sure, come through.
The sound of the foot swooshing “like the sound of an ocean wave” was an Andreas touch, from his own teacher. I like it. The body can be fluid: all that’s inside us moves around like water.
You hold Warrior One for four oceanic, Star Wars ujjayi breaths. Then slide out to Warrior Two for another set of ujjayi breaths.
Okay, I’m going to sit back down. At this point, it may not sound like it, but you’re already sweating. This whole time you’ve been “cleaning the garbage on the beach,” as Andreas would say. The voices that chatter with those awful scenarios and the voice of judgment, like stale, hard gum—spit it out, with the other garbage on the beach. The waves come and wash that gum away, along with those faded Budweiser cans and strips of dirty plastic beach crud. Then look at the horizon. Look at the view. Oh, ugh, the garbage on the beach has come back again: my shit, my work, my stress, the beach is a mess, this world is a mess—clean this garbage on the beach!
And then you get calm again, centered. A nice wind, while in Warrior Two, has come to blow the garbage away, allowing inner peace. Leaves blow by not indigenous to this tropical climate—c’est la vie, auf wiedersehen. Tschüss!
One day, during my moontime, Andreas led me through a private yin class and guided meditation. In yin class, you hold postures that are mainly on the floor but you still get sore.
He’d brought over some yoga blocks and blankets and an eye pillow. I sat cross-legged in meditation pose, on the yoga block, so I wouldn’t hunch. I closed my eyes. “I want you to picture yourself as a five-year-old sitting in a chair. You are looking at yourself in this chair. When the child moves, it’s a thought coming up. You ask the child to sit in the chair.” My five-year-old self was monkey-brained, examining the chair, walking around it—curious, distracted, laughing, crying. This played on a loop, quickly, in my mind’s eye. I found myself telling the child to sit in the chair over and over again, holding her little hand, walking her to the chair, gently gesturing for her to sit and be still.
Before I knew it, the hour and a half had flown by, so there was peace found. When I opened my eyes, I saw Andreas looking at me as if in a daydream. His teacher position had dropped. “I’d like to follow you for a day,” he said, “to see what it would be like to be you, with your dog, and to be free.”
Not long after returning from Berlin, I’d come home from a baby shower for a college friend, and I was feeling sad and blue. At the shower, I’d seen an acquaintance, a woman around my age, a writer, and she’d seen me in something. Anyway, she blurted out, about the other actress in the film she saw, “Why does she wear a wig when it makes her look old?” She quickly covered her mouth, embarrassed, and said, “That was an awful thing to say.” I shrugged and made it alright despite spiraling into thinking about all the talk that goes on behind my back. “She probably just likes the wig, and, you know, doesn’t want to sit in the makeup chair every morning and be fussed over. Someone pulling your hair at six in the morning for an hour, sometimes for months at a time . . . it’s not that fun.” Then I decided to be more direct or honest, and told her how I remembered seeing Susan Sarandon talking about aging on television, how after the age of forty, women are just ignored. She ended that conversation and said, “Well, you were great in that movie,” and I said thank you.
The snowy night in the city had me feeling like a lone figure in a snow globe and when I got home that night I couldn’t wait to cry. The suffering produced some garbage on the beach: I want to hide forever, New York is competitive and harsh and it’s not the same anymore; everyone wants something; everyone has to be so smart, interesting, or fascinating. Why do some conversations feel like I’ve given blood? The wind was dramatic and then settled and then I saw an IV tube and went to the ocean to rinse it. Oh, look, there are Andreas’s black warm-up pants and his wrist sweatbands. I went online to find a local yoga class.
There was one at Jivamukti, with a teacher I didn’t know. I took a fun class at a workshop there once and on the last day, the teacher had us close our eyes and find the tops of our mats with our feet and then stand on tippy-toe, and click our heels three times and say, in unison, “There’s no place like om, there’s no place like om, there’s no place like om . . .” I joined in for half a second and then just looked around to see if anyone else thought it was too silly or was too cool to do it and exchanged a few looks.
I started at the top of my mat, in Mountain Pose, Samasthiti. Then I started my four breaths on the count of four: earth, wind, fire (father, son, and the Holy Ghost), and water.
I put my hands to prayer at heart center: “home.”
Then came the Sun Salutation, arms up to the sky, “the sun always comes up,” my hands reaching out over the space. Then down on the count of four, bowing down, “the sun goes down.” I put my head on my shins, jumped back, Chaturanga; swooping up, my back bent like a wave, “the water rushes out.” I looked up and my emotions, like a wave, splashed out into the air. Good-bye. I pulled back into Downward Dog and receded from them as I breathed it out.
Next came four long Darth Vader breaths, “I am your father,” and on the count of four, the first big sweep into Warrior One. I brushed my right foot against the mat, making the sound of the ocean like Andreas taught me.
Well, the yoga teacher was standing directly behind me and his legs were open in a standing V and during that oceanic brush, the arch of my foot, the shape of a curved wave, briefly cupped his package, and I thought, “Sea anemone.” I fell to the floor, grabbing my belly and laughing so hard—rocking with laughter.
I looked around to share the moment but no one did, or they pretended not to. I was in the back of class so I knew people saw it because they’d have been looking through their legs when it happened. The yoga crowd can be a tough house. I said something to the teacher like “Never in my life,” and he said, “Well, there’s a first time for everything,” which made me laugh even harder. “A first time for everything”? Like “Laughagainasana”? There is no place like om.
