Begin with navel gazing

Palms pressing against the floor, head between my outstretched arms, hips pointed upwards, heels pressing down: I strained to see my navel. The room, alarmingly, began to spin

Downward dog is supposed to be a restful position and though I have often wondered why if this were the case no one ever chose to rest in such a way--why, for example, no one would ever encounter a TV watcher in downward dog--this was not my typical reaction to the pose.

I slowed my breath in the hope that the room would be compelled to follow suit and still itself too. In yoga the breath is very important. The focus of the practice, I have often been told, is on the breath and this focus is meant to keep one in the present. Experience has taught me, however, that this is not always a desirable state. Once as a teenager I did so much coke that I lost the ability to breathe automatically. For hours I had to concentrate on each breath, performing the simple act of sucking in air and expelling it back out as if I was learning how to knit or drive a stick shift. I was absolutely in the present, caught in a Gertrude Stein poem without end, in which each moment repeated one refrain, "This is now, this is now, this is now." Stretched across a scratchy grey carpet that served as a bed for a boy too punk rock to buy a mattress, I thought incessantly about my body while the boy beside me struggled to stay awake and breathe with me. This, I thought, was love.

These days I sleep always on a mattress and think about my breath only after paying 10, 15, or sometimes as much as 17 dollars an hour for the privilege of doing so while I move from squat pose to crow pose in a room full of people in racer-back tang-tops and spandex capris. I am upwardly mobile.

But in this now, the now in which the room began its nauseating rotation, my situation did little to advocate for my maturation in all the years since my coke-fueled breathing exercises. My plan had been to use yoga to neutralize a hangover, but as I pivoted forward into plank pose I found myself not only dizzy, but sweating profusely and worst of all, aware that my sweat reeked of rum. Knees, chest and chin, and acid reflex pushed backwater into my closed mouth, up-dog sent the backwater racing down my throat and the taste of alcohol lessened to leave in its wake the unmistakable sharp saltiness of semen. The horrifying realization that I had just thrown up cum into my own mouth hit me slowly, but when it did, the sheer disgusting improbability of it made me laugh out loud, a gurgling, compromised laugh because I didn't want to spill anything. Child's pose.

Herein lies the barrier between me and my better self, not that I spent the prior night at a bar, not that I drank more than I should, not, even, that I went home with someone I hardly knew and was spitting up their semen on my rented yoga mat, but instead this gurgled laugh. I know that yoga is forgiving, practiced in gyms and health spas and wellness retreats across the West as a form of self-help inspired, feel-good, Eastern philosophy-light. I know that my yoga teacher would encourage me to accept myself and all my imperfections, see my laugh as an expression of joy, see, even, the substance that brought it into being as just another ingredient in the spicy soup of life, but I know that the root of my laugh was a fundamental distrust of healthy living.

It also represents a terrible conceit: that I have no better self. I have long held the conviction that unlike the mutable selves of my yoga teacher and my fellow students, and unlike the changeling selves of boys from my past and boys from my present, my self is built around an impenetrable core. This core is capable of being affected by the particularities of my surroundings only in passing, able to learn new things and acquire new skills, prone to occasionally--even frequently--forgetting these things, subject to physical alteration and occasional illness, and temporarily transformed by fluctuations in mood, but really, in essence, less a body than an absolute. Let everyone else be a product of their actions, I am a universe.

This is quite obviously stupid.

*

I blame it on the Freudian narrative that locates all the truly defining moments in the pre-teen years and reserves adulthood for reflecting upon these formative experiences. I blame it on my parents, for telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be. I blame it on my education, which has given me analytical capabilities that exceed my empathetic ones. I blame it on God, because--as a way of avoiding blaming each other--humankind underutilizes God.

Lately, I have been really tired

*

The sun used to stream through windows with such intensity that the present already had the importance of memory. When I was a freshman in art school my Elements of Visual Thinking teacher, Helen, shared with us what a life spent visually thinking could lead to.

"You know," she said, tilting her head till her chunky orange hair threatened to cover her chunky black glasses, "I just ran into Carl Marnes in the hallway." Carl also taught Elements of Visual Thinking. "He had an empty coffee cup in his hands and he said, 'Helen, look at how beautiful the stains in this coffee cup are.' And I thought how great is that? Being an artist is about finding beauty everywhere."

