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***Part I: Obstacles***

There are thoughts that always seem to spring up during my yoga practice:

“I bet I look ridiculous right now, like a monkey doing an arabesque”; “I was pretty good at basketball, and soccer. Tennis, too. Boy, those were the days”; “Why, oh why, is my right hip so tight? What is in there? Daddy, are you in there? I know you’re in there. Get out of my hip!”; “How thankful am I to have a body that works. Okay, fine, how thankful I should be to have this body. I am thankful for my body, right?”; “If only I was still with that last girl, or the one before that, then I could think about hot sex while stuck in this stupid room balancing on one foot with my legs and arms crossed”; “That second paragraph in chapter six, maybe I should use ‘patio’ instead of ‘deck.’ No, no, deck. Or patio. Deck. Fuck!”

I expected those thoughts and so was truly surprised when the one I hadn’t anticipated trumped them all, lodged itself into a huge ball in my forebrain: I am transgender. I am DIFFERENT.

I guess I don’t have to think about that as much in San Francisco, or in the Castro where even if I’m the only trans person in my yoga class, my ego is at least comforted by the knowledge that in the distance between my studio to my home, I have received both a girl’s phone number and a guy’s tongue in my mouth.

But the second I arrived in Guatemala, I felt my difference: I laughed uncomfortably when the hotel concierge said, “That’s not your real name right, you don’t strike me as a Nina,” and I quaked in my zip-off pants when a uniformed officer with a gun said, “Good afternoon, sir” while staring at my open passport with the big letter “F,” and I panicked for a moment at a bar in San Pedro when I was directed to the “bathroom,” a cement hole with only a bare bones partition blocking it off from the center of a crowded courtyard.

And the second I arrived on my retreat, I felt my difference: When I met my new roommate, who was upset to have been matched with a guy, me, I took on the burden of the situation, as if I had solely caused the problem, as if my being was an irreconcilable problem. And when I removed my shirt, I realized that even though top surgery was without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt stigmatized, a tiny bit ugly, when my scars were acknowledged: The mom who asked, “Are you okay?”; The child who asked, “What are those lines?”; The massage therapist who asked, “Are those tribal markings?” And every time I heard someone address the woman named “Mina,” I felt my entire stomach drop before I’d realize that nobody knew my birth name, that the present incarnation of myself was safe.

At this point in my life, I find it easier to out myself instead of biting my tongue when I’m about to tell a girl I used to play sports against her all-girls school, or explicate that I played in the Sydney Gay Games as a dyke not a gay dude, even though I’m at least kinda gay-ish now. It’s also easy to out myself because I’m writing a transgender memoir and since writing is what I’m most passionate, it’s often the first thing I want to share with new friends.

Within the first few days, I’d told several folks I was trans (although I always said the full “transgender” and tried not to wonder if they had any sense of what I meant by a word that I believe holds a great deal of diversity). If I didn’t tell someone, I assumed they either heard or figured it out, and then, once everyone knew, I developed it into a new worry: I am only a Trans Person, that’s all I do, all I am, all I have to offer.

Different may have been the word I used to describe myself initially, but separation, isolation, and loneliness were the blocks that I turned it into inside my head.

*** Part II: Intention ***

On Tuesday, when I had settled into the retreat enough and still knew I’d have enough time to relax when done, I pulled out my manuscript. It took me a day-and-a-half to get through, and I read it as planned, in a hammock without a pen in my hand and without an eye towards revision. But I also read it with an intention I would not have considered had I not had a brief exchange at breakfast with my teacher who framed my upcoming task as a “nod to the work done.”

Four years of my life, a great deal of pain and triumph, and hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing and revising went into those pages. Some of those paragraphs had been sentences that became chapters that became words that moved from chapter 3 to chapter 5 before finally finding a home. I nodded in acknowledgment, in awe really, of the journey my words had taken. When I bumped into my teacher later, she said I looked clear. She wasn’t aware that I’d read my manuscript, and that after four years, I believed, for the very first time, that I may actually have a book on my hands.

