1. Places in Time

Yoga came early to the world. The outfits came much later.

2. Womb

It is 1952. My mother—my about-to-be mother—is 43, awaiting me. She takes yoga classes, long before prenatal yoga and spandex.

3. West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC

My mother, in her 60s, adores Hannah, her considerably younger yoga teacher. Hannah is mild, gentle, with a long braid down her back. I accompany my mother to a handful of classes. I’ve injured first my foot, then my knee, and cannot dance for some weeks, so I’m on an extended visit to my mother.

            I strain to prove myself well versed in stretching, in body elegance, even though my body is tight and somewhat unyielding. I glance over at my mother on her blanket, and I see her wide, flat bottom, her narrow hips resting in her hands, and her misshapen feet—the result of surgeries almost 20 years earlier—angled up over her face as she practices shoulder stand. Her soft body, which she believes is fat and unworthy, makes me uneasy. Also a little proud.

4. Lexington Avenue Y, New York, NY

I am on my strictly timed lunch hour; the Y is a few blocks from my office. I stopped dancing several years ago. Am I in search of some reckoning, some peace negotiations with my body? Am I looking for some quieting of my jittery fears, my self-accusations? I am in nearly constant abdominal pain or discomfort, and everything I eat seems to sicken me. On the days I go to yoga, I haven’t time for lunch anyway.

            The teacher, with dyed orange hair, lipstick applied just beyond the outline of her lips, and an unplaceable European accent, urges us, coaxes us to relax: “Imagine that you’re floating on a pink cloud….” I can think only of cotton candy and Pepto-Bismol. I do not relax.

5. Walkertown Road, Black Mountain, NC

Every afternoon (or is it every late morning?). my mother spreads a worn, faded quilt on the floor of the front room. She is 80, and she is living alone in her mother’s cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains; I am visiting for a week or so.

            She prevails on me to join her on the quilt for a yoga session, because it will be good for me, the breathing and the poses. A singer and voice teacher, she is insistent on the breathing part, on getting it right. “Slow your breath, Martha. Slow it down. Use your ribs, your back, can you feel your back expand? Put your hands on my back….” Touching her body is both comforting and futile. Panic begins to coil in me. I cannot seem to get enough breath; a catch at the base of my lungs makes me want to gasp. The more I try to focus, the less air I can take in.

            In the next few years, after she’s left the mountains, her once-powerful lungs will fill with liquid, and liquid will pool in her lower legs, so that when the bandages wound around the legs are removed, the nurses will have to place a bucket underneath to catch the cascades that pour out. She will find it harder and harder to breathe, will require increasing amounts of oxygen, and she will die at 85 of congestive heart failure.

6. Route 7, Shaftesbury, VT

Even my doctor suggests yoga. I obey, although there is no absolute directive.

            The class meets in late afternoon in a long shed used during the day as an alternative elementary school. We are surrounded by construction-paper cutouts, vividly painted murals depicting the depths of the ocean and dinosaurs, balsa-wood creations, hand- lettered signs describing “happy” behavior. The teacher is German, perhaps in her 60s, lean, understanding, hardy, demanding, militant, and she has a loyal following, all of whom seem to know one another. She asks us to hold asanas for what feels like a great long time, and the longer I try to remain in the pose, the stiffer and more rigid I become, until I want to weep in frustration. Here I am, fighting the warrior pose, not the ideal approach. Here I am, lying down finally in savasana, which the other students melt into with deep gratitude: again, the catch now at the base of my lungs, now at the base of my throat, defeats my attempt to find a complete breath, to settle into a steady, consoling rhythm. The panic means both entrapment and free fall. Means a barely admissible fury, which fuels more anger. I weep, quietly. I am not sure whether I want anyone to notice.

7. Saratoga Springs, NY

A friend and I sign up for a “restful yoga” class. We are the only students. The teacher is young and earnest and likes to use piles and piles of blankets. She tells me, in her earnestness, “I can see you efforting. Try not to effort….” Effort as a verb. My friend and I last about three sessions. Too much of an effort.

8. Places in Mind

I am at the center of a maelstrom, created, inexplicably, by a green-wool blanket, which swirls around me at a violent speed. I don’t struggle, except to stifle the urge to claw and scream.

            For a long time, this is the image that panic brought with it. The blanket I vaguely remember from my childhood. Odd, since I’m allergic to wool.

9. Library/guest room, Greenfield Center, NY

I am in my own house. The Covid-19 pandemic keeps me mostly at home—but I like staying at home. I am seeking some sense of routine, trying to understand discipline. I am tired of hearing people talk about their “practice,” but I want one. 

            The library/guest room is filled with books, with art.

            I do yoga in this room, via the now-venerable Zoom, spreading two mats over my mother’s carpet. I often find myself close to tears, sometimes from frustration, more often from a basic, deep-seated melancholy. Perhaps my body—for years now distinctly not the body of the dancer I once was, and in many ways I still mourn that body I battered into thinness—is learning to lean into itself.

            Not the same as a happy ending. Not an ending at all.

10. Savasana: Corpse Pose

My husband and I are revising our wills. He approaches this task practically, realistically, with equanimity. I approach it with realistic fear and sadness.

            The corpse pose does not mark the very end of a yoga session. Usually, one slowly resurrects oneself, comes to a seated position, and then joins in Oms or hears some spiritual teachings—meaningful or folderol—or places one’s hands in Anjali Mudra (I hear “Angeli,” as in “angel”), or prayer position, and tilts slightly forward in thanks.

Dealing with a will is imagining a corpse pose from which there will be no return. Hardly a pose, in that case.

Meanwhile, I may as well learn to breathe.

– Martha Graham Wiseman

Author’s Note: “Asanas in Many Different Places” grew out of my undertaking yoga seriously at the start of the pandemic. As I began to practice yoga (via Zoom) with a wonderful teacher and friend, images from other parts of my life came to me; I saw a certain trajectory in my sporadic yoga history, which revealed, both literally and metaphorically, my relation to my mother, my body, and myself.