Going Yoga: Through Breath, Body, and Heart

In Between East and West, philosopher Luce Irigaray has this to say about the lessons (or reminders) yoga taught her:

"First, I learned to breathe. Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one's own life. Only the mother, during pregnancy, breathes in place of the child. After birth, whoever does not breathe, does not respect his or her own life and takes air front the other, from others. Breathing is thus a duty toward my life, that of others, and that of the entire living world."

This idea of learning to breath, of what Irigaray might mean when she talks about learning to do something that typically happens naturally, makes me think about what it means to begin again. What it means to dust oneself off and start over, to open oneself, one's lungs, one's body, to being alive, instead of turning inward and defensively curling in. And what it means to risk saying YES—to all the uncertainty that being alive has in store: the precariousness resilience of the body, the uncertainty of flesh, the stops and starts of our animal bodies, all the tumultuousness that bubbles up in our inner and outer worlds.

But what is there to say about all the stops, stalls, hiccups, bumps, and crashes that are part of being alive—other than the fact that you can pretty much count on them and they often get you not simply when you're least expecting them, but most especially when things are going well? Because if you're lucky enough to live in relative comfort, to be healthy, to live in ways that aren't constantly reminding you of your own mortality or survival, you are surprised when the blows strike. You're flying high, absolutely on top of the world one minute, windows down, music up, 70 mph on the first sunny day in who knows how long, and then next thing you know you've been hit by a truck, you're lying on the side of the road, and the drivers around you are calling 911. You're shocked; your family and friends are shocked, a lot of people keep asking, how could this have happened—to him of all people? Even though things like this happen all the time and to the most wonderful people in the world, we tend to count on the fact that they won't happen to us. Until, of course, they do. And then, if we're a little bit lucky in the unluckiness of it, we may even get the chance to scramble around in the rubble and try starting over again.

Stopping and starting over—in life and in yoga and in the I've-just-had-a-horrible-accident-that-changes-everything kind of way—was brought to the forefront for me in 2009, when I was so sick with genetically inspired heart issues that I almost died.* Up until now, this is the biggest life-stall I've ever had. I've learned that such bodily and emotional trauma takes a lot of negotiation and time, as I've been picking up the pieces ever since. And no matter how many pieces I put back together, I'll never be the person I was before.

I first started practicing yoga in early 2006. I was happy to find a hot yoga studio that was light on all the new-age woo, guru-ism, and dubious spiritual promises that would have sent me running in the opposite direction and that, instead, allowed me to discover a practice that was ultimately meditative and even "spiritual" through its repetition and intense physicality. As an ex-dancer, yoga made me feel at home in and in sync with my body in a way that other types of exercise and practices had never done. The more days I spent in the studio, the more days I wanted to go back. Yoga also helped me learn to love my body in a way that years in the ballet studio (with the required always-critical self-assessments of too-short, too-big, not flexible enough, not-this, not-that, not-not-not noise ...) never did. In it's emphasis on intent as opposed to end result and looking a specific way, yoga offered me the joy of motion without the incessant critique that plagued someone like me, who—complete body transplant aside—would have never been the "natural" ballet dancer type, no matter how hard I worked or how well I danced.

The summer of my troubles, which started with two heart attacks followed by a triple bypass was (of course) a summer when so much was going well, and, yes, I would say I was even flying high and feeling on top of the world. It was also the summer I'd started taking steps to go further in my yoga practice by signing up for teacher training. I wasn't sure how much I actually wanted to teach when I was finished, but I was motivated by my need to bump things to the next level and to focus on my practice in a more nuanced and intense way. But two weeks after talking with the studio owner about signing up, I was waking up high on morphine in the beeping cold of an ICU instead.

My relationship with my embodiment has been fraught with trouble since then. Its bleakest moments are finally passed, but it’s been a long and hard excursion to say the least. I undoubtedly needed yoga more than ever in the months after my surgery, once my cardiologist gave me the OK to go back, but for a good while, for a lot of reasons I am still figuring out, I avoided getting back on my mat. Though I spent a lot of time mentally processing what happened to me—through writing, reading, my art practice, and my role as a national spokeswoman for the American Heart Association—I avoided my own body in a lot of ways. The physical attention I gave to it came most often in the form of things like comfort food or lying around on the couch, which I eventually realized were ways of coping with all my sadness, confusion, and fear. After a great deal of sluggishness later, I started to be honest with myself—about the fact that I was eating and living a lot differently than I had been before I got sick; and that even though I talked about going back to yoga, I was only rarely getting myself to the studio. I had become a contradiction: missing something like crazy and turning my back on it at the same time, a person caught up in an unrealized plan. Something was stopping me. So I started to dig for answers.

