Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 DEDERER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The studio was decorated in the style of Don't Be Afraid, We're Not a Cult. All was white and blond and clean, as though the room had been designed for surgery, or Swedish people. The only spot of color came from the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway into the studio. In flagrant defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, I removed my shoes, paid my ten bucks, and walked in . . .
Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love.
Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good--even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife--and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy.
Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read--because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.
Author Notes
Claire Dederer's essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Yoga Journal, Real Simple, The Nation and in newspapers around the country. She has taught writing at the University of Washington. A fourth-generation Seattle native, she lives with her family on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"I have never been good at sports; I always feel like a spectator even in the middle of the game," writes freelance writer Dederer about her initial reluctance to attend a yoga class. But despite her misgivings and her "defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags," Dederer makes it through that first class to develop a strong commitment to yoga in addition to-and sometimes despite-raising two children, coping with a husband struggling with depression, finding time to write, along with a demanding extended family and a move from her native Seattle to Colorado. With lighthearted humor and a touch of irony, Dederer introduces her readers to the culture of motherhood in north Seattle during the late 1990s, a place populated by clog-wearing attachment-parenting women whom Dederer simultaneously disdained and embraced. Each chapter is titled after a different yoga pose as Dederer recounts the challenging births of her children and reflects upon her own emotionally difficult childhood and adolescence during the 1970s. Dederer's memoir, like a challenging yoga class, flows smoothly and shows by example that a full life is one that is constantly in motion. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Dederer's humor is tangy and precision-aimed; her targets are the sine qua non of memoirs: mothers and marriage. A book reviewer and social critic with bylines in the New York Times, Slate, and Vogue, Dederer acidly deconstructs hip, politically correct Seattle, a very different place than the city she grew up in during the 1970s. As she looks back to her ambiguous family situation--her mother fell in love with a hippie but stayed married to, though separated from, her remarkably tolerant husband--Dederer contrasts women's flight from the soul-shriveling domesticity of that era with the rise of the super-stressed-out supermom, as women feel compelled to do everything perfectly in every sphere. As Dederer entered the precinct of motherhood, she took up yoga, the inspiration for this cleverly yogacentric memoir. If only it wasn't repetitive and disingenuous, making her a bit of a poseur as well as a poser. Still, Dederer writes superbly and offers sharp insights into family dynamics as well as hatha yoga's impact on American life, the focus of a growing number of groundbreaking books.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EARLY in "Poser," Claire Dederer describes a regular walk she takes with a new-mom friend in her North Seattle neighborhood: "We made a circle around Green Lake, and so our talk traveled. We started with our babies and tried to decipher all the new rules we had to follow. The talk opened out to work, maybe briefly touched the real world, and then, like a tight magic circle, closed back in on babies again. It was a dark, enchantment." This dark enchantment with the joys, rigors and travails of building a family life is at the center of this fine first memoir, and it's heartening to see a serious female writer take such a risky step into territory where writers of literary ambition fear to tread, lest they be dismissed as trivial. Bills, laundry, cooking, breast-feeding, baby sitters, holidays, aging parents - my favorite curmudgeon, Nietzsche, put it this way: "Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper." Dederer - a highly self-aware, clever book critic who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review - not only takes on this bad wallpaper as a subject, but she does so within the framework of her discovery of our New Age national pastime: yoga. Yoga! Let the eye-rolling begin. But what makes "Poser" work on a lot of levels is that first in line to ask searching questions and poke fun is the author herself. "We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue," she tells us. "We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right." North Seattle - a first cousin of Park Slope, the Upper West Side, Berkeley and dozens of other such enclaves around the country - was a place where attachment parenting was all the rage. Kids weren't weaned until they spoke in full sentences. Families all slept in the same bed; ate the same organic, locally produced food; and lived in an enriching environment safe from the dangers of plastic toys and disposable diapers. But chasing virtue was making Dederer miserable. By the time she