Kurma means tortoise. Kurmasana is dedicated to Kurma, the tortoise incarnation of Lord Vishnu, maintainer of the universe. Kurma is also the name of one of the five secondary forms of prana, or the life force. It is said to circulate in the skin and bones and is responsible for the opening and closing of the eyes. Kurmasana is sacred to the yogi. The Bhagavad Gita says, ‘When he [the practitioner] can withdraw his senses from association with other objects, as a tortoise withdraws its limbs from external danger, then he is firmly fixed on the path toward wisdom.’ In this pose the body resembles a tortoise and the mind becomes calm whether the practitioner experiences pleasure or pain. Eventually the practitioner of this pose will know freedom from the emotions. The pose tones the spine and the whole central nervous system, and stimulates the abdominal organs. The asana prepares the spiritual aspirant for the fifth stage of yoga, pratyahara, or sense withdrawal, symbolized by the tortoise.
The taxi climbed away from Malibu and the ocean, winding up through hills of dry red soil until the side road became a dirt track, and finally a dead end. At the top of a steep drive, in the shade of a black oak tree, a stream bubbled into a pond that held three terrapins. It was a hot afternoon and a warm dry wind came over the land. Grace wrestled out of her sweater, stopping to watch the wide wingspan of an eagle, circling overhead.
As if deferring to the majesty of the landscape and the big clear sky, the Bodhi Tree yoga centre was built into the rocky headland and painted the same sand color. Opposite the glass entrance a man leaned against a dry stone wall, his pale face tilted to the sun. Black hair curled emphatically on the white sheen of his thin legs, and Velcro-strapped black sandals disguised feet of unusual elegance. From behind closed eyes the man said, ‘They want us to wait out here.’ Grace sat beside him, welcoming the sun on her winter skin.
‘You were on my flight from London. I’m Sam.’
Sam was American and taught at the American school in Paris. He had flown through London to check it out, he said proudly, his earrings glinting silver. ‘We’ve traveled far, yet we’re here first, and that means we’ll get our first choice of where to stay.’
‘I left that part of the form blank. I didn’t know what a yurt was.’
Sam described a yurt as a round, canvas tent. Bodhi Tree had a village of them, kitted out with heaters, beds, and wooden floors. ‘I’d rather stay in a tent at the bottom of the valley,’ he said, ‘right in the heart of nature.’
‘It’s more than natural enough for me up here.’
‘I don’t want to be on top of the yoga centre. Too much going on.’ He glanced at her Dolce & Gabbana sandals and well-made luggage. ‘My guess is you’re in a cabin. Take it as a compliment. Cabins are elite, and would destabilize a teacher’s budget.’
Miss Messenger appeared, her gypsy skirt and long red hair at odds with the businesswoman impression she’d given over the phone three weeks ago. She held her clipboard as a shield against the sun as she addressed the students who had arrived in a steady stream. ‘Om shanti,’ she said.
The greeting amused Grace, but was forgivable, given not so much where they were, but what they were there for. ‘Please be patient. I will get to you all. First come, first served. You must be Sam,’ she said to the only man in the long line.
Sam came out of the building happy. Heaving his backpack onto his left shoulder, he headed off to his tent. Grace was next. Observing the sign to remove her shoes, she walked into the hall, past a life-sized laughing Buddha standing at the entrance with his arms raised. Grace touched his round belly, the red wood stroked smooth by thousands of trailing hands. At the far end of the hall, three women worked silently in a stainless steel kitchen that had floor to ceiling windows looking onto an herb garden. Grace wanted time to absorb the calm, cool atmosphere, but Miss Messenger was waiting.
‘I’ve put you in Yurt Six with three lovely women. Your application forms suggest you’re compatible,’ said Miss Messenger, getting down to business.
Grace regretted careless answers given in haste to questions she couldn’t remember. ‘I’d rather have a cabin, if you don’t mind,’ she said. The last thing she wanted was late night talks with girls in yurts, revealing secrets, reliving days.
