Friday 21 February 1975
Abby
I spread my towel on the wooden floor of the church hall. The yoga instructor, wearing a long-sleeved leotard, pale orange, offers me a smile of acknowledgement as she pads barefoot around the room. A fifty-something woman with a grey ponytail moves to the right to make more space for me. Sun beams in a bright slant through the stained-glass windows but the open front doors invite in a breeze so the morning’s heat is lifted to the rafters, to rest with a pair of swallows sitting in silence above us. The room is painted white except for the bare floorboards. It smells of incense, with notes of shampoo, warm skin and dust.
I’ve dropped the kids off: two at kindy, one at school. I lie on my back as I see the dozen others are doing and feel my shoulders relax towards the floor. Sarah, Petey and Joanne are safe and cared for, and I am free. My own schooling starts Monday and I’ll use this moment of unowned time to consider how to make this year better than the last, to force positive change. I will exercise, clean and organise.
I tell myself that for this one hour I won’t weep when I picture my husband and best friend naked together. I’ll block that image. I will not obsess about whether I can forgive my husband, or whether my husband and father will ever forgive me. I won’t try to think of fresh ways to further explain myself or how I can make amends. Or who exactly is owed amends. I won’t think about Skye’s little boy. I’ll push down my anger that Charlie still doesn’t seem as guilty as he should be, as contrite, or committed to healing his rift with Dad. None of this. I will banish this writhing, poisonous viper pit from my mind.
Of course, my brain fights relaxation, accustomed to encouraging anxiety to flare up as soon as I’m horizontal. I tell myself I’ll allow five minutes of my punishing self-talk and then I will relax into the class. So: I need to talk to Mark, and soon, to have one conversation that doesn’t immediately disintegrate into yelling and insults, our ping-pong of blame, so I can beg him to drop his investigations into the commune. Sergeant Doyle thinks this conversation has already happened, even praised my good sense, and I didn’t correct him. The truth is that the universe offered me a reprieve when Mark flew to Alice Springs one day after he moved out of our house. He’ll be there for another week, investigating something about the American military base at Pine Gap. The previous Four Corners reporter who was covering the story is under arrest for trying to get inside the facility. Mark is enraged there’s a part of Australia no Australian is allowed into: ‘Satellites, radars. Do you know that more than six hundred people work at that base and our government has no idea – none – about what’s going on out there.’ He said that much when he told me he’d be gone a while, so consumed with the story it wouldn’t have mattered who was on the other end of the phone. This assignment should fill me with dread but I’m confident in Mark’s ability to keep himself safe, and glad he’s immersed in a meaty story. Also, bastard. I’m snapped away from my thoughts by the yoga teacher, who welcomes us to her class.
We stand at the back of our towels with our hands in prayer position then swoop our arms up. The woman on the phone said this was a beginners’ yoga class and perfect for my tightly wound body, but the other students seem to know what to do and are able to move from one pose to the next with ease. I am, admittedly, making it harder on myself by second-guessing the instructor. ‘Salute’ sounds aggressive to my ear. And shouldn’t we be doing this outside where we can see the sun? My body resists the chest-expansion exercises, finding comfort in curling my shoulders in. Bending down to touch my toes feels claustrophobic and brings on a rush of panic. I roll up faster than anyone else. I count the seconds when we hold a position, antsy to move.
The instructor must see the tension radiating off me and strokes my back as I try a downward dog pose. Dog, cat, frog, camel, cow. Foreign words spoken as though I should understand them. More pain than I’d anticipated. I’m not unfit but evidently I’m inflexible, in every way. The instructor’s hand is warm through my t-shirt. I try to relax, not for myself but because I know this is what she wants me to do.
By the end of the class I’ve worked myself into a tangle of annoyance and self-loathing, and want nothing more than to be home. I shouldn’t have come. But when I think we’re about to be released, the instructor walks around the room passing out thick cushions to make us comfortable for our seated meditation.