strolled into her first yoga class - yoga being the panacea of the demographic of which she was reluctantly and yet somehow also enthusiastically a part - Dederer was in all kinds of (she would be the first to tell you) white, middle-class, we-should-all-have-such-problems pain. On the surface, she was a paragon of marital and familial contentment, but deeper down, she was lonely and panicked. Her marriage had become unrecognizable, like a facsimile of itself: "Our anxieties were driving us to become other people - he was Earner, I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play," she writes. She was constantly terrified in the wake of her daughter's harrowing birth, which left the baby temporarily in quarantine and hooked up to an oxygen tank. "The bargain was this: I will do everything perfectly and avert disaster. My idea of motherhood grew from this bargain.") But Dederer was willing to go to great lengths to keep up appearances. "I was resolute and cheerful; I was scared all the time," she tells us. "What I felt had nothing to do with how I acted." This, after all, was a woman who had decided to hold her wedding outdoors - on a frigid late October weekend - because she believed that the significant and persistent tremor in her hand would be less noticeable to wedding guests as she held her bouquet. Dederer's tremor calls to mind a story I once heard from a friend who went to see a psychoanalyst who suffered from a facial tic. When my friend asked the analyst about his tic, the analyst responded, "Life leaves its scars on all of us." The origins of Dederer's scars can be traced to 1973, when her parents separated but did not divorce. Dederer was 6, and she and her brother spent the remainder of their childhoods shuttling between their parents, a blur of ferry rides across Puget Sound, a series of eccentric living situations ranging from chicken coops to boats (she beautifully describes her father living on a houseboat with a water bed as "doubly at sea"). Her mother lived with a tugboat-captain boyfriend, but stayed married to Dederer's father in an arrangement that baffled their children and allowed for no closure. So when Dederer became a wife and mother herself, it comes as no surprise that she wanted to be nothing less than a steady and steadying embodiment of maternal virtue - scars be damned - all the while judging herself with her own, critical, self-lacerating eye. Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her tremor, her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage. She wasn't sure exactly what yoga was. A spiritual practice? Gymnastics for uncoordinated people? A gentle workout for rich women with too much time on their hands? She worried about adopting another culture's cosmology. "Was there something inherently inauthentic about it?" She moved restlessly from one type of class and teacher to another, in search of answers and solid facts - something to hold on to - but instead arrived at ever deepening mystery. She also found an elegant structure for her memoir, in which she uses various yoga poses (mountain pose, downward dog, triangle, headstand) not only as a pithy way to tell her story, but as something quite a bit deeper than that. IN yoga philosophy, there is a beautiful word, samskara, which loosely translates into our mental patterns, our deepest stories, which we hold in our bodies, like rings inside a tree. The practice of yoga can reveal our samskaras - as can the practice of writing. In some of Dederer's most elegant and moving passages, her samskaras - which she has tamped down just like that tremor on her wedding day - rise up through the poses themselves. In cobbler's pose (seated, bending forward, feet touching to form a diamond), she surprises herself by suddenly weeping, reliving her daughter's traumatic birth. In foot-behind-the-head pose (fairly late in the book, and don't try this at home, folks!), she writes: "I sat there with my foot behind my head, like a moron. Who puts their foot behind their head? I sat there and, sitting, realized: I was very, very unhappy." Dederer's husband had grown increasingly distant and depressed, their once strong bond frayed almost to the breaking point. The pose allowed the feeling to emerge: "I was trapped in a misery of expectations, as if in a blizzard. I was afraid that if I stopped, if I said, 'Something is wrong here,' my family would fall apart. After all, that is what families do." "Poser" is a powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir about one woman's openhearted reckoning with her demons. I only wish that Dederer had trusted herself just a bit more. Ever the journalist, she has a well-honed instinct to provide backup, context, proof to support her circumstances, as if hedging against the possibility that this might be read simply as - God forbid! - a woman's singular story. In numerous passages that seem hijacked from a scholarly essay, she supplies brief treatises on feminism, or attachment parenting, or the history of yoga. In these spots, it seems her inner "good student" won out. See? She seemed to be saying. This isn't just about me - it's a trend, a syndrome, a generation. Stop, I wanted to tell her. Breathe and stay still. Keep your gaze close to you. In the hands of a gifted writer, the universal is embedded within the personal. Guess what? Your bad wallpaper made for a lovely book. 'I sat there with my foot behind my head, like a moron. Who puts their foot behind their head?' Dani Shapiro's book "Devotion: A Memoir" will be published in paperback in February.
