The One-Legged Yogini

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: This continues my series of “Ruminations” on Yoga from previous years . . .

“Although thirty spokes meet at the hub,/it is the empty space at the center/Which makes the cart move.”
—from Lao-Tseu Philosophes Taoistes

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—10/3/11—After an almost-30-year relationship with Yoga, I still pride myself
on many things, and priding oneself on many things is like walking through a completely darkened room where there is a lot of small, sharp-cornered furniture located precisely at shin-height.

One of the things I habitually pride myself on is my almost-spook-like intuition about others’ intentions/abilities/challenges. I like to think I “read” people pretty well. (Ahh, you might say: then how in the world did she marry two closeted homosexuals?)

Pride goeth before a fall. Many prides goeth before many falls . . . and I have the bruises on my shins to prove it.

But you would think that, as an Iyengar-style Yoga teacher of two (mere) years’ standing, I might at least notice if a one-legged Yogini (female Yoga student) “walked” into my classroom.

Reader, I did not notice. And, adding insult to injury, I kept correcting this student (whom I’ll call “Ramamani,” as she’s from the Sub-Continent) for failing to straighten her right foot, spread her right toes, straighten completely her right knee. Ramamani took all this direction in stride (literally), and forged ahead through that evening’s sequence of standing asana, pretty much move for move with the rest of the class.

I thought to myself: “She’s a newish Iyengar student who’s obviously done some other variety of Yoga before. She’s probably  just having an off-night.”

As I do with all new students, I did not focus my high beams on this diminutive Indian woman—teenager, really. I just kept her close and adjusted her gently, and only very occasionally, through the one-and-a-half-hour-long class.

I’ve been taught to ask new students if they have injuries or disabilities to “declare” before class begins, but have given up the the practice in my own teaching as “too invasive.” Even asking, “Are there any physical problems anyone would like to tell me about before we begin?” seems to me too intrusive a query. I have students who are undergoing chemotherapy, students with herniated vertebral disks, students whose ankles comprise, largely, bits of titanium, students with about as much proprioception (knowledge of where their body parts are at any given moment) as a chunk of feldspar.

If I had to answer that “Where are you broken?” question, myself, I’d have to “admit” I have a dickey mitral valve, suffer from major depression, have lupus, hypothyroidism, and every sleep disorder known to science: I don’t really sleep; I’m simply “awake for about 12 hours between nightmares.”

But a one-legged Yogini , you’d think I’d notice.

Ramamani is in her late teens and she is a survivor. At least, most of her survived her childhood illness. The muscles of her right leg, however, in their entirety, have moved beyond that leg’s control. But the woman is such a marvel, and so adept at illusion, that she can go up into Shoulder-Stand (Salamba Sarvangasana) “carrying” her right foot (and leg) up, pinched between her left toes.

When you have 18 students in a gym Yoga class, and half of them are beginners, you feel like a mother hen with chicks going off in 11 unruly directions, so Ramamani got into Shoulder Stand without my really seeing
her do it. It’s only when I looked over at her—and her idiosyncratic set-up of bolster, mat and blankets, which I had cavalierly chalked up to “another time/another teacher’s style”—that I noticed the left foot’s toes’ hanging on for dear life to the lifeless right foot’s toes.

As a Yoga teacher, it is hard to explain the emotions that transfixed me at that moment, and in what order they coursed through me. Shame? Guilt? (Oh yes, I was brought up Presbyterian!) But, then, awe, pride, astonishment, curiosity, love . . . . The list goes on, still.

After class, Ramamani duly filled out my New Student Form and, at the very foot of the page, where I ask students to declare their challenges, she wrote one simple word: Polio. Born in the early 1990s, this perfectly beautiful young woman had somehow escaped being inoculated; had somehow contracted polio; and then had somehow landed in New Jersey: a “one-legged,” practicing Yogini .

One of my Iyengar teachers once said of me that I would take on even students who couldn’t walk. I’m not at all sure that he said this of me with unalloyed kindness in his heart. But one thing is certain: I’ve taught Ramamani nothing, but her classmates and I have skipped a grade or two just for having her with us.