But perhaps the clarity came from the experience of reading a story about a narrator who just happens to have been me, and the new perspective this gave me. For I’d just read a “book” that at its core is a queer coming out story about a person afraid of becoming an outsider, of not being “normal.” And there I was now, a person so comfortable in the Castro as a queer and outsider that “normal” people scared me. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, at the circularity of my course.

***Part III: Yoga***

We practiced yoga every morning and every afternoon, except for the one morning when a few folks climbed a volcano, an adventure I didn’t even consider after focusing on this concept of intention and setting my own for the week: not to go anywhere or do anything; to banish “should” from my head, to let go of any notion of achieving anything.

Yoga can be a complicated endeavor. It can be about trying to get my leg behind my head (I’m not even close). It can be about learning that my pelvis has a floor and if I can just convince it to feel like its holding onto a tampon for dear life, I might be able to do a handstand. It can be about discovering that there are words like kapalabhati and uddiyana bandha that I cannot physically understand, nor even pronounce.

Yoga can also be profoundly simple. It can be about being compassion to oneself and being compassionate to others. It can be about learning what happens when a handful of people who do not know each other take off work, leave behind children and husbands, drop some cash, shed their defenses, and connect. It can be about discovering that my experiences, my story, may be different from that of others, but that a good story, a real story, is universal—that we all experience joy, worry, pain, sadness, anxiety, passion, loss, grief, pressure, fear, loneliness, and if we’re lucky, some gratitude.

***Part IV:Transformation***

In the end, I didn’t leave the retreat property for six days. I’d wanted to see what would happen if I stopped moving, what would move inside of me if I stayed still. I’m not sure when it happened, or how it did, but I visualized the change in a ritual, an image, my separation going up in flames, and in the experience of diving into the icy volcanic lake every morning and sloughing off my coat of isolation

What took its place shocked me: the words of a friend who said I seem “really happy” and another who said I’m “magnetic” and exude the sense of someone who knows it; a friend on the mat by my side, stabilizing me with her steady strong breath; the pale blue eyes of a friend locking her drishti onto my heart every time I opened my mouth; the ease of skinny-dipping in the womb-warm watsu pool under a swollen moon; the cohesiveness of a circle, undulating, and the flickers of light that powered us from our center.

***Part V: Return***

I went to yoga class on Monday night, the first day I was back. I’d told myself I didn’t *have* to go, but after practicing daily, it seemed easier to go than not to, to stick with a good habit rather than force myself into a bad one. And besides, it was less than a five minute walk to the studio from my house, only a few minutes longer than the walk from my retreat room to the yoga palapa. I’d just spent a week with people who flew to Guatemala from NY, Minnesota, and Colorado to practice with my teacher, and now, back in San Francisco, the distance to her seemed even shorter.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was happy to see me, for she is human and not immune to the retreat withdrawal I was experiencing; she too had to let go of the community we’d created; she too had to acclimate back into the urban chaos.

After class, she was excited, telling me that she could see it, that my practice had shifted. Although I downplayed it, as I do, I would agree. I’m a little stronger, a little less self-conscious, a little more aware of my body, able to breath a little deeper. But it is off the the mat where I’ve noticed the shift the most. I waited for the panic to hit when my travel plans went awry after I left the retreat property, and I waited for my job annoyance to hit when I went back to work, and I waited for the overwhelm to hit when I got back to my manuscript and realized I have less than five months to finalize this book. But nothing hit, at least not as hard as it used to, not hard enough to knock me over.

After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

Forgive me for combining holidays here–but it’s only at Valentine’s Day that I’m able to reflect with the type of retrospective so common at the turn of the New Year. I’ve always been slow, thoughtful, deliberate, late. Though taking the two holidays  together makes more sense in context. For 2009 was the year of love, or almost love, or not really love at all, or self-love perhaps. It was the first year of my life as Nick, and the first year my gender and body were no longer impassable obstacles to my becoming involved physically and emotionally with others. It’s no surprise that I spent the year in relationships, four of them to be exact, though “relationships” is a term I’m using in its broadest sense to include engagement with another in a serial (and for me) monogamous (though unintentional) fashion.