Guardian Review
An elderly psychic in Hilary Mantel's novel Beyond Black is fond of asking her clients: "Have you known the joys of motherhood, dear?" It's not a phrase you hear nowadays. Motherhood is a terribly serious business, with terribly serious consequences: one misstep can doom your baby to years of therapy later on. Or worse, as one parenting manual warns: "Brain scans of impulsive murderers showed that under stress, [they] had lots of activity in the lower brain and very little in the higher brain . . . This can be the legacy of a childhood where children have not been helped to work through feelings of rage and distress by parents." Murderers! No wonder new mothers aren't feeling much joy. Claire Dederer had her baby about 10 years ago in north Seattle, a liberal enclave of well-educated white folks and free spirits that trumps any British neighbourhood for right-on-ness. Attachment parenting - a philosophy that advocates breastfeeding on demand, co-sleeping and generally slinging your offspring about your person, like a monkey - was considered optimal, and, as Dederer reports: "For the kind of mothers we were, optimal meant mandatory." That is, if the authorities recommend breastfeeding for a year, you carry on for several; if you have a second baby before your first is ready to stop co-sleeping, you buy a bigger bed to get all four of you in. Dederer finds herself racked with anxiety - and baby-induced backache. This book tells how her love affair with yoga changed her way of thinking and eventually her way of life. A wry eyebrow may be raised at this point. Not another westerner-healed-by-eastern-mysticism; not another journey to find oneself in the footsteps of Elizabeth "Eat, Pray, Love" Gilbert (whose endorsement graces the cover)? Thankfully, Dederer is too smart, too funny and too sceptical herself to follow that path. She skewers the hypocrisy of westerners who think they really, y'know, get yoga: "I had a feeling that doing yoga in a class, without knowing the philosophic and historical underpinnings, made me kind of a jerk." What's more, she's not very good at it. She can't get her head around the paradoxes in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and she can't do the splits. Nor can she concentrate, at first: even when trembling with pain in the difficult poses, she finds her mind drifting helplessly. (Did Patanjali ever catch himself wondering what to give the kids for dinner?) But it's these drifts and digressions that lift Dederer's book above the rest of the mystical-journey crowd. She gives us the poignant story of her faltering marriage and, many years before, the spectacular collapse of her parents' relationship. In 1973, Dederer's mother left her husband for a hippie type 16 years his junior. Dederer links her mother's departure to the wave of feminist feeling that boosted American divorce rates between 1967 and 1977: "Men had always left . . . now the women were leaving, too." It was the age of Erica Jong and Marilyn French and, if you didn't like where you were, you could just go - a revolutionary idea for women brought up to believe, as Dederer says, that liberation would come only with marriage. But what about their legacy? What happens, asks Dederer, when a generation of children grows up with parents who want to be free, and who think that freedom is movement? Those divorces may have liberated the mums, but they left the dismayed kids with funny ideas about responsibility and happiness. Is it possible to "just go" in a world where, when it comes to your children, optimal means mandatory? All this has taken us a long way from downward dogs and sun salutations. But that's no bad thing; the book is at its best when Dederer's quest for personal enlightenment gives way to broader sociological musings. Indeed, the book might have benefited from more investigation into issues of post-feminist maternity, and less yoga-blog-speak ("Inhale. Engage your core. This is a moment of readiness"). There's also a lot of chatty stuff about issues such as choosing an ultra-liberal school for young Lucy. A good edit would have allowed Dederer to get more deeply under our skins. She is an engaging, snappy writer, though, and her book is a pleasure. If the material is baggy and loose, it knits up well enough to form her point: that it's OK - perhaps essential - to suck at yoga, and to know you suck, because yoga doesn't make you strong, it reveals your deepest weaknesses. A mystical journey to suckiness: now that's a quest worth believing in. To order Poser for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Carrie O'Grady It's these drifts and digressions that lift [Claire Dederer]'s book above the rest of the mystical-journey crowd. She gives us the poignant story of her faltering marriage and, many years before, the spectacular collapse of her parents' relationship. In 1973, Dederer's mother left her husband for a hippie type 16 years his junior. Dederer links her mother's departure to the wave of feminist feeling that boosted American divorce rates between 1967 and 1977: "Men had always left . . . now the women were leaving, too." It was the age of Erica Jong and Marilyn French and, if you didn't like where you were, you could just go - a revolutionary idea for women brought up to believe, as Dederer says, that liberation would come only with marriage. - Carrie O'Grady.
