Savasana: Jesekah

Minute 4: Ardha Chandrasan

Jesekah pulled the air into her lungs and concentrated on the motion of pushing it back out instead of holding her breath. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize a light or a tunnel or a wide open sky or any of the soothing visual aids that had been suggested to her in order to slow her mind down, and she felt the one nanosecond moment when she could hold Ardha Chandrasan with absolute integrity. That’s what they called in in Bikram yoga when you found that isolated spot in the middle of a pose where you could really let go of all the other noise -- of the thinking about flexibility, of the morning argument with Matt over having run out of coffee filters, of the afternoon frustration at work when the rumor had started that she would not be given the advertising directorship (and though quickly dispelled, the rumor had caused a visible stress line to form between her brows), of the uneasy queasiness in her stomach that felt like it should be the warning that her period was about to start, of the nagging knowledge that her period was definitively late, of the sudden and unusual rain pelting the Dallas streets.

She rarely found those moments of integrity in her life, even in the strict ninety-minute Bikram routine that she performed with precise, scheduled regularity every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. This was how she managed her life, a series of lists and schedules and goals that could not be veered from without chaos ensuing across the board. Treadmill running and weight training was scheduled at 5:00am with her personal trainer on Monday and Wednesday, followed by a protein drink and a copy of Cosmo in the cab on the way to the office. Friday cocktails with the girls happened at 7pm after work, followed by Matt meeting her for a late dinner, an early fuck and a Netflix dvd as they fell asleep midway through some blockbuster hit with car crashes and a predictable love story. Wednesday nights were board meetings for a variety of charitable causes. Sunday was distance running followed by four or five hours of prep work for the upcoming work week, interspersed with phone calls to her friends from college, her mother and her favorite cousin. Monday nights were hers and Matt’s scheduled night for wedding planning activities, which she already felt hopelessly behind on even though the event was still ten months away. In between the regimen was work, and Jesekah worked like few other women worked. She obsessed over work the way some women obsessed over children. She defined herself by work. She arrived at the office at 7:30am and left at 7:00pm and took her lunch at her desk unless she was meeting with a client. She worked with dogged determination to ensure that none of the Abercrombie beautiful young men or single-and-therefore-able-to-play-the-game-in-ways-she-couldn’t women would be able to catch her promotion trajectory. She made mental notes of the advertising department employees who looked at her wrong or didn’t quite respond fast enough to her call so that when she took the department over from Allen she could speed up their exit from her domain. She was the first one there and the last one gone just so she could keep her edge.

But in between these set events, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:00pm and Saturday mornings at 9:00am, she took her Bikram class. And that was when she turned off and found the time to breath.

Minute 16: Dandayamana Janushirasana

The first time Jesekah was introduced to the theory of Bikram yoga, it was by her therapist, whom she saw every other week during her lunch hour on Thursday. The therapist, a soft, round man in his forties with perpetual hang nails and whom Jesekah could only assume had his own arsenal of emotional problems most likely stemming from the challenges that he faced in getting laid, had suggested that while Jesekah was not by nature the type of person who could “bring it down a notch to the type of peaceful living that would me more healthy for her,” the challenge element of Bikram might satisfy the competitive impulse in her while also forcing her to find quiet time in her life to “just be.”

Jesekah hated terms like “peaceful living” and “just be,” and really she had no interest at all in time spent listening to pan flute music and finding her “inner being,” but she could never leave a task undone. Homework was homework, and so that night while Matt was in the living room watching the NBA and drinking the last beer, which he no doubt would forget to replace, she crawled into the bed with her laptop and started to search out Bikram yoga.

The first thing she found was an interview with a Bikram master done on 60 Minutes. She loved 60 Minutes. That, at least, was something.

Bikram, she learned, was a ninety-minute yoga set of twenty-six repeating positions done in 105 degree heat. And it was hard. The interviewed Bikram master, a man named Bikram Choudhury, explained “You use the body as a medium to bring the mind back to the brain.”

And Jesekah had no idea what that meant or what type of hookah a person had to smoke to think that those words made sense, but then she read his next quote. “That’s the biggest problem in America. That’s the way yoga (was) introduced to America. Yoga (in America) means sit and close your eyes and you will look at the lamp and look at the crystal and meditate. Yoga isn’t supposed to be relaxing and meditative, it’s supposed to be torture.”

And suddenly, Jesekah was sold.

