IT WASN’T until my fifties, after trying out the whole supermarket of therapies out there—psychoanalysis, group therapy, Reichian therapy, the Alexander Technique, Rolfing, bio-energetics, primal therapy—that I finally clicked with yoga. The trigger was a doctor that I visited for a minor physical complaint, who said only: “What do you expect? You’re over fifty.”
It struck me like a thunderbolt. That thoughtless remark ended doctors for me—and I decided not to ask somebody else to solve my problems for me. It was my body and I would have to deal with it on my own. To me, that meant that I would have to heal myself of whatever ills struck me: I would not go running to therapists, doctors, practitioners, or teachers to solve my problems anymore. And I would stop my blaming my parents and society for messing me up, and would cease trying to erase or reverse my personal history—which could not be changed, after all—and to see life instead as starting from where I was. Now, I vowed, I would work on myself by myself.
Believing as I did that problems were lodged not in some nebulous “mind,” but rather in the body, it was the body that I saw as the arena of work. Who else but I myself was the ultimate expert on this body? But my hypochondria was in full flower, and I saw physical deterioration threatening if I didn’t do something about my health.
It was instinct, really, that told me yoga was the right course, a discipline I could stay with into the future. Indian holy men had nothing to do with it. I knew by then, after succumbing to the lure of Eastern religions, that I didn’t belong to that mystical world, though some of its teachings made sense to me. I was after something gutsier than the merely “spiritual,” just as I am in my poetry.
By that era—this was back in the mid-1970’s, after the first flush of gay liberation with its flowing hair and hippie softness—the gay world had adopted body building with a passion. I felt that this approach worked on the outside only, burying the “problem body” under an armor of muscles; I wanted to free my body of its bad habits first and release its natural proportions. Besides, if it were a question of vanity, I preferred a natural-looking body to a bulked-up one. Long outgrown were my teenage Charles Atlas longings for muscles. If it was a choice between strength and flexibility, I felt the latter would be more useful in the long run, especially for the semi-sedentary life of a writer.
At some point yoga just happened, almost by itself, as a natural development. Dutifully trying to do a daily set of calisthenics to stay in shape, I threw out my back again and again, which forced me to perform them more carefully. Slowing them down, those very same calisthenics, which we all have done in school, the army, or the gym, morphed surprisingly into yoga postures, like those I saw in books. And indeed, I read that the inventor of calisthenics—a.k.a. “Swedish exercises”—had gone to India to study yoga and adapted its postures for Westerners by speeding them up. So my slowing them down simply reversed his innovation.
A routine of postures developed very quickly based on the pictures I’d seen in yoga books, incorporating every twist, turn, and stretch possible to reach and communicate with every corner of the body. But the exciting discovery, which is hard to get from the pictures, was that those postures are not static, fixed positions that you hold. For example, instead of reaching down to touch the toes, down-up, down-up, ten times, as in calisthenics, you simply bend over and let your fingers touch the floor, sinking further and further until your palms are flat, head dangling. And you stay there. Yoga is dynamic in that you go deeper and deeper into each posture, until you arrive at a beautiful equilibrium. In other words, you are working all the time. It only looks static, and pictures tend to reinforce that misunderstanding.
“Every yoga posture has its soul, and we must try to experience that soul.” This cryptic sentence that I came across made a lot of sense to me. It is not necessary to twist yourself into a pretzel, as pictures of the fakirs and other experts imply. They started yoga as children, anyway, when the body is most supple. A short-lived ambition to be like them did initially lead me into forcing myself into difficult twists, but I came to regret it, with my knees and hip joints protesting. So I soon learned what I was ready for and returned to the simplest of postures, a kind of Basic Yoga, I guess you could call it, which I still practice today. Mysteriously, these postures never get boring. Sometimes it’s hard to get started, though, similar to the initial reluctance to write down an idea, lines for a poem, or any challenging activity. But once this obstacle is overcome, the practice moves forward on its own, and I find myself halfway through—the session, or the poem.
One thing that made it easier: one yoga book I read offered the advice to get a full-length mirror. We’re used to looking at our faces, but it’s something else to look at our bodies, especially after the years have played havoc with it. Naked in the mirror, it is strange how the face, except for the eyes, is demoted in importance. It takes its place merely as a part of the body.
I had always looked at other men and speculated about the relationship between their characters and their bodies. What did those hips that barely moved mean? Sexual inhibition? The fear of being thought feminine? The shoulders held high as if protecting oneself from blows? The uncoordinated movements? Were people as strange and distorted inside as their bodies were outside? And what did people read into my own movements? Now, before the mirror, I couldn’t avoid myself. I, who thought I stood up straight, actually had pretty poor posture. If our bodies are the record of our lives, my history was clearly built into mine.
In front of the mirror one can do for oneself what a masseur or Alexander teacher does, manipulating muscles with the hands, lengthening the torso from chest to groin, pulling up the back of the head to straighten the neck, and so on, almost as if reshaping the body with one’s hands. Or laying hands on aches and pains for healing or just for comfort (and it is important to learn to comfort oneself). Especially in folding my legs into the full lotus, I talk to them, especially to my knees, encouraging them and thanking them constantly for cooperating. I’m amazed that they haven’t given out yet, but perhaps the hands-on attention I give them is just what they need.