Kirkus Review
Enjoyable memoir about life and the provocations of childbirth made palatable with yoga poses.Critic and essayist Dederer describes herself as a "self-conscious, hair-adjusting kind of person," just the type to dismiss yoga and its purported physical- and mental-health benefits. She thought the exercise regimen was tailor-made only for "white people seeking transformation," but when her back seized after lifting her newborn daughter, the many folks recommending yoga didn't seem so crazy after all. Raising her daughter with her intermittently distant husband, also a writer, in a white, liberal, "well-intentioned" Seattle neighborhood proffered its own set of challenges, so she embraced yoga as part of a self-betterment project. Though some of the poses, Dederer wryly admits, seemed "porny," and she digested its spiritual and metaphysical aspects with "an agnostic's indifference," the ten years that followed were transformational. Her three best friendsa new mother with bohemian ideals, a risk-taking young mother and a childless artistprovided support through the writer's episodes of insecurity, the birth of her second child and a hilarious one-time attempt at pregnancy yoga ("nine ladies lying on the floor in a sunny room, farting"). The family's big move to Colorado offered a cleansing breath of fresh air. Dederer's bittersweet childhood and adult life is consistently engrossing and never becomes overshadowed by an eccentric family (though there's great potential). The author's parents are legally married, yet her mother has had a boyfriend for 25 years, and her brother is a former alternative-rock musician turned public-relations guru who insists that his parents get divorced. Through "coronal planes," sutras and savasanas, from downward dog to lotus poses, Dederer contributes nuggets of yoga trivia paired with a droll, self-effacing delivery that's both down-to-earth and pleasingly introspective.Delicious fun with a friendly nudge for readers on the fence about yoga.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
POSER (Chapter One)1. Triangle Creamy and flushed and covered with fuzz, our baby daughter was like a delicious peach. Only much heavier. Even though I fed her on a diet of breast milk and nothing else, she grew fatter and fatter. She was dense with good health. The story of how I nursed my daughter has a catch-22 ending. The child was thriving on this milky, unending flow of a food designed perfectly for her. When she was ten months old, I began to feel like we might weigh about the same amount. I would haul her onto my lap, and she would gaze up at me with delight, and, in the parlance of the day, latch on. I would gaze back at her, amazed that I could so easily satisfy another creature. She was intent and happy as she suckled away. The only problem with the baby was that when I held her in my lap for these marathon feedings, she was crushing something crucial inside me. Maybe my spleen, or possibly something larger. I tried lying on my side to nurse her, but she required so much food, provided in such lengthy sessions, that this wasn't really tenable. The milk was making her so, ah, healthy that it was getting harder and harder to actually deliver the milk to her. (That's the catch-22 part.) Cast your mind back to the late 1990s for just a moment. Nursing, at least where we lived in Seattle, was a strange combination of enthusiast's hobby and moral mandate. Drive thirty miles to the north, where my husband's cousins lived in suburbia, and you'd find mothers happily plugging a bottle of formula into their babies' squalling mouths. In Seattle, only full-time working mothers gave their babies bottles, or rather their nannies did, and those bottles were filled with the mother's very own milk, expressed through a breast pump. Weaning wasn't allowed until at least one year. This was by the consensus of who, exactly? Us. We were mothers with books. We looked things up. We knew stuff, like, for example, that the American Academy of Pediatrics said that at least one year of nursing was optimal for the baby's immune system and brain development. For the kind of mothers we were, optimal meant mandatory, and one year meant a few. Seattle at that time was a town where little dudes strolled up to their moms at the playground for a quick top-off, said "Thanks, babe," and rejoined the soccer match. Lucy wasn't yet ten months, and I wasn't supposed to quit nursing until at least a year. If you think this sounds like a frivolous dilemma, or not worth losing sleep over, then that just goes to show you were not a new mother in a liberal enclave at the end of the last century. While I debated whether or not to wean her (and Bruce, my husband, feigned interest), the inevitable occurred. My back went out. The middle of my back pinched me all the time, like a salacious old man. I couldn't sit in a straight chair. I couldn't lie flat on the couch. I couldn't lift the groceries. So I weaned her. Now that I've been doing yoga for ten years, I'm tempted to say something wise, such as: I was ready to wean and my body made the decision for me. But back then I didn't believe in that kind of crap. Instead, I paddled around in a complicated gumbo of guilt and relief. I claimed to feel cheated of my full, god-given, federally mandated year of nursing. I apologized to my husband for my subpar performance. I told my friends: Oh, no! I can't nurse the baby! Inside, I secretly exulted. I had my spleen to myself again. We lived in Phinney Ridge, a North Seattle neighborhood filled with educated, white, liberal, well-intentioned people. Which pretty much describes all North Seattle neighborhoods. Phinney Ridge is notable for being even more