My Yoga Teacher Fired Me
Apparently there is a wrong way to breathe, and I have mastered it.
My yoga teacher fired me on a Tuesday, between the breathing exercises and the stretching, with the serenity of a woman returning a defective toaster. She even gave me a refund for the remaining eight classes, in cash, in an envelope, which she must have prepared in advance, meaning my termination had been discussed, planned, and budgeted while I was at home practicing my exhaling.
I had joined the class in January for the usual reasons. My back had started making an announcement every time I stood up. My doctor had used the phrase "lifestyle modification" while looking at me the way mechanics look at a car they are about to describe as "honestly, at this point." And my sister had said the sentence that gets all of us eventually: "It's just breathing, how badly can you do it?"
Reader, I found out how badly.
The class met at seven in the morning in a hall above a pharmacy, sixteen mats, one teacher named Meera ma'am, a woman so calm that plants probably grew toward her. On day one she told us to breathe in for four counts and out for eight. Simple... Except somewhere around count five of the exhale I would run out of air entirely and finish with a sound like a lorry releasing its brakes. The man on the next mat, a retired bank manager named Khanna, started flinching in advance. By week two he had moved his mat. By week three there was a small demilitarized zone around me, which in a crowded yoga class is its own achievement.
Then there was the laughing. I want to be clear that I did not choose the laughing. Something happens to me in silent rooms full of solemn adults: the silence gets heavy, and my brain, sensing the one thing it must not do, does it. During something called cat-cow, sixteen grown professionals arching and dipping in unison while the pharmacy's shutter rattled up downstairs, a thought arrived in my head, uninvited: we look like a screensaver. That was it... That was the whole joke. I laughed the suppressed nose-laugh, which is worse than open laughter, because it sounds like a pressure cooker developing an opinion, and it spreads. A schoolteacher two mats over caught it. Then a college girl by the window. Meera ma'am waited us out with her eyes closed, which somehow made it funnier.
And the sleeping. Shavasana, the resting pose at the end, where you lie flat and let go of everything: I let go of everything, including consciousness. I did not doze... I slept, deeply, instantly, the sleep of a man who had been awake since 5:40 a.m. specifically to come and lie on a floor. On my final Tuesday I woke to sixteen people rolling up their mats around my body, as if at the scene of an accident, and I had apparently been snoring in a rhythm that Khanna the bank manager described, not unkindly, as "actually quite meditative."
That was the morning of the envelope. Meera ma'am asked me to stay back, and there is no version of "can you stay back after class" that ends well after age nine. She sat cross-legged, obviously, and said, with genuine gentleness, "I think my class is not serving you. And, forgive me, you are not serving my class."
Fired. From yoga.
From a discipline whose entire product line is acceptance, I had been formally rejected.
I laughed about it publicly for weeks. People collect funny yoga class stories the way they collect airport disasters, and mine was a hit at dinners: the demilitarized zone, the screensaver, the envelope.
What I did not mention at dinners is that I cried in my car that Tuesday.
Not because I loved yoga... Because it was the newest item on a long list. I had left guitar lessons at fifteen, French at twenty-two, swimming twice, therapy once, and now I could add rest itself. Failing at effort is ordinary.
I had failed at lying on the floor.
My back still hurt. So the following week, having nowhere to be at dusk and being unwilling to face the treadmill, I carried a cup of tea up to my building's rooftop, sat on the water tank steps, and did absolutely nothing.
I want to describe this properly, because it turned out to matter. The sky was doing its evening business, orange curdling into grey. Pigeons were commuting. Somewhere below, a pressure cooker whistled, my spirit animal. Two kids on a far terrace were fighting over one kite.
And I sat there and breathed with no counts, no cues, no Sanskrit, in whatever ratio my body invented, and after some time I noticed my shoulders had climbed down from my ears without being asked. I stayed forty minutes. I went up again the next evening. Then it became the thing I did, the way the class had never become the thing I did.
On that rooftop, weeks in, I understood something that embarrassed me with its obviousness: the class had failed me in a useful direction. Meera ma'am had not fired me from breathing. She had fired me from her room. Those are different things, and confusing them had cost me half my life. Guitar, French, swimming: I had walked away from each one believing I had failed the subject, when mostly I had failed the room, the schedule, the fluorescent light, the being-watched. The subject was still available. The subject was free, actually, and open till late.
There is no wrong way to breathe. There are only rooms that are not yours, and it is not a sin to leave them.
The strangest part is what the rooftop did next. Sitting still with no phone, I started composing lines in my head, about the kite fight, about Khanna's flinch, about the envelope, and one evening I went down and wrote them out, and they were poems, or at least poem-shaped. I had not written since school. I knew nothing about craft, so I did the beginner thing and worked through lessons at an online academy for writers, where an early exercise said: write what embarrasses you. I have never received an instruction more precisely addressed to me. The poem about being fired from yoga came out in one sitting. The poem about the car crying took four months, which tells you which one was true, and writing it did more for my back than cat-cow ever managed. There is a reason so much poetry lives under the theme of healing: some knots are not in the shoulders.
I ran into Meera ma'am this March, at the pharmacy below her hall, both of us buying unglamorous things. I thanked her, sincerely, for firing me. I told her about the rooftop and, because she asked what I did up there, about the poems, the whole accidental new beginning that her envelope had funded. She listened with her plant-growing calm and then said the most yoga thing I have ever heard.
"So you found your mat. It is just very high up."
I still cannot exhale for eight counts. I still laugh in solemn rooms; at a funeral prayer meeting last year I had to disguise it as grief, which, in fairness, it partly was. But most evenings you can find me on the roof at dusk, tea going cold, pigeons commuting, breathing in whatever ratio the sky suggests. Khanna was right about one thing.
It is actually quite meditative.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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