Miss Messenger twitched at the unexpected resistance. ‘I think you’ll enjoy the yurt. Students in yurts really bond.’
‘I’m not here to bond. I just want to do the training and learn as much as I can.’
‘Then you’ll miss out on the Bodhi Tree experience. Anyway, cabins cost extra.’
‘Please can I have a cabin? I need time alone to think.’
‘Or not to think,’ said Miss Messenger, eying Grace above the Yurt Six file. Grace looked back evenly and waited. Miss Messenger unlocked a drawer in her desk and handed Grace a tiny key on a plain plastic tab. ‘This is for the cabin at the top of the property where it gets mighty windy, so it isn’t that quiet. Neither is it the splendid isolation you say you want. The other bed has been reserved by a student with whom you have very little in common.’
‘Apart from yoga,’ Grace smiled.
‘Let’s hope it’s enough. Three weeks can be a very long time.’
After signing the indemnity that protected the Foundation from every conceivable (and inconceivable) misadventure that might befall her, Grace picked up a map of the Bodhi Tree property and went in search of her bed.
The cabin, a garden shed from the outside, was painted white within, and furnished with two wooden beds and an old glass apothecary cabinet. It was a small, good room and Grace was happy. She unpacked her bag and, out of habit, checked her mobile. There was no signal. She felt cut off, from what she wasn’t sure, since she had nobody to call. Leaving the door open, she lay on the bed, gazing at the mountains through the mesh curtain that kept insects out but allowed air to flow through. Spinning from twenty hours of travel, lulled by the constant sound of cicadas in the California afternoon, Grace drifted off to sleep.
When she woke the bed opposite was covered in clothes that were stacked in neat rows. On the table between the beds was a note: ‘I’m Stephanie, your cabinmate. You looked so peaceful, didn’t wake you. Induction at seven. Perhaps see you there.’
Grace liked Stephanie’s handwriting as much as her wardrobe. She picked up a white T-shirt (size x-small) that was hand painted and ripped in the right places, just the right amount. Judging by her clothes, Stephanie was a petite original, and, by the books piled on the bedside table, a serious yogi with a big mind. Patanjali, Desikachar, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Iyengar . . . and Jim Harrison? What was he doing alongside such illustrious vegetarians? Harrison, a poet, novelist, and meat eater, was an American who hunted and fished; he was an old favourite of Ted’s, which made sense, but he was hardly an obvious choice for a yogi girl. Grace opened The Shape of the Journey and read randomly: ‘I began my Zen studies and practice well over twenty years ago in a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed. I immediately set about reading hundreds of books on the subject, almost all contemporary and informed by earnest mediocrity. There was no more self-referential organism alive than myself, a potato that didn’t know it was a potato.’
Grace laughed. Zen studies, yoga studies; both promoted the idea of liberation, that it was possible to live attuned to something higher. She would have preferred to lie on the bed and read but the Bodhi Tree induction called. She ran to the main hall. The room was full of students, cross-legged on the floor; Grace squeezed in, knee-to-knee, between two women. The second she was still, a man’s voice said, ‘Let’s om to know we’re here.’
Everyone closed their eyes to hum, tones rising and falling with a harmony that ended of its own accord. When Grace opened her eyes, she recognized Garuda and Rita from the Web site. They were sitting at the far end of the circle, a bull terrier resting his head on Rita’s foot, his tail whacking Garuda’s knee. Confident that such a dog would not tolerate a self-referential anything, Grace felt better. In a way, the dog made things seem normal, although right then Grace felt that nothing was. For the first time it occurred to her that it was pretentious to have come so far west to learn about an Eastern discipline. What’s more, yoga teaching in England required no certificate. She really didn’t need to be here at all. Grace had wanted distance from home to heighten her experience, but now that she was here, all she felt was tired and precariously aloof from the thirty-six women and five men with whom she now sat: a circle of strangers. Grace was glad for the male-female imbalance. Her attempt at pratyahara before she met Harry had been wrongly executed. She understood now that she had simply shut down. The Bodhi Tree was an opportunity to reap-ply herself to sense withdrawal, and while, post-Harry, another man was the last thing on her mind, she was reassured to think that those at the Bodhi Tree would not distract her.
