Yoga, another male bastion

Wednesday

The great Swami Swaroopananda took questions from his acolytes in the temple at noon. There were four questions, which ranged from "What is love?" to "What should I do about the distress my family feels about the spiritual path I have taken?" In response, the swami issued long ruminations with many citations from yogic scriptures. In answer to a question about whether it was possible to follow more than one spiritual path simultaneously, he answered (in part): "If you're looking for water, don't dig many shallow holes. Dig deep into one."

One of the delights of being in this world is the culture of oral history. It seems that all who knew Swami Sivananda or Swami Vishnu-devenanda, Swaroopananda's predecessors, are giant name droppers who love to recount anecdotes of some charming thing or another that one or the other of the swamis did or said. Partly this is a pissing contest to establish the recounter's proximity to the great men and partly old party gossip. Swami Vishnu-devenanda, for example, according to Swami Swaroopananda, had a little problem with his mother. Even after he became a renowned swami, his mother continued to infantilize him by asking whether he'd had enough to eat or shouldn't he wear a jacket in the cold. She was quite a formidable woman, who later became a swami herself, and Swami Vishnu-devananda decided that the only way to deal with her was to practice detachment. He did so by severing his filial connection with her. She was terribly wounded by his treatment. Noticing this, Swami Sivananda, who was Vishnu-devananda's teacher, instructed him to treat her with the simple human kindness he would any stranger. Somewhat warily, Vishnu-devananda began to show his mother the love and compassion he showed everyone else in the world, and the alienation was resolved.

In the afternoon, the rains began again and nearly drowned out a special asana class on headstands. Unlike yesterday, today I did not fall asleep during the workshop. I learned, among other things, two benefits of the headstand: it allows the old blood that has collected at the bottom of the heart to be freed by gravity and get recirculated, and similarly it allows the ancient wastes that have collected in the bottom of your intestines to shake loose and get eliminated. Rather than making the headstand seem appealing, all that loosening of crud made it seem a little disgusting.

I asked Arjuna how asana practice fit into Indian culture, since I couldn't quite picture the Indian masses standing on their heads (with the ladies' saris flopped down over their faces), and he said that originally yoga was a secret northern Indian cult with an exclusively male membership. But when yoga was exported to the West in the 1940s and '50s, it spread fastest among women. Only recently has it been imported back into India from the West.

May the longtime sun shine upon you

Tuesday

Finally sunshine. Arjuna, the guest coordinator, gave new arrivals a tour of the grounds. At one point we stopped beneath a sapodillo tree. There are four sapodillo trees here, according to Arjuna, and they yield a fruit called the dilly fruit, which is edible only on the day it falls. It can't be picked early, nor can it be preserved. You have to be here to try it, because it doesn't ship well. When you break it open, it smells like coconut and banana. When you bite into it, at first it tastes sweeter than sugar, then sour, a great psychedelic burst of flavor. Of course, says Arjuna, clear as that description is, it can't convey the experience, For that, you have to eat one yourself. Just like yoga.

We passed a wall painting of Shiva dancing on a miserable-looking creature (something like the image above). "What is it that Shiva is dancing on?" I asked. "That is a human ego," replied Arjuna.

In the afternoon, I took a workshop on yoga nidra given by a Swedish flight attendant, who said she used the practice to get the refreshment of a full night's sleep when she had only half an hour between flights. She also told us that the state induced by nidra is qualitatively different and BETTER than real sleep because in nidra you are neither awake nor asleep and therefore (logic doesn't count here) have greater access to the subconscious, giving you the power to implant in your psyche positive affirmations that lay the framework for actualizing your deepest desires. This sounded pretty enticing (if a tad incredible), so I was eager to experience it firsthand. Sadly, as she began the systematic relaxation process ("I relax my toes; my toes are relaxed"), I felt right through nidra into a deep slumber of genuine sleep, from which I had to be manually awakened. "Was that nidra?" I asked. "No, you were really asleep," my flight attendant said. My 20-minute nap was refreshing, but I did not implant positive affirmations, and it was not the equivalent of a full night's sleep. Damn.