liberal and even better intentioned than most. In Phinney Ridge, people don't have BEWARE OF DOG signs. They have PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF DOG signs. When I complained about my back, which I did often and with gusto, the people of Phinney Ridge all had the same answer: Do yoga. My doctor said, "There are poses that will strengthen your back." The checker at Ken's Market told me I could buy a good yoga video at a nearby New Age bookstore. The homeless guy selling the homeless-guy newspaper outside Ken's Market said, "Be sure to get a mat! It's really hard to do yoga without a mat." I had a number of preconceptions about yoga. I thought yoga was done by self-indulgent middle-aged ladies with a lot of time on their hands, or by skinny fanatical twenty-two-year-old vegetarian former gymnasts. I was also unsettled by the notion of white people seeking transformation through the customs of brown-skinned people--basically, to my mind, a suspect dynamic. Despite these sloppily thought-out but strongly held reservations (my specialty), I had suspected for years that I probably ought to do yoga. I was a nervous kind of person. A self-conscious, hair-adjusting kind of person. A person who practically burned with worried energy. I had a constant tremor in my hands, so that the whole world knew how anxious I was. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had been hanging out at a coffee shop, feeding Lucy bits of cracker and navigating the coffee cup from the saucer to my mouth with trembling hand. A gentleman approached and introduced himself to me as an "energy shaman." Before I could think of a way to get rid of him, he took my shaking hand in his and pronounced gravely, "You could use a lot of work." "Oh!" I said, grinning nervously. "I'm sorry! I just, I have this tremor that I've had since I was a little kid, and I'm not getting a lot of sleep because of the baby. And I guess I've had a lot of coffee," I concluded lamely. "Do you eat a lot of chicken?" he asked. "That can cause energy problems." I stood up, spilling my coffee, and swiftly loaded Lucy into her stroller. "Well, goodbye!" I waved cheerfully, and left the café, fairly thrumming with energy problems. Yoga seemed like just exactly what I wanted: something to calm me down. It also seemed like just exactly what I didn't want: a place where everyone could see what a mess I was, could see my tremor and my anxiety and my worry. There was something about holding still, about inhabiting a pose, that was scary. What was under all that anxious chatter? But now things were different. I had a baby. It was imperative that I be able to lift her. I would do anything to be able to lift her. Yoga class, however, was beyond me. Like everyone else, I was terrified of a roomful of people who were good at it. Little did I know then that only very occasionally in yoga do you stumble into an entire roomful of people who are good at it. And when you do, they often turn out to be assholes. I figured a video would be the best approach; maybe I could get the benefits without all the pesky humiliation. On an Indian summer afternoon I decided to head over to the New Age bookstore. Amid much pinching, I wrangled the baby into her stroller. This engendered another form of mother guilt: recently strollers had come under the North Seattle mother's list of banned substances. Apparently the baby felt alienated so far away from its mother, and preferred to be snuggled up against the mother's back or--there was no escaping its Perón-like hegemony--her breast. You were supposed to strap your baby into a sling or a Snugli (known around our house as a Smugli). There was some theory about the baby wanting to see the world from the same perspective as its mother. Which looks crazy as I type it, but that was the argument. At any rate, putting your child in a stroller was fast becoming yet another way of letting the world know that a) you didn't really love your kid and b) you were an uneducated dumbshit. That was all well and good for people with those lightweight babies made from balsa wood, but my pleasingly substantial daughter and I were devoted to strolling. And so we made our way through the fall afternoon to the bookshop, the baby graciously tolerating her dumbshit, unloving mother. I had walked by the New Age bookshop many times but had never gone in. Wrestling the stroller through the door, I was hit with the ecclesiastically grubby smell of incense. Everything in the store was dusty and slightly off plumb. The magazine racks tilted; the books were piled haphazardly; the posters of chakras and mushrooms and stars were at various subtle angles. I found a teetering wire rack of yoga videos. Some of the people on the covers were orange. Some wore headbands. Some were peeking out from behind swirling, vaguely medieval purple writing. I chose a beginning yoga tape. It looked safe. The woman on the cover was not orange and she wore no headgear. The graphics did not look as if they'd been drawn up in an asylum. I located a yoga mat, and paid, and then the baby and I got the hell out of there. That night, Bruce gave her a bottle (to which she had adapted nicely, thanks) and I went into the room with the TV, which, like everyone on Phinney Ridge, we refused to call the TV room. I put on my tape. The blond woman gazed into the camera from her serene world, a place where potted orchids thrived. There was some discussion about not overdoing it and going at your own speed, and then the yoga session was under way. The woman sat there with her eyes shut. I sat there looking at her. Apparently we were warming up. This pleasant state of affairs continued for a while. Unfortunately, soon