‘Congratulations on your journey,’ said a lyrical voice. Rita spoke the language of spiritual America, but any word from her would have sounded divine, such was her southern accent. ‘I know for some of you the journey started a long time ago. For Garuda and me the journey is twenty-five years old, and it’s a treat to be gathered together with you this evening. Over the next twenty-one days we will become a yoga family. It’s a dynamic we’re already creating.’
Rita was the poster girl for a yogic life with a fine yogi husband. In Patagonia pants and plain T-shirt, Garuda didn’t look like a man who would take the mythological name of Lord Vishnu’s mount, the half-eagle, half-human personification of courage. He was wiry, blond, inscrutable, and let his wife extend the courtesies. Grace liked Garuda all the same, and supposed she would grow accustomed to his name, although he looked too American for it. Next, Rita introduced Mark, the assistant yoga teacher.
Mark had broad shoulders and a puckish smile and was the darkest-skinned person in a room that was predominantly white-white-white. ‘Fifteen years ago I arrived from England and haven’t been back since.’ His rolled r’s and flattened a’s were broad Hampshire, the last accent Grace expected to hear. ‘My job is to help make this the best experience for you, so don’t be shy, and do ask for help.’ Untouched by American influence though Mark’s accent may have been, his manner and Native American rings and bracelets were hardly Hampshire.
Rita invited students to introduce themselves, requesting that they keep their stories short. About half were married and three were planning weddings. There were several teenagers who had graduated that year and expressed indecision about the future. Only one woman, Frances from Seattle, thirty-five that day, admitted she was counting on yoga as a future career. Many women described husbands and children, and spoke about things that happen in life, and stick. All of a sudden, Grace felt bereft that nothing had stuck to her.
The girl beside Grace drew her heels higher on her thighs to tighten her lotus pose, pulled up her spine and cleared her throat. ‘I’m Stephanie,’ she said. Stephanie had apparently protected her pure white skin all her young life, but had dyed dark hair and kohl-smudged eyes. She was a California Gothette. Grace regretted not heeding Miss Messenger. For the next three weeks she’d be stuck with a rebellious young woman who shone with confidence, and she didn’t feel up to the challenge. ‘I was an English major, graduated Berkeley last summer. Right now, I’m between worlds, extending the dreamtime.’ Dark as she tried to appear, Stephanie’s laugh was as light as a charm. ‘I discovered yoga when sports failed me, or I failed sports. People who like sports seemed to be happy people but nobody in my family likes sports. At college I tried every kind of sport, but I was just sweaty and unhappy until I discovered yoga. My yoga teacher trained at Bodhi Tree, which is why I’m here.’
It was Grace’s turn. Predicting disapproval, she avoided her career in pharmaceuticals and, with her personal life a wasteland, she avoided that, too. It didn’t leave her much. ‘I’m here because I want to be a yoga teacher.’ The plain truth hit her and she bit the inside of her cheek. Linda, the grandmother from Kansas (‘I want to train so I can give free yoga classes to the wives of men posted in Iraq’), fluttered her hand over her packet of Kleenex. Still, Grace could not speak. Aware they were waiting for another crumb of self-disclosure, she tried again. ‘Hatha yoga changed my life.’ Grace’s voice broke and, afraid to cry in public, she bowed her head with her hands in namaste, as Linda’s tissue flew from hand to hand toward her.