The strange thing about being young is how optimism and skepticism equally influence judgment, threatening to turn every teacher into a hero and every hero into a charlatan. When Helen shared her anecdote and its moral I thought, "I am in art school. Behold: forms of value are available to me that do not subscribe to cultural norms. A life of meaning lies in wait." I also thought, "I am in art school. This place combines the worst of elitism, pretense, with the worst of populism, complete mawkishness. Fuck." If I hadn't had the second thought, I could now claim that my corrosive dissatisfaction was the result of a loss of innocence.

*

Before I took yoga for the first time, I had to fill out a form. It was the standard sort that gyms give out, establishing the various ways they could reach me when my membership ran out to convince me to renew my membership and releasing them of liability if I were to injure my body in an attempt to better it using their facilities. There was one curious question though, a question that cast doubt on my motivations for being there. "What do you hope to gain from taking yoga?" the form asked me. Exercise is about changing, after all, changing the shape of one's body and by implication the shape of one's spirit. I was not even close to being fat and resented the idea that my body should get smaller and my spirit, well, my spirit was an empire drunk with the delusion of its own infallibility. "I would like to grow taller," I wrote.

The yoga studio I go to most often now has a teacher named Michael. He begins each class with aphoristic chatter while we sit in sukhasana. Root the sit bones down; lift the crown of the head to the ceiling. Stretch, stretch, stretch my spine while Michael says:

"For the next few classes I will be talking about the yamas, one each class. The yamas are kinda like a code for living, but they are all really based on the main yama: ahimsa. That is the yama I talked about last week, ahimsi--it means no harm. This week I want to talk about satya, which means truthfulness. What is truthfulness you might be thinking? Patanjali gives a really simple definition of this, which is just to not give a false impression. So like, not telling someone something, lies of omission--that is not truthfulness. But we do this all the time; sometimes we lie without even thinking about it. My guru, just the other day, asked me if I had done something and instantly I was like, 'yes.' I didn't even think about it. Then afterwards I thought, 'I didn't do that, why did I say I did?' It wasn't even important; I just said it. So I had to go back to her and say, 'you know, I don't know why I told you I did that, I didn't. I just said I did. I'm sorry.' Why should we practice satya? Cause if you tell the truth all the time the things you say will come true. It really works--try it."

That night my roommate said we should paint the bathroom. My roommate likes to say things. She talks about taking road trips together when we don't even like to be in the same room with one another; she said months ago that she was going to give me her second blackberry. I wish I had the blackberry, but I didn't want to paint the bathroom. I was unperturbed though--my roommate does not practice satya.

I met a woman who does. It was in the office of a janitorial supply company, a basement with brick walls and no windows. A secretary, she sat at a grey metal desk obscured with stacks of paper, hanging files, and decade old catalogs in cardboard boxes with dented corners and dark spots of grease. Post-it notes dotted every plane, bearing dates long past and numbers without names. Above her head shelves crawled up the walls, full of tupperware boxes with peeling masking tape labels. Information, information was like a scab grown over everything.

It was cold in this office and the secretary wore a thick coat; it made her arms slow to bend and her round body wedge tightly in the chair.

"Why won't my phone work?" she asked me.

"What is wrong with it?" I replied.

"I tried to send a text and it won't send."

"Maybe you're not getting reception. I'm not getting reception down here."

"Hmm," she said. I stared ahead, generally averse to encouraging strangers to talk to me. But she began again a moment later.

"These guys here, they ask me to smile. I say to them, 'Why should I smile? Why is that a part of my job?' Do you think I should smile?"

"Actually," I said, "no."

"Hmm."

*

I have always thought it absurd when people talk about finding themselves. Either the self is a body, impossible to lose until dead, or an abstraction, impossible to find while living. Once I dated a guy who would talk about getting to know himself and he seemed so simple to me, so easy to know, that I couldn't imagine it being all that difficult—especially with all the extra information he had about himself that I didn't. Now I think that when people talk about finding themselves, what they really mean is finding a way to like themselves. I didn't really like this guy I was dating, so it makes sense to me that this would be a struggle for him as well. What I didn't count on is that dating him would make me not like myself.

Recently I got off at the subway stop closest to his apartment and walked towards it on my way to somewhere else. With each block I felt more nauseous. "My actions can change me," I thought.

The obvious always strikes me when walking.

*

The room stopped spinning. I swallowed. Whether through olfactory fatigue or having sweated it out, I stopped smelling rum.

Savasana: corpse pose. Sometimes referred to euphemistically as relaxation pose. We end yoga here to absorb the benefits of our practice.