The flame is my focal point. Any stationary point would do, but candles are known for their hypnotic power, the power to take you outside of yourself.
I am standing before the table, staring into the flame. My left foot is wearing a gorgeous Comme il Faut, the right foot bare.
I am seeking stability. Balance. The abandonment of ego.
This is what happens when you mix tango with half-assed understanding of Eastern religions, Catholic ritual and Jaimes Friedgen.
It’s not working. There may be too many chefs in the kitchen.
Let’s deconstruct. Start with Jaimes Friedgen.
* * *
Saturday, 1 p.m. in a hip-hop dance studio hidden at the back of a junkpile of industrial shacks.
The floor is beautiful, brand-new bamboo, and you hardly notice the ridges where the boards meet. A big garage door, half of one wall, lifts to flood the room in cold air and sunlight. Opposite the mirrors, the backdrop wall is bright green as a red-eyed tree frog, decorated with huge, leaping hip-hop silhouettes.
James Friedgen stands facing his students. In the mirror behind him, silhouettes leap and loom.
Jump! he says. We are to land on one foot. Stay there. Find stability. No wobbling ankles, no tremors, No matter how long it takes.
Some of you will find it in a minute … a minute and a half …
4 months, he adds, smiling, as if that were a joke.
It took me 18 months to find my hips. When I found my hips, I discovered the key to finding my balance. That was a few weeks ago. I am still figuring out how they work.
We stand and stand and stand. Wobble and wobble and wobble.
“I am wobbling, too,” Jaimes Friedgen reassures us.
We are to stand like this, on this one foot, until the wobbling stops or our leg gives way. Then we must Jump! to the other foot.
The wobbling will stop someday, he promises. But not for long. As soon as we become aware the wobbling has stopped, as soon as our ego takes note…
… we will start wobbling again.
It never fails, he says. You can’t remain in balance when your ego gets involved.
* * *
According to Yoga Journal, “An ancient, oft-quoted definition of yoga from the Bhagavad Gita is samatvam yoga uchyate (2:48), or “yoga is balance.”
Really?
My version says: “Yoga is perfect evenness of mind.”
A chicken-and-egg proposition.
* * *
The Jaimes Friedgen workshop is for intermediates. Do I belong here? How would I know? Every teacher defines the term differently. It is useful when a teacher says “to be comfortable in this class you should know …”
I know three things:
I’ve seen Jaimes Friedgen dance on YouTube. That’s all I need to know about him.
David Jones, the local teacher who is hosting this workshop, and I go way back, though he doesn’t know it. After my very first class, hanging out at the fringes of the dance floor to see what all the fuss was about, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and his partner, couldn’t resist what they promised.
This workshop is the first opportunity I’ve had to take advantage of anything David has to offer. Whoo-hoo!
The third thing I know, that I am coming to know with a sinking feeling in the moments before class begins, is this: there are a lot of people in this room and almost every one is a stranger.
Once that would have sent me into a panic or straight out the door. Suddenly I realize I know something new: how to stay in the room, stay in the lesson, in each moment of it.
Find the focal point. Forget yourself. Listen to the teacher. Work hard. Work harder.
* * *
This ritual thing, the candle, the dark, it’s too self-conscious. You don’t create a tableau and expect it to do all the work. No. There are ways to enter into a moment—slowly, sidling, layered
as when
at the end of a long day of hiking high up in the mountains, at the end of a long night, with a good dinner and long hours of talking and not talking behind you, the campfire turning to embers, only you and your partner left awake in this part of the world with the bears and mountain lions, you get up off the stump, stiff and butt-sore, and wander into the woods for a moment. When you come back to icy stars and burning coals, you do not sit back down but stand for a moment at the very edge of the fire circle, your toes nudging the coals, watching the undulating glow, and you raise one foot off the ground, you don’t know why, maybe you meant to step firmly on a coal, press down with your shoe to see it go dark and then glow again, but you have a second thought and so you stand that way, between, one foot raised, watching the embers and feeling the stars at the back of your head, the cold dark of outer space surround you. For no better reason than that it feels good, you shift your weight to the other foot, feel the solidity in muscles and bones and earth, hear the coals’ snappish murmurs, feel your icy nose because the mountains are always cold at night, even in July, and that is magic. Across the way your partner, heavy-lidded and hypnotized, the most beautiful thing that lives, is no more capable of leaving this moment than you are, but still you know that in some hour’s time you will turn your attention away from these dying coals to the heavy, double-wide sleeping bag, his side unzipped because he’s always too hot and you cuddled so close you could crawl up inside him, and then your nose will be warm, and your feet and heart too, and you will fall asleep to the scent of his skin and in the morning wake to the same.
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