When all the students had spoken, Rita led them in the name game, each student saying their name and all the names of those before them. Lucky the one who began the round, not so lucky the last. The names that came easily to Grace that night belonged to the people she would, for one reason or many, remember long after training had finished. Stephanie, her cabinmate, was the liveliest. Of the gaggle of girls, Kirsty and Fantasia, locals from Malibu, had been practicing yoga at their after-school club since they were ten. Serena from Las Vegas was the daughter of yogis and was memorable for a composure beyond her thirty years but Grace mistrusted her demeanor and thought she sat too close, too soon, to Sam, the American in Paris. A few down from Sam was Mark, who made Grace proud because he was English, even if he had abandoned the land of his forefathers. Then came blonde Olga, a Russian model nobody would forget, and her unlikely cabinmate and physical opposite, the tiny, dark-haired Vietnamese, Sungli. Grace wondered on what pretext Miss Messenger had put them together, although their English grammar was surprisingly similar. Pixielike Sara, with tattooed arms and the hairiest armpits on the planet (forget the room), was diminutive but enthusiastic and had proclaimed, with arms raised, ‘I’m from San Francisco and I believe in God!’ Her declaration made the circle freeze with embarrassment; explicit reference to God, or money, did it every time. No such exuberance from the troupe of ladies in their fifties who blurred instantly in Grace’s memory—apart, that was, from another Linda, who had been a professional ballet dancer, the evidence for which was in her upright body and the way she held her head. And then there was deaf Derek, midfifties, and new to yoga. This was his first time in a yoga studio. ‘I hadn’t realized yoga was such a girl thing,’ he said, genuinely astounded to be so surrounded. Nobody asked what a complete beginner was doing in a yoga teacher training session, but that was as it should be, for as it promised on the Web site, the Bodhi Tree was all-inclusive. Everybody was to be made welcome.
Grace memorized names as best she could, hoping she would not forget, or be forgotten. When Garuda initiated an om to end the day, the class, unbidden, joined in. Grace stared through the glass doors of the hall, down the valley toward a telegraph pole shaped like the symbol of the resurrected Christ, black against a burnt orange sky, while deep within her, the sacred sound resonated on and on.
Grace woke at five the following morning and tiptoed toward the cabin door.
‘Morning,’ Stephanie said.
‘You scared me!’ Grace jumped.
‘Girlfriend, you scare easy,’ Stephanie said, opening one eye. She was sitting cross-legged in the corner by the apothecary cabinet; she stretched out her arms, her shawl unfolding like wings behind her.
‘Being in the middle of nowhere amplifies every sound,’ Grace said.
‘Tell me about it. My meditation sucked. I’m starving. Supper last night was carbsville. I couldn’t eat a thing. Time for turkey slices.’
‘Where are they? They don’t even allow meat in the students’ fridge.’
‘I hid them in a tofu packet,’ Stephanie said, tapping the side of her nose.
In England it was gone lunchtime and, still on that clock, Grace happily joined Stephanie to eat. In pyjamas they crept down the garden path, into the kitchen. They kept quiet so as not to wake the women who slept in the cubbyhole in the ceiling of the main hall, reached by a ladder attached to the wall. Climbing into the cubby required agility and some nerve. A child would find such a place an adventure to reach, yet Miss Messenger had known to put the over-fifties up there. Nestled in sleeping bags, the oldest women in the training had giggled like girls when they’d first climbed up. In the early morning, Grace and Stephanie heard their sonorous breathing; one of them was snoring. Silently, Stephanie prepared coffee and Grace made toasted turkey sandwiches; to their surprise, the divine smells did not wake the ladies, so they returned to the cabin, wrapped themselves in blankets, and ate breakfast on the step.
‘You can’t beat the wisdom of the stoop, watching the world go by,’ said Stephanie, extracting the turkey filling from the bread, wrapping it inside a piece of lettuce.
‘Not much world going by here. Give me the city over this nothingness,’ Grace responded.