The second time I saw her, I arrived early, as usual, carrying my usual six mats or so, plus a notebook, purse, bottle of Gatorade-2 and who knows what else. All my years of living (car-less) in Greece have convinced me that, as long as I can hang it off my body somewhere, I can carry it.

Ramamani was there, early as well (like the good Yogini she is), and she rushed forward, on one leg, as it were, to “help” me lighten my load. Again . . . that rush of emotions. “Jesus, Woman, you’ve got ONE LEG! Have you NOTICED that fact?!”

I let her take the mats from me. I am her “teacher”: it is what she must do, as my student.

I’ve not yet had much time to talk with her, one-on-one. I teach in gyms , for heaven’s sake, not in ashrams, not in Pune, India, not in the beautiful Iyengar Yoga Association digs in Manhattan. But in little gyms in New Jersey, one of whose owners has seen fit to build a Yoga room. (“If you build it, they will come,” I said.)

But I did kneel down with Ramamani at the end of our last class together and tell her I did not want to hurt her, to have her hurt, on my watch. I asked how I could help; if I could help. She told me her pain receptors in that “dead” leg are all functional, and tell her when she’s pushing too hard. But she also told me that she’s been
doing Yoga all her life, and that, furthermore, she was there to learn; to progress. She felt I would help her progress.

Reader, I was speechless. I’ve been an Iyengar devotee for only six years, teaching for only two, and am still working my way through the process of accreditation and certification (which, in the Iyengar system, is not “lifelong,” but “multiple-lives-long”). I told Ramanani it was far more likely that I’d learn from her than vice-versa.

Before the next class, I contacted my two longtime student-assistants—one, in her 40s; one, in her 60s—and
asked them quietly to keep a weather eye on Ramamani when I’m not right there to support her right leg, or she’s in Headstand (Sirsasana) and “needs a leg down.” But I rather think the three of us will be on very light duty with her.

Iyengar Yoga master-teacher, Kofi Busia*, writes: “Health is not, and cannot be, an individual affair. It is a community—indeed, a cosmic—affair. Individuation is the root cause of all suffering. A community, even a yoga community, sickens when its individual members do not extend the bonds of unity to one another through the exercise awareness and purusha dharma [the Soul’s religious duty]. The community sickens when its members fail to alleviate their mutual suffering through a benevolent ‘knowing’ of the truth that stands behind each other’s existence. Dharma [duty, virtue] insists that human-heartedness, benevolence, and compassion be a full part of wellness, for that is the way that suffering ends and the absolute is restored.”

So, now, in the gym’s little mixed-level classes, where students with greater and lesser abilities, greater and lesser challenges, all mix together, every day of the week to study the asana in a sort of “one-room schoolhouse,” we are all one leg short, and one Ramamani richer.

*Quote from Iyengar: The Yoga Master , edited by Kofi Busia, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2007.

The Wounded Yogini: Back To Base Camp

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—10/3/11—My father was a dinosaur even before his premature death, of stroke, in 1972.

He was a non-proselytizing Presbyterian; a quiet, if not silent, Christian. If anyone ever twigged to the truths of his personal belief system, it was because he so thoroughly walked the walk (as opposed to talking the talk).

He also played golf with an old, beat-up set of clubs, in an old bag, which he carried, himself, on public greens. He was an athlete long before fancy sneakers, fancy clubs, fancy memberships. No logos; no greens fees. No manicured turf. Golf as it was played on the olde sod, amongst the rocks and rubble.

And, he was a gentle, post-Freudian therapist who practiced out of his home office, at all hours. He believed in talk-therapy, and unabashedly loved his clients.

His only prayer for me, always, and it wasn’t said often aloud was: “May she be healthy of body and mind.” Body came first, and I followed in my athlete-father’s footsteps though, for half my life, I never found my niche in sport.

My mother was pretty much in charge when it came to the matter of lessons. She had wanted to “go on the stage,” herself, so I took drama, and acted, professionally, early. I hated it. I also hated piano, French, ballet, gymnastics, modeling and tennis. My father, the swimmer, taught me swimming and diving. I took to the water naturally, but never competitively.