Minute 22: Dandayamana Dhanurasana

Allen had called her into his office almost six months ago. She had known something was wrong with him. His twelve-hour workdays had turned into sixteen-hour workdays. He had looked more haggard, and looking more haggard was hard to do if you were Allen. A man of fifty-five, maybe fifty-seven (she could never keep the difference between Allen and her father straight), he was always impeccably dressed, but his eyes were always encased in dark circles. His hair was always slightly in disarray. He always seemed worn down, as though the stress of running the advertising department for one of the largest financial institutions in the world had taken its toll early and he had given into it, accepted it as the way it would be. He had gotten the directorship early on, in his early forties. That, of course, was a feat Jesekah had set herself up to surpass. After Allen, she would be named director at the relatively young age of thirty-five. He’d bred her for it. Set her up for it. And when he called her into his office that day, she had known he was about to tell her that the time was coming. She had known he would tell her from the moment she had caught site of him in the break area a few days earlier, pouring himself a cup of coffee. She had watched the process from behind him. For what seemed like five minutes, he would pour a few inches of coffee into his cup, and then pause to collect himself. At one moment, he actually looked off into space, or at some imperceptible mark on the wall, and seemed lost in thought for endless moments. He had slowed it down.

And Jesekah felt three things. She felt sadness at seeing Allen slow it down when she knew it was against his will. In the early days, when he had just been named director and she had just been placed in charge of the high money accounts in the department, they had embarked on a cliché corporate affair. Renting luxury hotel suites for just hours each Friday to spend time together sweating, drinking hotel wine and forgetting the week. Finding each other naked and relaxed together on business trips. Once even fucking in his office late at night after everybody had left. It didn’t last long. Neither of them really wanted much from it other than an easy escape from the plan, the schedule, the day. She had never told Matt. In fact, she was quite sure that in the way of their generation, Matt had had his own corporate fuck buddy at some point. Probably one of the paralegals in his office. A nice safe affair since the paralegals almost always left the firm quickly to head into law school. But she had formed genuine, caring feelings for Allen along the way. She understood how his drive took him over. She had always had a part of her that wanted the best for him.

But when she saw him that day, knowing that something soon would cause him to have to put an end to letting the drive own him, she also felt excitement. Greed, maybe.

And she felt fear, but she wasn’t sure what the origin of the fear was. Fear that she wouldn’t get what she wanted? Fear that she would fail if she did get it? Fear that someday she, too, would be Allen?

In the office that day, Allen told her it was a tumor. It had started in his liver, but he had taken so long to have it looked at that by the time anybody caught it, it had spread. Six months maybe, but he was planning to work until he had to be put down. He didn’t have any illusions of ending it all on a mountain singing new age Kumbayas. She needed to be ready. They needed to start moving her slowly into the new role. He would have his secretary send Jesekah over all the files she would need to start getting acclimated.

It was Friday. Jesekah closed her office door and watched the sun begin to drop down over the Great State of Texas. Then she headed over to Deep Ellum and had gin and tonics with her girlfriends, got some sushi with Matt, had doggy style sex since they had done it missionary style the week before and fell asleep watching “8 Mile.”

Minute 36: Tulandandasana

Balancing stick pose was one of the hardest for Jesekah. She had a hard time staying still enough to make her body into a single line, extending from her fingertips to her toes, perpendicular to the one leg she was standing on. It required an exercise in rhythmic breathing and concentration beyond most of the other poses. She closed her eyes and counted the air in through her nose and out through her mouth. She tried very hard to be still in that moment.

Minute 48: Tadasana

She had met Matt in her last year of grad school. She was already out interviewing for jobs, and, at the time, he was working as legal counsel at a well-known consumer goods company. The day of her interview, she had a particularly foul morning. Her cab never showed up so she drove her car downtown, but it was the middle of the day and all of the parking garages were full, so she was already running late and had to park almost five big, Texas, city blocks away from the office building. On her way to the interview, she got caught up in a protest about animal fur or ethical standards or saving the planet or SOMETHING outside of a store that apparently did something that people with the kind of time to spend their days protesting cared about. So by the time she got into the interview, she was boiling with frustration and anger, and it seemed to have shown through in her demeanor because her interview was cut short and she only met with two of the three people she was scheduled to meet with. Before she left, the HR person sat her down and politely told her that while her credentials were fantastic, they just didn’t feel like she’d be a good fit with their organization. But best of luck!

And so, suddenly with time on her hands to kill after the shortened, failed interview, and in an even worse mood than before, Jesekah promptly went to the bar across the street for a Sapphire and tonic and a burger, which she ate at the bar. At least at the bar she would watch CNN on the bar tv instead of looking at an empty chair across from her at a table. She didn’t have the kind of patience to not be engaged with some kind of noise.