‘Read some Jim Harrison. He’ll bust the concrete out of your veins. Happily, his tendency to misogyny doesn’t appear in his verse. Mind you, stuck here, I could tend toward a little misogyny myself. What do you think about Mark, by the way?’
‘The Hampshire boy. I like him.’
‘The original, right?’
‘Yes. Good old Hampshire, rather than your New.’
‘He’s incredibly cute, so who cares if I can’t understand him—which is not why I’m skipping his trail hike, by the way. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.’
‘Noel Coward. How d’you know of him?’
‘My uncle played me his songs every time I went to London.’
‘Does he still live there?’
‘You bet, holed up in Cadogan Square, New Jersey boy made good that he is.’
If Mark was a mad dog, and Grace suspected he was, he had that dog under control. On the hike he was courteous and took care of his charges as they followed him around the Bodhi Tree land. Lathered with SPF, and wearing long pants and training shoes to protect them from poison ivy, the students clutched bottles of water as if heading for the desert. Cautious they may have been, but few were sure-footed as they walked in a slow line. Impatient at being stuck toe to tail, Grace bounded to the head of the group, alongside Mark and Sam.
By the waterfall, Sam pointed out two camouflaged tents. ‘That’s where I am. Derek’s in the other and he’s not pleased.’ Derek, it transpired, was on the training to investigate opportunities in the expanding yoga market and, whether he knew it or not (and it seemed he didn’t), the company of flexible females.
‘Those tents are a long way down the valley,’ Grace observed.
‘It’s too far for Derek. He wants to swap your cabin for his tent.’
‘What about Stephanie?’
‘Derek wouldn’t object.’
‘I was thinking about her.’
‘Either way, he’s going to ask. He can’t take the hike up from the tent, or the bugs,’ Sam said.
‘Bugs?’ asked Serena, the coy Vegas girl, right behind Grace as they followed the narrow track by the river. Conversation was cut short as they concentrated on clambering over boulders, following Mark to the edge of a deep, wide pool.
‘Welcome to the swimming hole. Who’s first in?’ he said, taking off his shirt.
His torso was certainly worthy of acclaim, but Grace suspected it was his proposal to dive in that prompted the squeals that followed. The distant snow-capped mountains were the source of the waterfall. The pool would be close to freezing.
‘Come on! It’s never as bad as you think,’ encouraged Mark, jumping in mad-dog style. Students stepped closer to the edge as if to better observe an animal in his habitat. Mark looked so at one with his world, Grace wanted to join him. She pulled off her T-shirt, kicked off her shoes, and jumped. She surfaced, teeth chattering uncontrollably, laughing from the coldness of it.
‘There’s always one. I guessed it would be you. Fantastic, isn’t it,’ Mark said, swimming past her, pulling himself up and out in one effortless move.
Grace dripped dry on the climb up the valley. Halfway there, Mark led them off the main track to a rocky headland to admire the view below: the ocean bounced the sun back into the blue; while below, Malibu sprawled the coast line. Grace found the mountainside even richer, with yellow broom scenting the air, its soft honey smell cut with sage and eucalyptus.
‘Don’t you love that scent when you step on the leaves,’ said Grace, as they trekked back to the main path.
‘Eucalyptus soaks up the water and isn’t indigenous,’ Sam responded, sounding like the teacher he was.
‘Didn’t you know, eucalyptus damages indigenous vegetation.’ Serena pushed past Grace. ‘Oh, sorry,’ Serena said, ‘accidentally’ elbowing her.
‘This way for the Ganesh rock!’ Mark shouted, once again cutting into Serena’s conversation, as he led them off the path. As Grace followed up the hill, Serena’s bottom wobbled at her eye level, a plate-sized tattoo of the Hindu god Ganesh peeking over her low-slung sweatpants. Then, echoed in the red rock above, Grace recognized contours that could be construed as a trunk, elephant ears, and potbelly.