Dealing with it—part deux

Monday

And then it rained. And I dealt with that too. Skipped the mandatory chanting and meditation (hereinafter called satsang) at 6 a.m., but did attend the 8 o'clock asana class, the 10 o'clock brunch, the 11 o'clock orientation/history-of-Sivananda with Arjuna, the 12 o'clock finding-the-voice-within (think primal scream) workshop, the 2 o'clock pranayama workshop, the 4 o'clock asana class, the 6 o'clock dinner and the 8 o'clock satsang and sitar concert (though I bolted early—just too tired to sit up any longer).

Dealing with it

Sunday

Any attachment issues I may have been hauling got challenged before I left the ground. I suffer from fear of flying, so I'm careful to chose aisle seats. Window seats make me too aware of what's going on "out there." Can't bear to see the wing flaps, um, flap or actually witness that this great hulking mass of steel and human flesh has no sturdier support than air. But a large extended Indian family with many infants desired my seat, so I traded my aisle seat for … a window seat. I kept the shades drawn. The promised movie did not materialize. There was no food to be purchased. We arrived in Nassau on time, but could not deboard for over an hour because five other aircraft had landed at the same time. Customs, baggage check were both congested. When I got to the ashram, the promised single room had evaporated, and I was consigned to a double. The promised receipt for yoga classes (which my employer would partially reimburse) was refused. The "new guy" who had made both promises when I was making my reservation had made a mistake. No apologies. Deal with it. So I'm … dealing with it.

Fear of flying

Many people would rather miss a movie than attend one alone. I've never been like that. I'm exhilarated by the intensity of experiencing a movie without social distractions, and I relish the freedom of mulling it over long after the credits have rolled and the screen has gone blank—without having to render a critical judgment until I've fully digested the full film feast, and maybe not even then. It's a guilty pleasure. (Even guiltier is my preference for late-morning matinees, when it's sometimes possible to have an entire theater to myself and then a whole day to let the experience sink in.)

So, when I decided to go to the Bahamas for a yoga vacation, I made some overtures to friends to have them join me, but when one could not get the time off and another waffled over the stringent regimen (four hours a day of sitting, four hours a day of asana practice, plus karma yoga—who can blame her?), I embraced the prospect of going alone: the liberation from responsibility for anyone else's happiness, the freedom to chant out of tune in total anonymity, the chance to fly without the safety net of friendship.

But there is fear too. Fear that no one will want to sit next to the gray-haired lady at meals, the fear that I'll get sick or injured and have to rely on the kindness of strangers, the fear that I'll be lonely, the fear that I'll find my own company boring. And I recall why it is that teenage girls always, always enlist a girlfriend to accompany them even on a trip to the ladies' room.

So here I am in the JetBlue terminal first thing on a Sunday morning, hungry for adventure and a little bit scared of it too.

My life as a lurker

When you give birth, you want to know all the details from other women who have been through it. No bit of minutiae is too minuscule or too intimate. When did your labor start? How did you know? Did you have a bloody show? Did your water break beforehand? How far apart were your contractions when you went to the hospital or called the midwife? How long before you went into transition? Did you take drugs? Have an epiosotomy? What position were you in? How much did the baby weigh? How long before it started to nurse? When did your milk come in? When was your baby's first stool?

It's the same with breast cancer: How big was your tumor? What quadrant was it in? How did you find it? What grade? Was it in the lobules or the ducts? Were your lymph nodes clear? Was it hormone sensitive or her2 positive? Did you have a lumpectomy or a mastectomy? Uni or bilateral? Reconstruction? Implant or transplant? Did you get a port? Did you get lymphedema? What was your chemo regimen? Your radiation protocol? Where were you treated? Who's your surgeon, your medical oncologist, your radiation oncologist? What's your follow-up schedule? Do you get scanned or have tumor markers drawn? Do you get ultrasounds or MRIs or just mammograms?