it was time to do asana. This had a forbidding sound. "Jump your feet about three feet apart on the mat," said the blond lady. This I did. "Turn your left foot in about forty-five degrees, and your right foot out." Done and done. Check me out! "Extend the right hand over the right foot, and gently rest the hand on the shin, the ankle, or the foot, wherever is most comfortable." Tippy, but I was on it. "Slowly rotate your torso upward, and extend your left arm toward the ceiling." Aaand I'm out. I sat down with a thud and watched the woman with her strangely unshifting expression. She was a puddle on a windless day. In a calm voice, the way you talk to old people when you're convincing them to take a few steps across the hospital room to use the bathroom, she said, "Tri-ko-na-sa-na." She lingered on the word, obviously enjoying the sound of the...what was it? Sanskrit? "Triangle pose," she translated. I rewound the tape. I tried again. Right leg out. Feet turned at an angle. Extend right arm. Drop right hand to right shin. I started to worry. How was I going to get that left arm up? How was I going to turn my torso? Oh, shit, now or never. I flung my left arm into the air and twisted my torso maybe a millimeter up. Pinch. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the darkened window. I was hunched up like "It's Pat!" from Saturday Night Live. I rewound the tape again, and followed the directions again, and ended up, again, bunched in an odd shape. I could feel parts of my body bumping together that had never bumped before. Something hurt. I had a feeling it wasn't supposed to hurt. Looking back, I can see that I had just learned a paramount yoga lesson: Get a good teacher. Or at least a live one. My back still hurt, and though muscle relaxants exerted a powerful allure, the muscle-relaxant lifestyle was not really doable for me. I made my living as a book reviewer. (A terrible idea, by the way.) When I took muscle relaxants, the novels I read for review tended to improve dramatically. Since my critical faculties were really all I had going for me, I reluctantly went drug free. There was this notion in my mind that somehow yoga was going to make me better. Better than I'd been, better than everyone else. More virtuous. I liked the idea of myself as a yoga person. (I could not bring myself to say yogi, or yogini.) Lithe, probably thin, with some kind of ineffable glow. And my back wouldn't hurt. Clearly it was time to try an actual yoga class. The following week, on a rainy October day, I left the baby with my mother and drove across town to the yoga studio my friend Katrina went to. Katrina was sort of nutty, but she had a gorgeous ass, so I thought, What the hell. Inside the front door of the studio was an entry vestibule, decorated in the style of "Don't Be Afraid, We're Not a Cult." The walls were painted white and screened with tasteful shoji panels; the blond-wood floor was uncarpeted and spotless; neat cubbies awaited shoes. All was white and clean, as though the room had been designed for surgery, or Swedish people. The only spot of color came from the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway into the studio. In flagrant defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, I removed my shoes, paid my ten bucks to the wan girl at the desk, and walked into the studio, where eight or ten young women were sitting on their mats. Even though we were there for a beginner class, they all looked incredibly fit and somewhat stern. Their ponytails were glossy and neat. Those ponytails were ready for business. The women sat cross-legged, with straight backs. They all gazed straight ahead into the middle distance, as if they were about to break out into a collective fit of landscape painting. I smiled apologetically. This is my worst habit, and I hope to break it by the time I'm eighty. When I'm an old lady I'll finally be able to swagger into a room with a fuck-you attitude. I laid out my mat and sat on it. I felt the onset of the deep sorrow that, maybe peculiarly to me, precedes any new physical undertaking. I have never been good at sports; I always feel like a spectator, even when I'm in the middle of a game. The shoji screens filtered the light from the vestibule, spreading it on the floor in a grid. My sense of futility grew larger. I looked at the serene ladies and wondered if they really believed that enlightenment would find us here, in a drafty room in a strip mall in North Seattle. As I looked around at the fair-skinned women and the prayer flags over the door and the little altar in the corner, my preconceptions about yoga seemed immediately and all too amply confirmed. The scene was the very picture of white female self-indulgence. There were no Indian people in this room, that was certain. A woman in her late twenties entered and rolled out her mat in front of us. Her thick blond hair was cut in an expensive bob. Her eyebrows were fancily mowed. Her outfit was black and tight. She looked as though she had been a step-aerobics teacher until about five minutes ago. She looked like her name was Jennifer. "I am Atosa," she said. Like hell you are, sister. "Come to a comfortable sitting position," she said. "Please bring your fingers into the gyana mudra. Mudra is the yoga of the hands." She made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and I followed suit. It felt corny but sort of wonderful at the same time. My hands looked enlightened. "We will begin the class with one long om," Asha intoned. "Breathe in, and om on the exhalation." I sneaked peeks around the room. The other women looked peaceful and relaxed, as if they were in an ad for bubble bath. I breathed in and let out my om, which came