‘The Hindu lord of success, the destroyer of obstacles,’ Mark said, pointing to the Ganesh-like features in the rocky overhang. ‘The god of education, wisdom, and wealth, his trunk represents om, the source of cosmic reality.’ Mark made spooky eyes, earned a laugh, then trekked back down to the trail. Nobody lingered, or asked how an elephant had qualified as the god of education, which Grace stayed sitting to ponder. Whatever shapes and names had been imposed on the rock formation (this was Native American land and there surely would have been a few), Grace felt the place was sacred, and would be beyond time. She hummed ‘om.’ Even with only birds and insects to hear her, she felt ridiculous and stopped. But the sound of om vibrating in her body left her very calm. Grace tried again. She breathed in and let out a long, soft om, which set the blue jay above her squawking from the eucalyptus tree.
‘Stand at the top of your mat.’
Garuda had come into the yoga studio unnoticed for the first class of the training. His command silenced the chatterers, who now stood stiff as soldiers on parade. ‘Why not relax?’ Garuda’s features disappeared into a blink-and-you-missed-it smile. ‘Don’t go into this training expecting to quantum leap your practice and come out of here buffed up. Keep the long perspective. You’ve got your whole life. Let’s start slowly with the Vinyasa flow series. Ujjayi breathing.’ He told them to narrow their throats and suck air through their noses, to channel their breath to intensify heat and strength. The room filled with a Darth Vader sound. ‘Ujjayi means master, victorious. Master your breath. For most of you right now that means don’t forget to breathe.’ While Rita and Mark closed all the windows, Garuda paced the strip between the two rows of students who faced each other down the length of the studio. ‘We build heat so nobody gets hurt. Surya Namaskar,’ Garuda said, and they were off.
At Swami D’s, Grace was accustomed to three rounds of Surya Namaskar, the salute to the sun—it was the name for twelve flowing movements that went from standing, down to the floor, and back up again. After five rounds Garuda told his students they had five to go. Grace ignored her doubt that she might not make it. By round eight, even younger students were lying down to rest, but she did not succumb. She was determined to be youthfully strong and not flounder with the oldies and the unfit. By the time all ten rounds had been completed, windows had steamed over, mats were slippery with sweat, and everyone was soaking, most of them in a trance induced by movement, music, and conscious breath.
Back bends revealed that Stephanie was the elasta-girl of the training: her head hit her heels with such ease her vertebrae had to be hinged. Aware (or at least hoping) that such extreme flexibility is genetic, nobody tried to compete. Other rivalries were rife and eyes flicked the room to gauge agility, body shape, the coolest yoga clothes, and the most original tattoos. Paul, who had practiced yoga for forty years, kept his eyes down, in and out of the studio; he was a quiet man though his body spoke volumes. With sculpted shoulders and a flat stomach, in his black leggings and fine grey vest, he looked like a dancer. Nobody believed he was sixty. Olga, the slender Russian, a Jivamukti devotee, was the blondest of the blondes in the training, and her white acrylic nails were decorated with diamanté hearts. Watching other students was an absorbing distraction but the yoga studio—an unadorned rectangle, twenty feet by forty—offered no other. After a few days, when everyone had been duly scrutinized, the students had nowhere else to look, apart from inward, where observations would take longer to surface, and evaluate.
As Garuda dictated their movement and breath in sequences that were unfamiliar, Grace felt once again a beginner. ‘Vinyasa means connection,’ he said. ‘Vinyasa flow implies breath, concentration, going with the flow, and what’s right that day. Make sure that’s what you do, on and off the mat.’ Going with the flow off the mat at the Bodhi Tree meant giving up makeup, coffee, alcohol, meat, and men. The focus was yoga for six hours each day in the studio, and for several hours a day out of it, working in study groups on the Bodhi Tree Yoga Handbook. Sam, Stephanie, Kirsty, and Fantasia were in Grace’s group and, while they joked with each other, there was much vying for authority.