I met the first girl at the start of 2009, literally, midnight-ish on New Years. Re-met would be a more appropriate term since she used to hang out at my house years ago, flirt with my back in the day when I’d run away scared of anyone who wanted my clothes off. When I re-met this girl and she saw my room, she shook her head in disappointment. All I had was one map of the world. For the three years I’d lived there, it was the only thing that made me feel comfortable, a map with its millions of escape routes. I didn’t have a home. Home was something I couldn’t create inside my body and it was something I couldn’t create in my surroundings.

Shortly after we started hanging out, I asked this girl to make a decoration suggestion. “Curtains for your bay windows and a comfortable reading chair,” she replied. The chair is where I’m sitting as I write this, my windows framed by my handsome blue and gold curtains.

I didn’t get to ask the second person for room advice. We never spent an entire night together. But he showed me boundaries, the beauty of the queerest of bodies, helped landscape my internal home. The third suggested a duvet cover for my bed, and how her of her to have the perfect one, to give it to me and make a home for me to rest. The fourth picked out a plant, bringing life into my home.

I’m still feeling the fourth, enough to know it’s time to regroup, time to be alone inside this home I’ve created, time to watch the leaves on my new plant, the hair on my new body grow. I’m feeling her enough to know that today would be a special challenge, and oh, how I love challenges.

I had decided Rusty would be my Valentine long ago, looked forward to yoga today for all that I knew it would be and all that I didn’t. There’s something about his tone, part pleading, wisdom and command, the way he says, “Don’t miss this moment,” so that even if my legs are trembling, and I’m so uncomfortable I want to call it pain, I cannot help but think, “Do not miss this moment,” and that when I’m so beat I can’t see through the sweat in my eyes and he says, “I want this to be the most challenging part of your day. I want this to be the most challenging part of your week,” I know that I can hold sadness, loneliness, loss, and even more, that I don’t want to miss the moment.

The hardest part was towards the end, a two-minute meditation, stillness. Rusty challenged us here too, offered us a couple mantras and goaded us to try them. “I dare you,” he said. “For two minutes, I dare you to repeat to yourself: I am worthy of love. I am worthy of love.” I certainly believe it and I certainly tried, but let’s just say my mind wandered a little. How easy it is to give love to others, and how easy it is to receive love, but  how very very hard it is for me to sit with my own love.

He ended class with words he’s said a lot since he opened his new studio though the meanings are infinite. “Welcome home,” he said

“Welcome home,” I said to myself.

I almost never talk to my yoga teachers, especially the ones I like. Because there’s no talking to a yoga teacher without hugging them. And it’s not even like a post-conversation hug. You make one move to open your mouth and their arms open wide, like they couldn’t possibly concentrate on an introduction or anything really until they’ve felt your bare sweaty skin. So part of my avoidance is the intimacy, and part of it is that my favorite yoga teachers have offered me so much spiritual guidance, I think of them like gods. Just imagining a heartfelt hug with a god makes me want to crap my pants.

I always told myself that my only goal of yoga was to show up and be nice to myself. If I was afraid or just didn’t want to approach my teachers, so be it; it wasn’t on the to do list. I’ve been going to yoga semi-regularly for almost two years, and that’s still my only goal. In that time, I’ve only spoken to one of my favorite teachers.

It was a Sunday night, Mother’s Day. Janet had turned the whole class into a beautiful homage to mothers, and at the end, she demanded that everyone whom she’d never met before say hello. It’s the only demand she’d ever made and it sounded more like an invitation like a demand. So, I obliged, even waited uncomfortably in the short hugging line for my turn to rub sweat on Janet and wish her a happy Mother’s Day.

I hadn’t spoken to a teacher since Mother’s Day, and certainly not Rusty, even though I still have a “get well” card on my refrigerator from him–a friend brought it to class for him to sign last year when I had top surgery. A couple months ago, he started paying more attention to me in class, making it a point to help me in a couple poses each time. And by help, I mean entwine his body around mine and open me up in ways that allowed breathe into places that I’m absolutely sure had never received breathe before. His adjustments were more intimate than most of my one-night stands; there’s no way I could talk to him.