Books by yoga teachers prescribe a formal breathing routine, inhaling and exhaling, to go with the postures. I was wary about this artificial holding and letting out of breath by the numbers—it went against my nature. How one hurt oneself exercising, I was sure, was by holding one’s breath. And since I was reinventing the system for myself, I decided to settle for the most natural breathing possible. So, just as in running you involuntarily open your mouth and pant for air, I figured that in yoga exercises, which are more strenuous than they look, it was safest to let myself breathe in the most natural way possible. In fact, each movement, I discovered, sets its own breathing rhythm. I find myself breathing pretty hard, even noisily, as if from heavy exertion, while the body goes through the changes each posture demands—the breathing changes by itself with each movement. It feels like the universe is breathing with me, and the breathing I do, or don’t do, is guided by that great breath. The only way to explain it is to say that “it breathes me.” This is as close to religion, to a sense of the cosmic, as I have ever gotten.
I find the intermittent use of marijuana to be particularly helpful with yoga. Grass goes with yoga like the Liebestod with sex. One toke is all it takes. Looking into the mirror, I feel it giving me back my body; I become more alive in an animal way. The breathing deepens, the genitals spring into greater prominence, the bottom of the feet connect with the floor, movements take on special significance. With grass, a yoga posture will “yield its soul” more easily.
Grass is also a kind of herbal x-ray device, making it possible for me to analyze my body. I use the session as a diagnostic check, recognizing physical problems and working on them. You start knowing about your body, what’s going on inside of it. For instance, I’ve come to recognize that my back trouble is a result of crossed nerves in my lower back due to constipation problems. Ignoring the call sends the signals into the wrong channels and brings on muscle spasms. Sometimes with back trouble it locates the pain’s source in the single point from which it radiates, turning the pain into a vibration, a vibration that can be either pain or pleasure. While I’m a pretty healthy and active old man, I haven’t been able to conquer all of my problems. But yoga does a lot for them.
Another thing yoga reveals is the power of symbols, how to tune in to their messages, to follow their instructions. It doesn’t feel like I am learning by myself; it feels like I’m receiving a “teaching” from the patterns in my rugs brought back from Asian travels—something coming through the patterns woven into the rug. It sounds mystical, but I’m not that kind of person. I’m the sensible, agnostic type, not one for mystery. But I have an old oriental rug on the wall behind me, and when I look at its reflection in the mirror, the designs speak to me, almost directing my movements. I focus often on one symbol, a kind of cross with a hole in the middle at the juncture. I feel energy pouring out of that hole into the middle of my back. When I question what is the function of the hole, the mysterious answer comes into my head, “To breathe through.” The rug, I have come to believe, teaches the Art of Balance.
I wish I could say that yoga has given me the beautiful body of my dreams. Or, perhaps, if it has, it’s not one the world sees. For the deprived creature, the old man with sagging flesh I see at the beginning of my practice, gradually, as I pursue my alphabet of movements, the body becomes harmonious, well-proportioned. In the mirror I see, amazingly, a body I am not ashamed of. By stretching through a lifetime’s distortions, the body is allowed to subside into its true shape, what it should have been all along if experience had not corrupted it. I cruised away endless nights in my youth looking for a manly body to worship, another man’s penis, endless penises, with their intermittent pleasures. But here I recover my own body, rediscover my own dick. Not bad, I think, approving of the full, hanging appearance of my genitals. How happy I would have been with that fine schwantz in the showers at Lynbrook High, Long Island! I never, like some guys I know, jerked off looking at myself in the mirror. But with this yoga vision of myself, the genitals receive permission to “be there,” and masturbation connects me to my sexual self. And if this ideal vision of myself doesn’t last, the next day’s session, much like the sexual act, takes me through the process of transformation all over again.
Here I must confess, and should have in the beginning, that if I do a regular set of exercises, it’s not in my nature to keep to any routine. Discipline is alien to me. But I was just lucky enough to connect with the kind of guy who wakes up at the same time in the morning, eats three meals a day, and does his own exercises regularly. So I simply let my partner set the schedule of our life together. He does his exercises while I make lunch, and I do mine before bed—a delicious hour out of a busy life to be alone with myself. The hour for yoga is exclusively about me, about my body.
It’s hard to separate yoga from my poetry. Poetry for me has always been connected with healing, self-healing, and yoga is a healing process. I get so many ideas and phrases while I’m practicing. (One of my yoga-derived poems, called “Proclamation,” is on youtube.com/fieldinski; it is a kind of prayer.) Like prayer, so useful to allay the terrors in the night, the movements have also been my magic to stave off illness. I’ve done them through colds and flus, and even through back trouble, by moving at a snail’s pace, except in the most painful attacks. But nowadays, I am learning to treat myself more gently and let myself skip an evening occasionally. If I’ve eaten too much or guests stay on too long and I’m worn out, I just go to bed. For it’s no good doing yoga until several hours after meals.
Eighty-six now, I can still end up in the full lotus, the position, so often depicted in Eastern art, sitting at rest, legs folded like crossed arms. In this pleasant state, solid on the floor, even levitation seems possible, encouraged by the symbols in the oriental rugs around me, my magic carpets. One hears about holy men dying in this position. And indeed, it is the resolution to all the movements, like the final chord in a symphony.
Edward Field’s latest book of poetry, his twelfth, is titled After the Fall: Poems Old and New.
