Valk Fisher has been on a hiatus! I’ve been working on a few other projects. I’m back. Stay tuned for regular posts to come.

 

 

I lie flat, rocking my weight from glute to glute. Beneath the sweat-soaked towel, the water-engorged plastic of my yoga mat inflates and compresses like a sponge. I shift. It oozes perspiration like juice from a squeezed orange.

My heels, gone soft from moisture, touch. My arms go limp by my sides, palms facing up in surrender. Sweat sprouts from skin, imperceptibly, as if wishing to keep its mechanism a secret. From the soft flesh of my bicep and bony plane of my forehead and webbing between my toes, it drips, slowly, down humid tissue in the direction of gravity, falling into towel fibers.

The room is heated to 36 degrees and smells of industrial amounts of sweat. This, disconcertingly, brings to mind the scent of raw chicken breast.

A Speedo-clad instructor paces the back of the room. I plot an early escape from this inferno, for which I, in a moment of unforgivably poor judgement, now have a paying membership.

A comrade in perspiration, to my left, adjusts his towel. His forearm, clammy, grazes mine, the curls of his body hair wet.

“SAVASANA. Means Dead. Body. Pose,” The instructor is unapologetically un-zen, his tone resembling that of a drill sergeant, or of my mother in a foul mood. “Corpses do not move.” This is a disturbing thought.

“Your towel will be there after SA-VA-SA-NA! Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t even blink your eyes! Concentrate. Meditate. Be. Completely. Still.”

I have a problem.

A bead of sweat has trickled across my forehead, down my left temple and into my ear. It moves slowly, insidiously, like a leach on skin, deep into the vulnerable crevasse of my aural cavity.

The instructor is watching. I do not wish to be reprimanded. I resist the urge to move.

The drop persists, licking skin.

Panic rises. It’s not sweat, but insect. I feel six arthropod legs infiltrating my ear canal. I recall the urban legend of an office worker’s papercut that became a cockroach’s hatching ground, and suddenly I’ve had enough – I plunge a finger into my left ear.

The bead of sweat wipes off clean.

To stop and not do can be a difficult thing, and increasingly, a skill of evolutionary rarity. Our compressed schedules are unavoidable. We run from class to meetings to social commitments to the gym to the bank to work and back (“#adulting”) all with pocket-sized devices in our palms that push notifications whether we’re asleep or awake such that there is no natural stopping place or time. Ever.

And if one were to exist, we might struggle to identify it. In our culture of doing, a constant treadmill of tasks can make us feel dignified. I’m slammed, I’m knackered, Crazy Busy! We wear time constraints, which we perceive as modern status symbols of success, like badges of honor.

Six years ago, I quit a high-paying job as a Magic Circle attorney in pursuit of a free-wheeling creative path. My work days were suddenly spacious. As soon as my career trajectory was no longer measured in the volume of six-minute increments billed to clients, I inexplicably found myself slumped on the sofa in a panic, bingeing on dark chocolate and string cheese for lack of any purpose or meaning in life. In the absence of my time not being in relentless and unforgiving demand, how to believe it had any value?

In a culture where successfully being requires doing, stillness can indeed feel like a posture befitting a corpse.

Our sense of achievement, Jia Tolentino suggests, begs us to become increasingly “functional” humans, continuously seeking to optimize ourselves like devices subject to performance updates. We seek to constantly do more without being able to articulate what might be enough. This is considered setting-up for success.

And yet, is it possible we lose something in continuous movement?

In the yogic tradition, Savasana is the practice’s most important pose. Its stillness empowers the body: to regulate breath, restore the immune system, balance digestion, decrease body temperature, stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, focus the mind. Far from being dead, corpse pose is a posture that’s fully alive.

Back in the yoga room, the Speedo-clad drill sergeant puts us into Tree. Feel the four corners of the sole of your foot ground into your mat.

I balance on my left leg and bring my right foot into my hip crease, letting the knee splay out to the side.

Close your eyes.

I’ve done Tree hundreds of times, but now, I discover it anew.

My ribcage trembles, intercostal muscles flexing to stabilize the torso. I wobble on the left leg, flexing through my shins to find a balance I didn’t know my lower limb could provide. I hear sweat drip onto plastic, feel lungs inflate in full, taste salt on my lips. I fall over. I am in a different body, and doing less has somehow become an avenue for feeling more.

I leave the yoga studio caked in sweat and walk, slowly, home. I overhear a woman speaking into her AirPods: Work is manic, I have no life! She’s proud.

We come to a crosswalk and the pedestrian crossing turns red. I close my eyes and inhale, grateful for a moment’s stillness.