Last Friday, I went to his class, and despite having a pretty rough week, I was feeling rather comfortable, stable, strong in my body. That is until the the end of the class, backbend time. I love backbends. I’ll half-ass it on crunches, and go to the bathroom during chair pose, and take a long time to rise into plank, but I always give it my all on backbends.

I like backbends because they feel awesome, and because they are the ultimate heart openers, the foundation of heart opening in all poses really. Plus, a teacher once said you always give the benefits of your last backbend away to someone else. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but since my favorite part of yoga is dedicating my practice to someone else at the beginning of class, it’s not that surprising that my favorite pose involves giving it away; I think of it as selfish selflessness.

In Rusty’s class, I inhaled to my crown and exhaled all the way up and nothing felt right. My body quite simply did not want to do a backbend, so I went back down. Rusty came over, stood by my head and nodded. I knew what it meant, since he’d assisted me once before, having me hold his ankles. I grabbed his ankles and popped up and he supported me, did half the work for me. It felt good, maybe even great. I was very relieved when it was time to come down.

As everyone prepared for the final backbend, I didn’t even think of dedicating mine away. I didn’t even think of going up. I was tired. Rusty saw me on the ground and he came over again. He stood by my head and smiled, so I had to go up, holding his ankles again. This time he instructed me to do push-ups, something I’d done in this position with him once before.

In my backbend, as I started bending and extending my elbows, the term “emotional calisthenics” popped into my head—something my pal says to me whenever I’m going through a rough patch. Emotional calisthenics, I thought as I gripped Rusty tighter for support, raising and lowering myself again and again in this heart opener.

At the very end of class, I started to cry, just a little, and I knew that today was the day. Afterward, I approached. “Hey Rusty, I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said. His arms were around me before I could even say my name.

He thanked me for being so open, for being an amazing presence in his classes. He told me to keep trusting him. I wanted to thank him for holding me up, strengthening me, helping me rise when I couldn’t alone. Instead I just thanked him from being my teacher. It was all too much; I hope we never talk again.

We were walking down the street, me and an acquaintance. He asked me what I’ve been up to, a harmless enough question, but one that has been stumping me lately. I try to keep any discussion about my job at my job, and I can always talk about my writing. However, there is one thing that has been the centerpiece of my mind’s lazy susan.

“I’m having top surgery on Wed,” I said.

“Wow,” he replied. “I’m probably a year away. I’m really scared.”

I remember when I said the exact same phrase, “a year away.” It was about three months ago and a couple weeks before I made my consultation with Dr. Brownstein. Hearing myself say “a year away” was one of the triggers that kicked me into action. If this was inevitable, then what was I waiting for? I had the money saved, sitting underneath my online mattress, safe from the crashing stock market, earmarked for this.

“I understand,” I said to my acquaintance. “I was scared for three years.”

“And you’re not anymore?”

“No,” I said.

I didn’t tell him that it was one hell of a journey to get here, that I took the long way, over Everest, that at times I didn’t know if I was actually going to make it. That I spent hundreds of hours lost in daydreams about something I wanted but could not, would not, did not allow myself to have. I thought of the knife, the drains, the scars. I thought about telling my parents, I thought about dying, me, them, wanting to die, wanting them to die.

What surprised me the most is that the moment I set the date for my surgery, the self waterboarding stopped. After years of torture, I felt calm, serene, like I was waterskiing on a glass lake.

December 3. It felt right when I heard it, like I already had a connection to it, like it was my birthday in another life.

I remember the first person who told me about his top surgery experience. The night before his surgery, he slept in my room. This was before I even lived in this house. I’m not sure why I find that little fact so comforting. Maybe he is watching over me. Not in that from-above-in-heaven kind of way, but as a leader showing me the way, the first of many who would. I remember when he told me he reached the point when nothing that could happen in surgery or after surgery could be worse than having breasts. I didn’t understand, but now I do. That is what I’ve been up lately, arriving here, at a place far from self-loathing, at a place where I am able to give myself and my body an enormous precious gift. I remember my friend said he couldn’t sleep the night before his big day. He was too excited. He felt like he was going to Disneyland. I wonder how much I will toss and turn tonight. I wonder whether Disneyland will be as magnificent as I imagine it to be.