It has been incredibly difficult to understand this contradiction and to explain it to myself and others, but ultimately, I think that being sick to the extent I was left me feeling so powerless and absolutely betrayed by my body, that I wasn’t convinced I could do anything to get it back into my body’s “groove” again. It wasn't that I was worried about my body not being able to handle the exercise, so it wasn't that kind of all-too-common, recovering heart patient fear, but it was more about not wanting be intimate or “in tune” with my body at all. Falling back into yoga—that union of body/mind, where I am reminded up-close that everything is grounded in the body—was actually unappealing in a lot of ways. I now suspect that I was trying to live as if my body were some washed-up ghost lurking around my edges, just some gadfly shadow in tow. Not surprisingly, my heart events also dredged up all the “body issues” I’d had when I was younger as a dancer. Once again my body had become my enemy.

A year and some months ago, however, something started to click about the way I was keeping myself apart from something I had enjoyed, and I really let myself entertain the risk of wanting yoga again. I began to admit that the way I was living (like a slug, really) was making me feel incomplete. After quite a few fits and starts, I finally got back to the mat. Slow. Steady. And very much like a turtle, but it did happen, and is happening. I have this sense of traveling back to my body (albeit a new and changed body) again, and I am allowing myself to re-feel that joy. When I practice, I notice the ways yoga ripples throughout the rest of my life, even my art. I've been remembering how that feels. And, yes, falling back in love.

Lately, I keep having this odd experience in the studio when I suddenly feel like the particular moment I am inhabiting could be happening at some other point in time: it could be a Monday night in 2014 or a Saturday afternoon in 2006, when I first started practicing. I look at myself, my eyes, in the mirror and I could be looking at myself before surgery years ago. Breathing deep, breathing through the body, and breathing through my heart has become a thread, a passageway, from one now to the other. I see myself in the mirror and the precise "when" fuzzes out of focus. I have the experience of a Now that happened before and will happen another time again; every time will be Now. This is one of the ways yoga continues to help me knit together the before and after of my heart trauma.

Yoga is also helping me confront my heart disaster honestly—from the level of my body, not just intellectually—and reminds me to relinquish myself to the messiness of my flesh. To give myself over and up to this body who is me, is my home, even if this home doesn't promise anything or actually "care" about me in any way—at least not in the sense we think of when someone says to us, "I care about you." One of the strangest, most estranging, utterly animal helpless, and existential moments I had during my first heart attack was the instant I felt knew that I was dying and the thought "I am dying and something is happening in my body and it doesn't care about me" went through my mind. I will never forget that. I knew that whatever was happening on a physical, mechanical, cellular, internal level didn't know or care about this amalgam of biology I know as "Lori Anne." For a long time, I didn't want to get intimate with that non-caring body again. But the body that betrayed me, is not simply the only the only one I have, but all that I am. And what am I to do in the face of that—continue the futility of running away even though running away is impossible?

I nod as I read the passage by Irigaray I quoted above: Yoga does remind and teach me to breathe. And yoga reminds and teaches me again to say yes: Yes, I am lucky, and grateful, to have this moment, this day, this life, and its continual stream of Nows.

And in the spirit of loops and returns, I am happy to share the news I've been keeping fairly private: yoga teacher training is back on the table and right around the corner. This weekend my new 7-month yoga teacher training adventure will begin!

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* I would be remiss if I didn't include a note here about how important it is to know the signs of a heart attack, especially women, who have a lot of symptoms that are different than what you might think of as "classic heart attack," and how you should pay attention to the symptoms even if you think you are THE LAST PERSON ON EARTH who could be having a heart attack. I ignored my symptoms the first time (even though my symptoms matched the whole list of symptoms in front of me when I finally looked them up), because I thought it couldn't be happening to me: I didn't have any risk factors and in fact was the epitome of health in terms of all the numbers (AND I was only 38 years old). My troubles were caused by SCADs (spontaneous coronary artery dissections)--something I had never even heard of. I am lucky that I lived long enough to have a second heart attack and finally get help. Know the signs. And if you have them, get help immediately. Two resources: www.goredforwomen.org; and www.aha.org