Essentially, this is meaningless information, since no other woman's disease is precisely the same as yours. But somehow it's comforting to compare notes. Part of it is finding your place in life's pecking order by seeing where you fall in the risk-of-recurrence ranks. Part of it is getting to know your tribe, finding out who you are now by finding out who the other people in your cohort are. Part of it is the comfort of knowing you're not alone.

It may seem as if every woman in the world has breast cancer these days, but in fact it's actually hard to find someone with it when you're looking. Ironically, oncologists' waiting rooms, where the cancer-ridden congregate, are not very good venues for starting up conversations. So, much of this checking-out happens online, particularly via blogs.

What did women do before the Web? My first stop on the cancer-info highway was breastcancer.org, which is not really a blog but an online forum. But whoever put it together completely understood what she was doing. When you create your profile to participate in the discussions, you spell out all the key data (date of diagnosis; tumor type, size and grade; nodal status; hormone/her2 status), and it appears with your signature. My screen name is nagem, and my stats are "Diagnosis: 9/23/2005, ILC, 1cm, Stage IIa, Grade 3, 1/13 nodes, ER-/PR-, HER2+." To an outsider, these details would be boring, perhaps incomprehensible, but to the inmates of this weird world, they tell a story. And they help provide a context for yours. Post any question, and someone will answer from her own experience.

Now I have many, many stops on that long, long highway, too many to enumerate, and I visit many of them daily: The Assertive Cancer Patient, Killer Boob, I Blame the Patriarchy, Rock the Bald, my Breast Cancer blog, to name a few. I lurk. I comment. These are my invisible friends (some don't even know I'm their friend!). As my diagnosis recedes into the past (fingers crossed, knock on wood), I try to extricate myself from my cancer-patient identity, but I'm reluctant to leave these fellow travelers behind. Wittingly and not, they've been kind to me, and I want to know how their stories turn out. So for a few minutes every day, I check in with each and find out how they all are.

Bosom buddies

The downsides of breast cancer need no telling. Even if you haven't had it, you can use your imagination: the disease eradicates your childlike sense of immortality; eviscerates your confidence in your physical well-being; transgenders you from the waist up by lopping off your hair and breasts; makes the simple act of getting dressed in the morning an eternal conundrum; and places your future employment (and insurability) forever more in jeopardy.

There are no upsides. But the experience has galvanized some women to take action. And their accomplishments on behalf of their sisters are heartwarming and ingenious. There is B, who created breastfree.org, devoted to sharing information about mastectomies and clothing solutions. It's got stories, photographs, helpful tips—and not only is it breast free, it's cost free. Then there's Rebel1in8, who after her unilateral mastectomy designed herself a one-of-a-kind bra and then took to repurposing T-shirts and other garments to create a line of clothing that balanced out her new silhouette—and now she shares her trove in rheabelleapparel.com for barely more than the cost of materials. There's Beryl Tsang, who knitted herself a prosthesis, dubbed it a Tit Bit, and published the pattern for others to follow (and knitty titties, as they've come to be known, are less expensive, more comfortable and certainly a lot more adorable than most of the competition). And now Mary Beth Kirtz has Webicized her informal boob-sharing service: www.pinkstock.webuda.com. Women who have unneeded new or used prostheses and bras send them to Mary Beth, and she sends them back out to women who lack insurance to pay for them. (I'm not even going to get into the swimsuit prostheses she fashions out of bath pouffies, which untold numbers of women are still struggling to replicate in a kind of mass frenzy.)

These women are members of a legion I've met in person and online who compose a creative community. Their projects are not Big Business. They are little businesses. But they're clever and homespun and make the whole awful breast-cancer thing seem somehow manageable, like something a good whip stitch could solve.