My mother arrives in San Francisco tonight. It’s still a bit hard to believe she will be here to take care of me when for awhile I wasn’t sure I was going to tell her about my surgery. I find the thought of her presence comforting, even though she told me yesterday that she is worried about EVERYTHING. She is worried about what she will eat for dinner, if it will be cold in my house, if I have a hairdryer, what we will do if our cell phones don’t work when I am at the airport to pick her up. I am my neurotic mother’s neurotic child. She is scared that I’m having a mastectomy, that I am transgender. But she is coming anyway. Sometimes I think she is one the one being strong. But I am also my strong mother’s strong child.

My mother is a good distraction. I’m too busy drawing her maps of where she can pick up prepared gourmet food to think too much about what it will feel like to have “knives in my binder,” as someone recently described the experience to me. I am focusing on other people’s anxieties and fears, the same way that other people are focused on my impending surgery. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on others than on ourselves.

This morning I tried to do yoga, my last physical activity for at least a few weeks. And I say try because I had a hard time holding the poses. Go figure. I wanted to blame the teacher because her last name was “Lightseed” and she kept referring to the six of us in class as “ladies,” over and over and over again. But Lady Lightseed was also the first teacher to ever adjust me in Shavasana. That is the last pose, the most mentally challenging pose, the one where you just lie there, resting. She put her hands on my shoulders, which were stalking my ears, and pushed them down my back. Then she placed her hands underneath my head by my neck and pulled gently. My neck must have grown two inches in that moment. It was as if she’d coaxed a turtle out of his shell.

It’s how I know that I’m still afraid. I’m a little scared that I won’t have enough patience to sit through the recovery, that I won’t know how to calm my mind when I cannot run, bike, or do yoga, that I will be in too much pain to work on my book. At least I’m afraid of the stupid stuff, the disruption to my routine. It is always the uncertainty of change that is the hardest. I have some ideas though: board games and urban hikes and movie marathons and Percocet highs, maybe even Rest, a place that is so foreign to me I wonder if I’ll ever get past the culture shock.

I don’t want to dwell on the fear. I just want to let you know it is there, in case you are afraid of something, in case you are weighing what feels like two crappy choices. There have been times when I’ve been really angry about my available options. But there have also been times when I think about my friends and acquaintances and their experiences: a complicated pregnancy, a miscarriage, cancer, migraines, knee surgery, bunion surgery, the death of a parent, the death of a lover, a divorce, a break-up. Sometimes it seems like everyone I know is facing a challenge. I think of trans people who will commit suicide before being able to have surgery. I think of those who cannot afford surgery. I think of those who do not have mothers to take care of them after surgery. I don’t dwell in the fear because mostly I think that I am lucky.

I went to a yoga class once in 2001, a couple times in 2002 and in 2003, and maybe once in 2004. In 2005, I gave it my strongest effort, attending a handful of anusara classes at the only yoga studio in the small town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Back in San Francisco, I bought my own mat, which inspired me to avoid yoga for all of 2006 and 2007. During this time, in the first of many Yoda-grasshopper moments, someone said to me, “When you are ready for yoga, you will open to it.” By the time I set foot in the Castro Yoga Tree only a few blocks from my house, I had attended maybe a dozen classes in a half dozen studios over the course of almost eight years.

Going in, I was aware of some of my struggles. I tried not to let the anxiety provoking length of a 1.5 hour class get to me, and I promised not to berate myself for my novice yoga skills. It turns out this was the whole point of mellow flow, a class that isn’t easy like restorative, but sets the challenge for all of us to go easy on ourselves. The teacher, the much-loved Janet Stone, reminds us of this repeatedly throughout the class, and occasionally I listen. Her classes draw over a hundred people and we all line our mats up, mere inches apart, so that we are nearly sweating onto one another in the warm but not Bikram hot room. As dusk settles onto our Friday, darkening the barn-sized studio, we are instructed to let go of the week’s stress and the American mantra of harder, faster, better. Once a week, I told myself, just go to this class once a week. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.