With one flight, and in one night, Grace had changed her world. She was immersed in the Bodhi Tree, and, in those early harmonious days, it was a mystery to her that the whole world didn’t live in peaceful yogic communities. Each hour was allocated, every meal a feast with a social scene and music from Garuda’s well-stocked iPod. The training was hard work, but easy living. Garuda and Rita had refined the schedule over many years, and along with everyone in the course, Grace was happy to follow it. The only decision she had to make each day was how much intensity to apply, which was no real decision at all. Grace was committed, and gave all the energy she had. Perfect sleep was the sweet reward: she could not remember sleep so profound, nine or ten hours, straight through her dreams, waking in the position in which she had lain down.
By default, Miss Messenger had given Grace the perfect cabinmate to share ‘the Bodhi Tree experience.’ Stephanie, the intellectual girl from Los Angeles, loved literature, language, and every cool Hollywood hangout, but was united with Grace by a passion for yoga, and Jewish blood—‘on the father’s side.’
‘The side that fucked me up,’ laughed Stephanie. ‘Mind you, there’s a theory that twenty years after blaming one parent, you realize it was the other one who really fucked you over.’
Grace nodded, but said nothing. Memories of her mother were too precious to be sullied. Resenting her father was easier, particularly since he was still alive and still drinking.
During that first week, personalities and personal history were secondary to the yogic purpose, but gossip was the sign that good behaviour only lasts so long. Secrets soon filtered beyond the fragile confines of new friendship, but throughout training the yoga studio unified them, whatever trouble brewed outside it.
Only Derek was consistently late to class, padding in ten minutes after the rest to pick a prime spot, blithely asking whoever occupied it to move aside. ‘I need to see Garuda’s mouth,’ he would say, pointing to his own. Nobody turned Derek down, so he kept arriving late. Displaced students squeezed compliantly into remote corners of the studio while Garuda stopped the lesson, squeezed his lips between his teeth, and stared down the room. Rita, opposite Garuda at the far end, would laser him a look: ‘Don’t even think about it.’ She may have acted tougher than her husband, but she was the compassionate one. Derek’s yoga wasn’t great and never would be. ‘Give the guy a break,’ was her attitude. Garuda went along with this but Grace could tell he didn’t like it and neither, in truth, did she. Deaf or not, if Derek wanted a place at the teacher’s feet, Grace thought he should get to the studio in time to claim it, like anyone else, and the morning he asked for her mat, Grace said ‘no.’ Later, in the lunch queue, convinced that she wouldn’t turn him down twice in one day, Derek asked Grace if she and Stephanie would swap their cabin for his tent.
‘For how long?’ Grace asked.
‘A couple nights, if you’re feeling generous.’
‘No need to do that,’ said Garuda, walking by. ‘Lookout Cabin’s been repaired. Derek, you can move out of your tent anytime you like.’
Derek beamed. ‘Thanks, Garuda. I’ve missed my creature comforts.’
It turned out that that night Derek got more creature than comfort: the smell of a decomposing skunk trapped beneath the cabin kept him awake all night.
It was unusual for Garuda to intercede in student conversation. He was usually aloof, a mysterious source of wisdom, which he would share, without wasting word or breath, only when the whole class was gathered. Under no illusion about how far teacher training would take them, he made no grand promises. ‘We can give you an education, but it’s up to you to be enquirers, to open your minds and hearts. Teaching yoga is the art of seeing. You’ll learn that, over time, from your own practice and watching those you teach. Don’t wait to be perfect. Start straightaway. Grab people from the parking lot if you have to—just don’t hurt them.’
Jokes there were, but never during pranayama. Prana, the Sanskrit word for breath and nerve energy, was paramount and led to Garuda’s preferred subject: the energy body. ‘Within the nervous system are currents that yogis equate with the sun and moon, ida and pingala. That they haven’t been scientifically explained doesn’t make them less valid. In my experience these currents open the chakras, the energy centres of the psychic body, and alter consciousness.’