And there was Matt at the bar with his domestic beer and his club sandwich. Jesekah was from that generation of women who fancied the idea that they could be just as sexually aggressive as men, that generation called “Third Wave Feminists” but which Jesekah preferred to call “Just really screwed by the emphasis on sexual revolution. No pun intended.” But nonetheless, she’d been bred to pick men up as easily as men picked women up, and by nine o’clock that night she and Matt were at her place beginning the routine that would get them through the next decade. Talk about politics, the Business Times, how to decorate the living room. Eat out six out of seven days and eat leftovers out of cardboard boxes on the seventh. Learn about wine and retirement funds. Attend parties together. Take turns picking out the dvd rental. It was…fine. It didn’t interfere with any of their other ambitions while still giving them the security of exactly the type of relationship that all of their friends were in. It made sense in the plan.

That was almost ten years ago. They had moved in together in year three., spending months looking for the perfect downtown loft since they weren’t quite ready for the echoing noise that would result if they moved into a big house in a gated community in the suburbs. The bought each other cooking classes for Christmas one year, but the only time they ever cooked was in the class. He got a little thicker, but not in a bad way. She got a little thinner, but not in a bad way. They thought about buying a dog, but who would walk it in the middle of the day? They bought some high value artwork instead.

On her thirtieth birthday he had asked her if she wanted to get married No, he hadn’t actually proposed to her. Matt wasn’t a risk taker like that. He had asked her if she wanted him to eventually propose to her so that he could start making a plan to do that. She had said they needed to make sure they were on the same page with things first. Did they want children? Would she keep working? What expectations would they have of each other?

And so they talked it out. And decided that, yes, she did want him to propose to her. Yes, they did want to have children, but not until she was in her later thirties. Yes, eventually they would move into the bigger house, but not until there were children, and yes she would work, and yes they would get a nanny and yes that nanny would speak Spanish so the child would learn two languages and and yes there would be a pre-nup and yes it all made sense that this was the kind of life they wanted.

It took him three years to actually propose to her. Promotions for both of them at work and Jesekah’s mother’s passing away, which took her away from Dallas for every weekend for almost eight months and a critically stressful time when they thought Matt was going to get an offer to run for judge (he didn’t, but it was still only a matter of time), had pushed the idea of a wedding back further and further. But one day, on a Sunday, Jesekah was sitting cross-legged in bed reviewing ad reports on her laptop and Matt was in the living room watching football and reviewing law briefs, or so she thought. But suddenly he appeared in the doorway with a bottle of champagne, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a tiny ring box. And she said yes. And her girlfriends thought that it was funny that on the day she was proposed to, Jesekah was wearing her glasses, no makeup and a pair of sweatpants she’d had since college. And Jesekah returned the ring that Matt had picked out and selected one that she liked better. And the two of them agreed to split the cost of the wedding down the middle.

They set a wedding date for two years later. After all, these events take planning, and they both had very busy lives. They made a list of things they would need to do to pull the wedding off, set Monday night as their “wedding task” night, and got to work. And that was a year and a half ago.

Minute 51: Bhujangasana

Cobra pose was Jesekah’s favorite because it was how she lived her life. Poised and anxious and ready. Anybody who told you that cobra pose was a centered moment, a moment in which you could find integrity, was wrong. It was an anxious moment. It was a moment in which you didn’t even try to slow your breaths down.

Minute 64: Poorna Salabhasana

She had really known it the moment her period was late. Her period was like her, always punctual. She had actually woken up that day and put a tampon in even though there was no sign of the thick flow of her insides coming out yet. After all, it would happen sometime that day. Jesekah took her shot every three months to ensure that. In to the doctor, get your shot, fill out insurance forms, return to the office. And when she took the tampon out that night and it was still as white as that morning, she had known. But she had run her mind through the other possibilities. Stress? The strange weather they’d been having with rain in the middle of August? So odd. A change in her body as she hit her mid-thirties? Any of this could explain it.

But she had known. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing.

And knowing came here, in the peak of the locust pose. Laying on her stomach, creating a curve with her body by raising her head and her feet. Pushing the arch of her back to its limit. Counting as she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. Integrity came. And in the integrity she knew she was no longer alone in her body. That deep within her, there was another rhythm of oxygen going in and out. And that rhythm was in conflict with hers. It was faster. It was driven by some force different than the one that drove her. But just like her, it would not give up it’s pattern of in and out and heartbeat and the path towards an ultimate goal. Just like her, it would not slow down of its own will.

He would not slow down of his own will?

She would not slow down of her own will?

Jesekah released her locust pose and returned to a flat laying position on her mat. She took in bigger breaths to fill herself back up in the moments before they returned to the pose again. She wondered what she was supposed to feel like at this moment. Next to her, a woman who always came to the same Bikram classes as Jesekah opened her eyes and looked across at Jesekah. And Jesekah wondered if her eyes ever looked as clear as that woman’s.