in a wheezing gasp. Atosa's om boomed and wavered beautifully. "The om travels up from the seat, through the heart, and out the top of the head. It passes through all the chakras." Atosa listed all the chakras by name, location, and color. Yoga seemed to involve a lot of talking. We did a series of wildly uncomfortable movements that I now recognize to be sun salutation A. We reached for the sky, we touched our toes, we lunged one leg back. Then we pulled back into downward dog: both hands on the floor, both feet on the floor, bottom jutting up toward the ceiling. We lunged again, touched our toes again, and there we were, where we started, reaching for the sky. I was red and breathing hard and trembling. As we sank into a deep runner's lunge, Atosa looked at me with worry. It wasn't "I'm worried about you" worry. It was "I don't need anyone collapsing in my class" worry. "You need blocks," she said abruptly. She got some foam blocks from a shelf and had me prop my hands on them. She kept an eagle eye on me. "We're going to work on trikonasana today," she said. My nemesis. "Please turn your mats so they're perpendicular to mine. Jump your feet apart about three feet," she said, and then we were off to the races. We did trikonasana over and over: at the wall, in the center of the room, with a partner pulling on our front arm. Each time I bunched up like a cluster of grapes. I shook; I sweated; I clenched. It was exactly as I had always suspected: yoga was a kind of magnifier for my limitations. Triangle was especially baffling because it was, in essence, so simple. You stood with your feet apart and rested a hand on your shin. Easy as pie. Except it wasn't. (Even pie itself is not that easy, if you make your own crust.) There seemed to be an infinite number of ways to get it wrong. Atosa began to lecture us. Well, actually, she began to lecture me. "Think extension. The pose is about creating space." I thought extension. I tried to create space. I bunched. At the end of class, we all lay flat on our backs in savasana, or corpse pose, sprawled loosely with our arms at our sides. Even this seemed painfully beyond my reach. My eyes were shut tight, but I could sense Atosa looking at me, noticing my tensed shoulders, my knit brow, my clenched jaw. Finally we sat up. Atosa led the class in a final om, and said that if anyone had questions to feel free to approach her after class. I took her at her word, more fool I. "Yes?" she said, raising a perfectly shaped eyebrow. "Uh, I was wondering if you could help me with triangle." "Oh, you mean trikonasana?" she asked. "Yes, trikonasana." "Well, you just need more extension. Here, look at this." She stepped into a beautiful shape, legs angling apart, torso twisting gracefully, eyes gazing upward as if she could see infinity beyond the acoustic tiles. She jumped back to standing. "See?" she said brightly. I was reminded of Julie Peterson showing off her cartwheel in first grade. I gave it a go. "No," she said. "Try extending your trunk more. You're too hunched." I smiled apologetically at her and said, "I'll work on it." And I left. I never wanted to see Atosa again. In a just world, she would've been deported, maybe to an island populated by fully extended human beings. Even so, for some reason I still wanted to try yoga. The next week I noticed a little storefront yoga place near my house. It didn't look like much. It had a stylized brushstroke drawing of a yogi--or was it a Buddha?--as its logo. I didn't want to do yoga in a place that looked like a half-assed noodle joint. Nonetheless, it was only five minutes away and offered a beginner class at 7 p.m., which is the time of day when I customarily begin to be alert and look around and notice things. I thought I'd give it a try. It was dark by the time I got there, and the foyer to the studio was a pool of cheerful yellow light. I approached the desk, which was manned by a serious-looking fellow with a dork knob. My heart sank. After Atosa, I couldn't take any more coldhearted grooviness. I introduced myself and gave him my ten bucks. "Welcome," he said ominously, Vincent Price in a tank top. I went into the studio. The room was filled with not-girls! Which is to say, there were all kinds of people there. A few young men in workout gear and two older women in stretchy purple Lycra and a couple of slightly lumpy women my own age, clearly moms, all but lactating through their leotards, and one old fellow who was wearing jeans and a leather belt. A leather belt! Even I knew better than that. I enjoyed a nanosecond of feeling superior, but was thrown off guard when the students turned and smiled and said hello. In all my days--well, day--of yoga-going, I had never seen anything like it. Dork knob came in. He sat down silently and I got myself ready for some more vague sanctimonies. Instead, he looked around the room and smiled. Something in him lit up, like there was a big switch on his back that had just been flipped on. He started laughing before he started speaking. "Hi, I'm Jonathan," he said. "Beginning is hard. But it's also lucky. Because you have the chance to build something beautiful from the ground up, with no old mistakes, no bad habits." I know now that this was basic yoga boilerplate, but the thing was, Jonathan really believed it. He finished the speech and laughed again, like: Can you believe we're all doing this crazy thing in this room together? I looked around. Everyone was smiling. We sat and breathed for a while. Then Jonathan popped up and said, "Tonight we're going to work on triangle!" I got ready for the bossing: First we would jump our feet apart, then we would try to extend, whatever that meant, and then I would look