‘Like an altered state on some kind of drug?’ asked the pixie-girl Sara.
‘I’m thinking of a dreamlike state, or the state of mind you get when you’re walking on the beach. You don’t need drugs to experience altered states.’
Garuda believed that the purpose of yoga’s strenuous physicality was to open the chakras, each chakra a source of prana, the fundamental energy of life; he claimed there were many indications of when the chakras were activated, or waking up. A physical sensation in any one of the seven centres along the spine was considered a clue, as was the perception of colours behind closed eyes, whether pure light energy or the darker tones associated with the lower chakras.
Grace had seen swirling colours while resting on her yoga mat after class at Swami D’s, but Swami D was wary of discussing the energy centres. Garuda was also cautious, but pushed by the class, he hinted at the chakras’ potential. ‘They hold secrets and, the yogis say, answers to the religious mysteries. One thing I know for sure is that working with your chakras is a way to know yourself. When you can see other people’s, that’s when you’re really on to something.’
Garuda’s psychic experience was balanced by his application of yoga’s more visceral practices, among them the ‘big six’ purification techniques: the appropriately named shat kriyas. All were familiar with neti (most had poured warm salt water up one nostril and blown it out the other), but none had ventured into vasti, an activity not for the squeamish, which required a bucket of warm water and a hollow bamboo tube. ‘Mind you, if you go down to the garden centre and buy a garden hose, it’s a darn sight more comfortable,’ Garuda said, straight-faced. ‘The big seventh’ was his personal addition to the purification techniques: the elimination of television.
Garuda had traveled India in search of the great yogi masters and consulted many, but when students asked him to name his favourite guru he would say, ‘The tao that is explained is not the Tao. He who knows, knows not.’ Garuda was not in awe of the East or the esteemed yoga authorities, whom he enjoyed bringing down to size, sometimes two at a time. ‘Desikachar’s solution to make the asanas more spiritual was to chant the sutras of Patanjali during his practice. You could try that,’ he chuckled. ‘See if it works for you.’
Grace was not dismayed that Garuda did not revere Patanjali and doubted his authorship. She admired Garuda’s indifference and respected his scholarship. He was clear when he said that all he could say for sure about the sutras was that they had been translated to death from Sanskrit and extrapolated every which way. ‘In the entire writings, whatever the translation, never once have I found the word love, and, if you ask me, that’s a state of grace we can’t live without.’
Love. Everything came down to it. And at the Bodhi Tree those with love in their lives, or simply a love for life, shone out from the rest. Garuda and Rita had it. Always professional in public, Rita had quietly admitted to Grace that she and her husband saved their loving, and their fighting, for later. ‘We’ve all got a shadow side and the sooner we face it, accept it, and lose shame about it, the better.’ This made Grace think how much easier it was to see the dark side of other people, rather than one’s own. As a child, she had turned dizzy circles trying to glimpse her own shadow, but at the Bodhi Tree, walking back to the cabin one night from the outside showers, she had jumped at the sight of her shadow, cast ahead of her like a dark, thin stranger.
Grace appreciated the balance that Garuda and Rita had found between love and work. In business Garuda deferred to Rita and in the yoga studio she deferred to him, but when the balance tipped, it added spice, and not just for them. One afternoon, teaching warrior pose and how to adjust it, Garuda called for silence. Low voices continued. Garuda called again, irritated at being ignored.
‘No, Derek, the knee above the ankle,’ Rita continued.
‘Miss Gold, I said silence! See me in the principal’s office after class,’ Garuda called down the studio, eyes ablaze, face stern.
‘Yes, sir.’ Rita blushed, confident all the same that her husband appreciated how she stood up to him. Twenty feet apart, twenty-five years married, the couple’s mutual desire, the love they had, was there for all to see. If they offered a course in that, Grace would have enrolled straightaway.