He found a woman who allowed him to take advantage of his newfound ability to challenge himself. He let her enroll them in a yoga class, that kind where they heat the room up to make sure you’ll sweat. She was a True Believer, bought in to the guru’s philosophy. He was pretty sure the heat thing was all a gimmick, the way a business will take something that people in other parts of the world have to suffer through and re-package it for Americans and have them pay for it (“Dumpster Diving! The Easy Way To Weight Loss! Buy the Online Seminar Now!”).
He eventually had to admit to himself there were poses he couldn’t do. He gave himself permission to stop, a triumph of sorts, given that his usual course of action for things he didn’t know how to do was not to go near them. When the instructor came to him after class and said “I saw how red you were getting and I was afraid something was really wrong,” he knew he was on the right track. Keep pushing yourself, but don’t go down as The Guy Who Keeled Over in Yoga Class.
He listened to the instructors saying that savasana, the corpse pose, is the hardest one because of the deep relaxation required and the need to blah blah blah blah – Never a problem. He could lay there for 90 minutes, the whole class, if he had to. So as he was laying down, listening to the movement around him, visualizing success at the stretches he couldn’t do yet, it happened.
He had his Yoga Revelation.
The instructor was having the class do a quick floor pose and then rest. It’s just a few seconds, then a quick situp and on into the next pose. At this point, the instructor claps twice, sharply and quickly, to set the pace for the coming pose. And that’s when the light went on.
He thought about how sounds and smells put you back into a certain Time And Place. Grilled onions always made him think of drawing designs in the condensation on the kitchen windows of his childhood house, because his mother always made them for his father’s steak during the crunchy-cold Ohio winters. He always kept music paramount in his life, remembering the exact layout of the tiny college radio station studio he was in during his first-ever on-air shift any time he heard “Cars” by Gary Numan, because that was the first song he ever played there.
It was the sound that provided the memory then: The clapping created an almost physical desire to want to run away. Deep in his gut, he felt…. inadequate.
It was his father.
The father used to do this thing when he wanted you to hurry up where he snapped his fingers, quickly and sharply. As the man lying in corpse pose thought about becoming a teenager, he remembered listening to what turned into a lifelong litany of reasons why some idea he had (A business to start, what college to go in, what to major in, etc) would never come to fruition, and he remembered how he began to associate the snapping fingers with his father, and with his father’s Caution-First approach to life that became the perfect way to take a young person with vision and put into his head a questioning voice that would follow him his whole life, would cause him to doubt himself at every turn, would cause him to live his life from a scarcity rather than an abundance standpoint.
The snapping fingers. The clapping hands. The recoil whenever anyone demanded something of him. The years of keeping people at bay with sarcasm and other battle swords. That’s where it all came from.
The Confluence of Experience brought him here. It could have been any yoga studio, it could have been any instructor. But it wasn’t. It was this studio in Miami Beach, Florida, where the question of “What will our lesson be in our 6 months here?” had seemingly just been answered. It was that instructor, the one with the jangling loud clapping and the edge in his voice that said “You’re not good enough” if you listened hard enough.
He wanted to cry, laying there. Then just as quickly, he wanted to laugh. Instead, he just watched a waking dream, watched the pictures in his head and saw this rope that had anchored him to the shore burning, almost instantaneously like phosphorus exposed to air, leaving him bobbing in a boat that was larger and more powerful than he remembered. It seemed as though it had been far too long since he inspected the boat and its capabilities. He thought to himself that if only he’d known the strength of the engine he could have fired it up at any time and broken free of these moorings whenever he wanted.
It could have been any time. But it wasn’t. It was December in Florida.
And there he was, young and free and in love with himself and her and the world and it could have been anyone but it wasn’t. It was him.
And he could have felt anything right then, but he didn’t. He just felt free, and he had to come to Miami Beach to get there. Right there, at the Confluence of Experience.
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