God in South Africa

There's a 12:30 weekday class at this yoga studio near my work. Mary Dana was supposed to teach today, and she's one of my favorites, but I showed up to discover that someone was subbing for her. A white woman named Deborah who explained that her accent was South African.

White South Africans creep me out. I know that's incredibly xenophobic, but it's like meeting a really old German - you can't help thinking, and where were you back when? Now, I know all South Africans aren't racist, and Deborah is really young, so it's hardly like she was an exiled member of the apartheid government or anything, but still. I took one look at her and wondered what black mother had left her own children each day to travel past machine-gunned checkpoints to the white part of town, where sweet baby Deborah waited for her milk, curls and blue eyes shining.

We all got settled, Deborah introduced the theme of the month, and here, my second prejudice of the day reared it's self-righteous head. God.

Each month the studio chooses a theme, and usually it's something inoffensive like Mudras, or Mother, or Forgiveness. October, apparently, was God's month.

There's a certain tic an atheist displays when hearing the word "God." It's a subtle eye roll paired with the quietest release of air in the back of the throat, a short, breathy -uh sound, sort of like the dismissive noise a teenage girl makes right before she says, "whatever." It's not meant to be rude, or even noticed by the speaker. It's more of an emotive gesture, a release of frustration, the sort that develops after a lifetime of uninvited God references in and from neighbors, relatives, strangers, books, door-to-door proselytizers, weddings and, as I recently discovered, funerals.

God really is everywhere.

So, needless to say, I was all set for this to be the worst yoga class ever. A honey-voiced apartheid baby was going to God-talk me to death while running us through an endless series of painful, sweaty, mind-expanding poses. Great.

But then Deborah did something really unexpected. "Let's keep our eyes open," she said as the class began. "We'll start today by looking around the room, seeing all the people in this room, and recognizing that any one of them might be in a great amount of pain right now."

I almost raised my hand. It was amazing. It was like Deborah was this superyogi who could smell the sadness of death. And I was all the way in the back.

The whole class was like that - gentle and surprising and without the usual crazy drive to out-chaturanga the yogi next to me. And then at the end, you do this thing called shavasana, which means corpse pose, and you lie very still on your back and just relax. It's nice.

You know that Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah? Well, Jeff Buckley did a version sometime in the 90s, and Deborah had it on her iPod and played it during shavasana and it was like the height of cheesiness and I bet you can guess what happened next...

There's this thing I like to call the shavasana sob, and every once in a while someone just starts crying in corpse pose. It's really weird. All that twisting and straining and ancient physiological tuning and by the end, some people burst into tears. It's kind of awkward, and everyone else in the room is like damn, what the hell happened? and no one knows if you should just ignore it or go get a tissue, or what.

And today, I was the sobber. Yup, that was me. The shavasana sob had never happened to me before, but ever since Kyle died, I've been waiting for it. I just didn't think Jeff Buckley would be involved.

I wasn't really loud or anything, just sort of quivering and sniffly, and then, like an angel from a formerly-segregated heaven, Deborah was there. She smoothed my forehead. She rubbed my ears. She wiped the tears from my face, laid her hands on my neck, and let them just sit there. It felt really good. I stopped crying.

Deborah, you are a fantastic teacher. That was the most amazing yoga class I've ever been to.

So here, in your honor, because it's fun and the better version anyway, is Leonard Cohen singing on what looks like a 1980s Scandinavian television show:



UPDATE: I now have it on the highest authority that this clip was not filmed in Scandinavia, but in Germany in 1984. Thank you, dear reader. You made my week.