I followed directions well. If Janet said to close my eyes and wag my tail, I did. If she said to take a deep breath and let it all out with a great big sound of relief, I did. Upon command, I introduced myself to neighbors. I chanted off-key. I mooed and meowed. I did this all, perhaps, because I was in the midst of a break-up and I lacked the energy that self-consciousness requires. I needed to blindly trust in something; I was either ripe for a cult or yoga or the cult of yoga.

It took me months to try a different teacher and a different class. I started going to the Sunday morning bhakti flow class because a few friends attended it as part of their forays into yoga. The four of us would set up in the corner, the only ones, or so it seemed, following the level one instructions. Once, during the new age sermon that carries through every class, the teacher said that yoga was an event. All of a sudden, I stopped considering yoga a workout or meditation or something I did for a couple hours in between other things, and I began to think of it as the highlight of my day, an activity of grand importance, an event.

I also treated yoga class like a 12-step meeting in that there was always one going on, waiting for me when I needed it. If I was having a bad day, and for awhile there were some real rough ones, I would look online, find the next class and go. I always learned something enlightening about myself and my body, and I collected words of wisdom like these: “We are here to breathe. If we decide to do some poses, that’s great. But we are here to breathe.”

My favorite part of yoga class is the beginning. We are encouraged to come up with an intention, to think of a person and offer up our wants and needs and benefits of our practice to them. I change up the person every time, but I always hold someone I love close to my heart. I like to start with that person and imagine my well-wishes rippling in concentric circles out through the studio, the city, the world. I can’t help but picture the slow-motion images of a nuclear bomb, spreading not annihilation, but radiations of warmth and light from my own personal point of impact.

I also like the poses themselves. I like to root my hands and feet into the ground, spreading my fingers and toes wide, envisioning them gripping the earth. I like to concentrate on pulling my kneecaps up, elongating my rib cage, letting my shoulders melt into my back, and relaxing my jaw. I like trying without trying to feel the presence of my entire body, to engage muscles it would never occur to me to use in a certain stance. I like the names of the poses, the Sanskrit words and their English counterparts–tree, mountain, warrior, frog, fish–each one rich in metaphorical significance. I like the focus on balance and strength and awareness over achievement.

The other day one of the instructors approached me during a session with guidance on a pose, and he told me my practice was blossoming. I was surprised, convinced that none of my instructors had noticed me. Feigning amazement, or showing teacherly encouragement, he asked me how I did it, and although the question was rhetorical, I spent the rest of the class alternating between beaming pride and a variety of answers to his question.

I wanted to tell him that I was facing the biggest challenges of my life, that I got to the end of the road and it said, “Not a through street,” that I ran out of places and ideas and escapes from the discomfort, that breathing into it was my last ditch attempt at living. I wanted to say that I came to yoga in desperation, or in a failed attempt to battle desperation, I came in resignation. I considered saying that I’m an addictive and obsessive person, and now that I’ve gotten a taste of the spiritual enlightenment revolution, finally a bite of that bliss, I’m back for more, again and again, because I can’t get enough. I wanted to say that my mind is so full of chatter, and I listen when you tell me to place my head on the ground and let the contents spill out, or that I need to hear that yoga is endless, which is why it’s called practice, or that I think I’m being kinder to myself, softer, and more thoughtful to others, or that I feel physically alive, more in touch with my body than ever before, or that when my thoughts become a runaway train, I need someone to remind me to say “thinking” to myself, smile, let it go, and show up on the mat again.

Yesterday, I tried a new teacher. He asked if it was anyone’s first class, and one person raised a hand. The teacher told him, “Happy Birthday.” It was my 28th class in the last five months. I know because I got curious and had the desk person check the computer. I said “Happy Birthday” to myself, commemorating the big event that is my every class. During that session, the teacher mentioned a few different types of breath. He said, “If you have no idea what I’m talking about for a decade don’t worry about it.” I had no idea and I didn’t care. I spent the last decade on the path to yoga, understanding finally, that I am here to breathe. It doesn’t surprise me that I will spend the next decade learning how to do so.