Minute 71: Ustrasana

Allen had been admitted to the hospital two days ago. Jesekah had not been to visit him yet, but that was because she was suddenly overwhelmed at work. She didn’t officially have Allen’s title yet, but in his absence and with the unlikelihood of his return, she had assumed almost all of his duties on top of her own. There had been this ugly rumor circulating that the executive team had begun to wonder if she really had the experience necessary to manage the entire department. Jesekah had shut that down, quickly scheduling a meeting between herself and some key members of the upper management to show them that not only was she ready, she was prepared to make significant improvements over the way Allen had handled the department.

Matt had been excellently supportive, not once complaining when she needed to stay extra late at the office. Leaving tiny white cardboard containers of food in the refrigerator for her. Changing his daily afternoon check-in phone call to just a text message so that he wouldn’t interrupt her. After all, he understood. His job demanded the same thing sometimes.

This morning, she had received the official offer. Hygienically sealed in an envelope delivered by some administrative assistant from the human resources department. Jesekah had closed her office door, opened the interoffice envelope and read the contents. A pay increase to put her on the level of any male executive in her position. Complete control of the department. Extra stock options. Extra bonus incentives. A director’s title and the hope that should would grow into even bigger roles within the company.

VP? Could she be a VP? Maybe even a partner?

Out of her office window, she saw that big Texas sky, and she felt a pang for Allen. He had put his life into this, and now she would probably surpass him and he would fade away in a hospital bed, looked over by a wife who meant only as much to him as any other building block in his perfect tower of a life, children who probably didn’t even really know him, and the real thing that had driven his life, his work, already passed into the hands of another as though he’d never even been there.

She really should go see him in the hospital.

She took the forms from the envelope, signed her name in the appropriate places, and buzzed her secretary to take them back to the HR department. She’d probably need a second assistant now, what with all the things she would need to manager. Allen had had two assistants, maybe she could retain one of them.

Minute 84: Ardha Matsyendrasana

Spine twisting pose. Life twisting problem. The forms were signed, but if she didn’t prove herself as director, she knew they would let her go. And how could she do that with her belly growing big? With a need to take not weeks but months off? With overwhelming nausea and a problem concentrating? With every male executive looking at her with that “That’s what happens when you trust your company to a woman?” look.

Would they cancel the wedding? Would she walk down the aisle with a big, fat belly and a big fat face and gas and hormones and a ring that wouldn’t fit on her swollen finger? They had planned for this wedding for over a year. Three hundred people were coming. There were going to be four kinds of cake and six bridesmaids.

If she couldn’t prove herself as a director now, would she ever get a second shot? It was different for her, for a woman. You were supposed to want to raise children, but if you took the time to have one, it would count against you forever. It would…change how they all looked at you.

They hadn’t even started looking for a house yet. Would they be able to find one in time? What about finding a nanny? They hadn’t even gotten a puppy because neither of them had time for taking care of it. How could they get ready for this while she was getting promoted and Matt was trying to get a judgeship and they were still planning a wedding?

It wasn’t what she wanted right now.

But as Jesekah twisted her body around and focused on slowing herself down, she felt the other person inside her trying to fit its breaths with hers. His breaths with hers? Her breaths with hers? Not really breaths, Jesekah knew, but the same thing. A taking in and a letting out in a pattern that continued at all times. What would it be like to have something so close to her that they breathed together?

She could barely imagine.

Would that be enough to drive her? Could that be enough to drive her?

Tomorrow, when the strange rain had stopped, she would go to the hospital and see Allen.

Minute 88: Kapalbhati in Vajrasana

The pose is called blowing in firm pose. It is simply about trying to capture the peace of breathing and feeling solid so that you can take it into the outside world with you. For Jesekah, the challenge was much more simple, just find that moment where you feel solid. Where you feel like you’re not a thousand pine needles swept into a dustpan after you’ve dried and fallen off of a Christmas tree. To feel, instead, like you are the trunk of that tree, firm and heavy and lasting long after the decorations have been taken off you and the tinsel has blown away in the wind and you have been discarded into a dumpster or a city corner or a compost pile. To be powerful and heavy even when you have been stripped down and tossed away into aloneness. To have that, even for a moment, was seemingly beyond her.

It was raining in Dallas. She had fought with Matt about the coffee filters. She had panicked about the rumor that she would be passed over for the promotion. Tomorrow she needed to see Allen. There was a nucleus forming deep in her belly. It was unbearably hot in the Bikram studio suddenly. She had a plan. She had a wedding. She had decisions. She had dried up and turned brown and was being swept into a dustpan and she couldn’t slow her breath down enough of her own will.

Namaste.