straight down twelve thousand feet. That’s more than two miles. If you’re standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking over the edge, that’s a very safe one thousand feet. We are twelve times as high.
We had each paid an extra $80 to have a guy attach a video camera to his head and jump with us. He’s standing ready. By law, I have to be the one to jump us from the plane. My instructor can only follow my lead. I steel myself and leap. Obviously the plane is moving, so as soon as I launch, the wind takes over. I forget to tuck, and I kick the videographer in the head.
Fortunately, he’s okay.
Now I’m free-falling. I will free-fall for forty-five seconds and travel nine thousand feet in that short time. That means I’m falling at more than 130 miles an hour.
I forget to close my mouth. The airflow makes my cheeks look like Louis Armstrong’s. When I say that I forgot to close my mouth, that implies that I had thoughts. I did not.
For those forty-five seconds I receive a mental enema. It washes me clean. Usually I have no less than fifteen simultaneous thoughts, worries, and fears. Here I have only one, in the same way that a mouse being chased by a cat has only one. You could say that it was complete yogic one-pointed concentration.
Then, my instructor starts yelling something at me. I have no idea what he is saying. No idea even, until then, that he and I can communicate. No idea that such a thing is possible. I am primordial soup — precommunicative.
Luckily, though, there is no law that I have to be the one to pull the chute, which he has been shouting at me to do, because he then reaches past me and grabs the dummy cord. We lurch from 130 miles an hour to a leisurely 10 miles an hour. Not good in a jumpsuit that does not fit, and my lower back takes the brunt.
Running on adrenaline, I do not even realize I am hurt until later when I’m seated in Manuel’s Miata.
Really, I got off easy. I wasn’t hurt too badly. I had to hobble around for a week. I couldn’t run for a month. And I got to tell everyone that I had been skydiving — earning me a fair bit of clout with my teen students.
And luckily, Janice was a genius at therapeutic yoga. So two months later, I was completely healed. Well, sort of. I think the injury shook up some things in my lower back and abdomen, because something odd began to happen. In Janice’s class I would be enjoying warm-ups and standing postures, but then, when led into belly-down poses (cobra, boat, bow, locust), I would become agitated and emotional and sometimes downright pissed.
I came to expect this and would leave the room for the belly-down postures. I’d take a stroll and then watch from the window to return when I could see Janice had moved on to the shoulder-stand series.
At the time, I did not wonder too much about what was happening; I just knew I was uncomfortable. One moment we’re doing mountain posture and I’m focused on my breath and the alignment of my feet and shoulders, and the next we’re in cobra, and I’m Fred Flintstone about to blow his top. I was angry at the hard floor, the noisy guy next to me, and even Janice. I blamed them all.
I see now, though, that a great storehouse of stress, agitation, and anger in my gut — I’d say the very angst that had caused the ulcerative colitis — was being tapped and primed for a more thorough release.
In college, I had stretched and relaxed my muscles. I had improved my circulation. I had straightened my posture and improved my diet. I had even experienced periods of mental calm for four or five seconds in a row, and I did not seem to have colitis anymore. And now I was tapping its deeper roots, tapping the twenty years of repressed angst that still lived in my gut.
In new age circles, the kind of circles in which we say things like, “I love your new amber necklace, did you make it?” we call this process of releasing old strains and habits “peeling back the layers of the onion.” The idea is that when a layer is removed, a subtler layer underneath is exposed. Stretching and strengthening my muscles and learning to deal with stress had eliminated the outer layer of colitis. Removing that layer had exposed the subtler roots underneath — my habit of repressing angst and storing it in my belly — the root cause of the disease.
When the roots are exposed, yoga helps to eliminate them. It’s like pressing on a knotted muscle in your back. Most of the day you might just say, “My back feels stiff.” But when you give the muscles a little massage and feel around, you find a knot. When you identify this knot as the source or epicenter of the stiffness, you open up a possibility for its release.
If you press right on the knot and breathe and wait and breathe and watch, you’ll find that eventually you sigh or moan or laugh or cry, and the knot releases a little bit or even completely. That’s what yoga was doing for the tension in my gut. It had identified the source knot in my belly, and it was pressing right on it (literally, in cobra, boat, bow, and locust postures). Eventually I’d be sighing, moaning, laughing, and mostly crying as it released. But not for another year or so.
In the meantime, my discomfort in Janice’s class during belly-down postures eventually passed. I chalked it up to getting stronger and therefore less frustrated as I attempted the postures. And I think that was true, but I also think that my body had done its work accessing and unveiling the tension for the time being and was waiting for the right time to unleash it.
The body really does possess a kind of intelligence, such as the ability to wait for the right time to unleash. Think about how you can wait until you are alone in the bathroom to bawl after a big confrontation at work. Or imagine you’re on your way home from work and sense the stirrings of a very large bowel movement. Haven’t you ever noticed that your urge grows as you get closer to home? Unless you’ve got a stomach bug, it never gets unbearable until you’re within range of the bathroom.* Now, that’s pretty intelligent, if you ask me. So my body knew that this was not the time to unload my angst. Not yet.
* Actually, to be precise, while some people did feel that way in certain business classes, as if they were in exactly the right place, no one felt that way in Productions and Operations Management class. The professor was horrible, and since attendance was mandatory, students would sign in and then literally crawl out the window when he turned around. One time a friend and I conspired to make a run for the door. When the prof turned, I sprinted. I made it through the door and watched from the hallway as Midge followed. As the prof turned back around to face the class, Midge was caught midstride. She froze, eyes wide, panicked, deer in the headlights, and then she dove, headfirst, Pete Rose–style, through the open door and into the hallway to a standing ovation from the rest of the class. Needless to say, she was a legend after that.
* On the show, Yogi Kudu would contort his body to fit into a two-foot-square Plexiglas box. Then Cathy Lee Crosby, John Davidson, and Fran Tarkenton would toss the box into a swimming pool or bury him underground for fifteen minutes.
* I once saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “I’m only speeding ’cause I really have to poop.”
I spent a year teaching in a boy’s