So, when I came to Yoga, in my early 30s, it was as though I’d made my way, very, very slowly, through a maze of possibilities, and come out on the other side of a useful labyrinth . . . to a cool, deep, clear, fast-running stream. And, I could see in the far distance, that that stream—the study of Yoga; the lifelong, or lives-long, practice of Yoga—lead to the ocean. Or to God. Enlightenment wears many faces.

Through the body, through the mind, through the soul, I would reach that sea towards which we all travel. I was convinced of it from Day 1 on the mat. But, only in late mid-life, at 50, could I turn aside from practical matters and devote myself to the path. From 50 to 58, I lived, breathed and ate Yoga, morning, noon and night.

Enter the devil.

Enter my broken back. At age 58.

In the midst of life, in the midst of studying and teaching Yoga, in the midst of joy, I was stopped cold against a wall; blocked from re-entering that stream of life and learning it had taken me decades to find; almost a decade not to master, but to know. Seemingly.

Like Barbaro, coming down the stretch with a broken right ankle, it took me a while—in my case, a stubborn, damaging half-year—to realize the extent of my disability. At first, I did asana (Yoga poses) “through the pain.” I’d been brought up a Presbyterian, remember. Pain? That little thing? That wouldn’t stop me. My body was saying, in every language it could, “Stop.” I just could not believe what I was hearing.

Four of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief followed on the heels of my spinal fusion surgery: denial, anger, depression and grudging acceptance. Bargaining, I left out. At least I was spared that, given my long training in the spiritual arts.

I had chosen, I had consented to, incarnation in a human body, I believed. I had got round to using that body on the path to enlightenment late in life. It was not my body’s “fault,” nor “God’s” that my spine, like Barbaro’s legs, could not serve my mind’s purposes.

Or could not, for the time being . . .

Which is where I stand, where I sit, where I wait, today.

In The New York Times, one of the last of the great newspapers, I recently read an article titled “Steps Back Give Solo Mountain Climber Perspective to Reach the Top” (by Aimee Lyn Brown, page 10, 8 August 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/sports/08climber.html).

The article, in the SportsSunday section sub-titled “Outdoors,” relates the story of 26-year-old solo climber, Althea Rogers, who was literally blown off a mountain in the southern Andes, ending a two-and-a-half-month solo climb and, almost, her life. With broken ribs, she spent five weeks alone at her base camp, waiting to heal, reading and re-reading Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.

Writes Brown: “At the end of the ordeal, Rogers returned to the United States ashamed of her failure to complete the climbs. She could not separate herself from the fruitlessness of the attempt. In her mind ran a single refrain: I’m an awful person; I’m an awful climber.”

Brown explains, “The propensity to measure one’s value by achievement in athletic pursuits is sometimes referred to as the athlete’s identity.”

Of course, the story has a happy ending. Rogers learns temperance, patience and the rewards of every step of the climbing process before she returns to tackle the big peaks. She learns from her time in base camp.

Which is where I, too, find myself today. No longer swimming along, mindlessly, in that cool stream to the sea, but no longer in that stall with doomed Barbaro, either.

On my surgeon’s and Back Rehab crew’s reports, I’m described as “an elite athlete” . . . if a sidelined, rather aged one. Back in the labyrinth of learning and re-learning; back in the base camp or preparing, and re-preparing.

Next month, next winter, next year, perhaps I will return to the climb, with the body-I-have-then.

. . . for, unlike human beings, with their four limbs, or Barbaro, with his four, Yoga has eight limbs* to support its forward progress. According to the great sage, Patanjali, these are: 1) adherence to the universal moral commandments; 2) self-purification through discipline; 3) asana (or the poses/postures best known to the West as “yoga”); 4) rhythmic control of the breath; 5) emancipation of the mind from domination by the senses; 6) concentration; 7) meditation; and, finally, 8) samadhi, or that state wherein the individual spirit becomes one with the over-soul; or, whereby that stream of mine meets the sea.*

For the longest time, Yoga has meant, for me, asana. Yoga has meant, virtually, standing on one of eight limbs. Silly, when you have another seven . . . .

So, may I be “healthy of body and spirit,” if not ever again completely eight-limbed. Seven shall suffice.

*For more on the eight limbs, etc., etc., read Light On Yoga, by B.K.S. Iyengar.