Once we’ve arranged ourselves onto the cushions, the room becomes silent. The instructor, cross-legged in front of her altar – a low square table covered in Indian cloth, topped with a Buddha statue, incense, a small vase of frangipanis, a scattering of shells, a lit candle – asks us to gaze with soft eyes on the flame and become aware of our breath. ‘Don’t try to control it, simply observe. Feel the rise and fall of your stomach, the release that comes with each exhale.’ My ankles push into my towel. I hear my heartbeat over my breath. I watch the flame and think of the altar we make to my mother each year, and realise I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve turned what started as a moment of reflection into a furtive chore to rush through before getting on with Christmas. I’ll tell Charlie I want to try a new way to remember our mother, as she was before she got sick. And I’d like to include the children. The decision to drop our shrine-building makes me feel more relaxed than I have since I walked into this hall. My shoulders ease down.
Out of nowhere, I remember Charlie saying ‘karma’ when I was trying to explain the laws of motion. Perhaps action and reaction and cause and effect are not that different.
‘Breathe in, breathe out.’ The instructor advises us to find peace in the truth of this moment. I don’t know what that means. But the promise of peace, that word used on her poster, is what drew me to this class so I should at least try to experience it. ‘Try not to think about the past or the future, or the stories you tell yourself about your life, but instead think about what is happening in this moment. Be here, now. Be willing to truly feel, in all its glorious expansiveness, everything that exists in this breath, and in the next breath.’ The idea of not allowing my mind to think about the past or future is intriguing but bewildering. I’m committed to keeping the bad thoughts at bay, and dropping my mind into a lower gear, but to corral my mind into one moment seems incredibly limiting, the opposite of expansive.
‘Let go,’ the instructor whispers, as if reading my thoughts.
We sit in silence until she says: ‘A poem.’ Which we all take as an invitation to resettle our bodies.
‘Let us consider the words of Zen poet Ryōkan as we begin our brief look into the three paths to peace.’
How strange that the Western scientist and Eastern seer divide their truths into threes: did they artificially construct three laws and three paths, or is that a division preferred by nature that they merely put into words? Surely life is scrappier, messier than their three-part theories would have it.
‘To find truth, drift east and west, come and go, entrusting yourself to the waves.’ The instructor looks directly at me and suggests we close our eyes. ‘To find happiness and peace in our lives, to feel genuine contentment, first we must know the truth of ourselves and the moment, and pay close attention to what is inside us; second, we must encourage kind and loving relationships with those around us; and third, we must relax with true awareness in the waves.’ She pauses. ‘This last one can meet resistance from those of us more comfortable trying to control than to observe. But a wise mind entrusts itself to the waves, and is able to remain calm even in chaos, knowing that life is never still, and that we are a part of that perpetual movement and change. Even as you sit here your heart pumps, your blood flows, your lungs empty and fill. And outside, flowers bloom, a bird breaks out of its shell, another may lie down to die. The earth moves around the sun. We don’t control any of this. We need only to be aware of it, fully awake to everything around us, both outside and inside our bodies. Live and love, entrusting ourselves to the waves.
‘Take a moment now to visualise yourself floating in an endless sea. Be at ease in the calm water, then observe the waves as they rise to swell and crash around you, feel the push and pull of the water and know that life is not meant to be still, that you are part of a vast and ever-changing ocean. Entrust yourselves to the waves.’ She pauses again. ‘For our last few moments, come into your body and simply breathe.’
And though I am sitting still and my eyes are closed, inside I am like a cartoon character who has thrust a finger into a live power point and become electrified. I’ve never thought about life in this way. My father taught me the value of pragmatism, practicality, the rigid inevitability of forward motion, the pointlessness of introspection or resisting what is established. Move on, move forward, fix and maintain. Control.
But what I hear now is that life’s movement is something more organic than that, messier, more beautiful. The world and everything in it rises and falls and changes and grows, even as I sit and breathe. And I can’t control that. And I am only responsible for some of what I can control. And it is possible to feel at peace knowing that.
This, at least, is how I understand her words: I can control what I eat for breakfast, how many hours I study, how I vote, what I say. I can exercise. I can show up again for this class. But I cannot make my brother grow up, my father answer the phone or my husband come home and love me. I can keep my hands on the wheel today, but I cannot undo Skye’s death. I cannot rewrite the past or be certain about the future. But I can choose to fully be in this moment of this life. A thought that fills me with fear and delight.