like "It's Pat," and then the teacher would frown at me. Alrighty. Jonathan did have us spread our feet apart, but we didn't jump. We just lazily separated them. Once our feet were positioned, he said, "We're going to work on angulating our hips. That's all triangle really is. It's a hip position." His right foot was in the leading position. He cocked his left hip to the left and said, with excitement, "Look! See how the simple action of pulling my left hip back creates a crease between the top of the right thigh and the hip? That crease is what we want. That's where triangle comes from." We all cocked our left hips. As one, we gazed down at our right thighs. And, lo! There were creases. We beamed. "Look at those hip creases. That is triangle," said Jonathan. He looked genuinely happy for us. "You are doing it. You can add more. You can extend the right arm out over the right leg, and drop the hand, and turn the body, and raise the left arm to the ceiling. But those are all additions. You are doing triangle right now." I cocked my hip over and over again, and watched that crease appear. I had been living inside of my body more than thirty years, and it was showing me a shape I had never witnessed before. After a while, we tried gesturing forward with our right arm. It felt great, like the movement was growing from that creased hip. Then we dropped our right hands. "Just anywhere," said Jonathan. "Anywhere that feels good." Mine landed on my knee. We turned our bodies gently. And then we raised our left arms as best we could. Mine was not exactly straight up. It was in the general direction of up. It was the beginning of up. Jonathan walked around the room looking at us. He stopped by me and said, "Try pressing the little toe of your back foot." I tried it, and all of sudden the pose made more sense to me. I was able--or abler--to understand what I was doing, and didn't feel quite so much like I was at war with my own body. I was amazed by the change. It was like having someone show you that you could fix a car's crankshaft by adjusting the side mirror. Here was a place where someone would tell me what to do, and there were identifiable results. Unlike motherhood, where the rules seemed to shift all the time and the standards seemed as high as the moon. Of course, this was no different from what happened at any exercise class--at step aerobics, for instance, they were only too happy to tell you what to do, and had the headsets to prove it. But I intuited, or guessed, or, let's be honest, devoutly hoped that in yoga there was another outcome. You would do what they said and you would be better. Yoga would allay my anxiety by teaching me to breathe and relax. But it would also allay my anxiety by elevating me to a more superior, evolved state of being, where I would no longer have to worry about whether or not I was doing everything right. Jonathan continued. "Imagine your body is being pressed between two huge planes of glass. Gently pressed, of course." I tried to imagine this. It seemed sort of silly. Jonathan went on. "This plane, this space between the two imaginary panes of glass, is called the coronal plane. You want to keep your body within this plane while you do the pose. Don't lean your torso forward or let your behind stick out. Keep it within this coronal plane." This seemed like the most pointless piece of information I had ever heard. In fact, triangle itself was an exercise in pointlessness. Who could imagine herself into being a triangle? It brought to mind that old They Might Be Giants song about "triangle man," who goes around beating people up. Maybe that song was secretly about yoga. These thoughts ran through my mind as I tried to fit myself into a triangle. At the same time, Jonathan spoke with such confidence, as though the coronal plane and fitting oneself into it were crucial information. Maybe he was right. Anyway, I couldn't quit now. I just stood there and held the pose. This small submission would yield huge and strange returns that would reverberate across the next few years. Yoga had come into my life, with its strange, unknowable, even funny logic. For good or for ill, it had arrived. What the hell, I thought, as I extended my hand toward the sky, and creased my hip, and tried to fit myself into the coronal plane. At the end of class, we lay in savasana. I felt tired and content. The immobility had a pastoral quality to it, as if trees swayed overhead. Jonathan's voice was quiet now. "Thank you for sharing this evening with me. In yoga, we say 'Namaste,' which means 'I bow to the divine in you.'" He bowed his dork-knobbed head and said, "Namaste." We bowed back and mumbled, "Namaste." On my tongue, the new word felt as though it contained its own foreign spice. POSER Copyright (c) 2011 by Claire Dederer Excerpted from Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Camel | p. 3 |
| 1 Triangle | p. 5 |
| 2 Eagle | p. 19 |
| 3 Lotus | p. 37 |
| 4 Crow | p. 51 |
| 5 Pigeon | p. 63 |
| 6 Child's Pose 1 | p. 73 |
| 7 Cobbler's Pose | p. 81 |
| 8 Headstand | p. 91 |
| 9 Child's Pose 2 | p. 107 |
| 10 Scale | p. 119 |
| 11 Lord of the Dance | p. 127 |
| 12 Child's Pose 3 | p. 139 |
| 13 Half Moon | p. 147 |
| 14 Pranayama | p. 155 |
| 15 Warrior II | p. 167 |
| 16 Child's Pose 4 | p. 181 |
| 17 Vinyasa | p. 191 |
| 18 Child's Pose 5 | p. 221 |
| 19 Foot Behind the Head Pose | p. 227 |
| 20 Crow, Again | p. 233 |
| 21 Mountain | p. 241 |
| 22 Seated Forward Bend | p. 255 |
| 23 Corpse | p. 265 |
| 24 The Jump-Through | p. 273 |
| 25 Wheel | p. 291 |
| 26 Handstand | p. 299 |
| 27 Lion | p. 305 |
| 28 Monkey | p. 313 |
| Epilogue: Downward Dog | p. 323 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 331 |
