Mantra
The Wisdom of Youth
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Mantra
Cassandra entered the Better Pathways Studio, set the long tube aside, and began pulling off the layers. Coat, hat, gloves, second coat, long sleeve shirt, shoes – tucked neatly under the bench with all the others – and sweatpants. Standing in warm socks, legs sheathed in a millimeter of quality black spandex, and a deceivingly simple top (deceiving because no one would ever suspect it cost as much as it did), she pulled her mat out of the tube and entered the studio.
The wide room had a pitched roof and pale wood floor. Other yogi-wannabes had unrolled their mats in a staggered pattern facing the front. Cassandra took her usual space at the front left; plenty of room to see the instructor without being crowded. She unrolled her mat, a piece of rubber costing over one hundred dollars. It was worth it; the double-thick mat stayed put on the floor when she did downward dog, but it also cushioned her old bones. She took a seat cross-legged, easing into hips stiff from sitting at a desk for a few hours.
Cassandra was in excellent shape for a woman in her 60’s. Sure, she wasn’t as strong as she used to be, but her muscles were lean. Her old skin may have been soft, lacking the collagen of youth, but it wasn’t droopy, and (she liked to think) not as wrinkled as her neighbor Rose, who was always baking cookies. How many women Cassandra’s age could still get on their hands and knees? Meanwhile, Cassandra could do a crow-pose (knees propped on upper arms while balancing her entire body on her hands) which she was rather proud of.
“Alright everybody, we’re about to get started,” a young woman said, picking her way between the mats to the front. The instructor couldn’t be out of her twenties. Was this young miss even out of college? Her long brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, had a glossy luster to it, and her skin had the plump roundness of a child before the world gets ahold of them. She took a seat on her mat with crossed legs and hands rested on her knees palms up.
“Willamina is out with the flu, and so I am your guest instructor today. My name is Patience, and we’re going to have fun today,” she said, her voice a loop de loop of pleasant tones, like a kindergarten teacher.
Cassandra immediately disliked her. She was just so… soft. Cassandra came to class to work, to get things done, not to have fun. It was why she liked Willamina; the instructor was a hard, no-nonsense woman. You could see every muscle in her sculpted arms, the human body perfected. There was nothing superfluous to Willamina. Patience struck her as… not that.
“We’re going to start with a meditation today.”
Cassandra tried to cover her eye roll by looking away. She didn’t buy into all the voodoo self-awareness, third-eye crap. Yoga was good for deep muscle and bone strengthening; the resistance and focus required were excellent for keeping her young, healthy, mentally sharp. Anything else was a waste of time when she could be getting things done. Just because Cassandra was retired didn’t mean she’d given up on life. Taking a yoga class wasn’t to whittle away her golden years, but to make them gleam all the brighter, refining herself to perfection.
Nevertheless, Cassandra followed Patience’s instructions to measure her breathing. She had read an article that explained how slow, deep breathing had proven to center and focus the mind. When you were as driven as Cassandra, that could only be a good thing.
“This practice, we’re going to focus on a mantra, so if the pose gets too hard, or you feel your mind wandering, focus on this. Our mantra today is ‘I am me.’
What the crap was that even supposed to mean? (She’d heard one of her grandsons say that at dinner on Sunday, the eldest, Davy, and she thought it had a nice ring to it).
“I… am me,” Patience repeated.
In the words of her youngest grandson, Charlie: whatever. Cassandra closed her eyes. She could still have a good practice, regardless of this prepubescent pimple with her New Age hullabaloo. Breath in… out.
Cassandra did not understand her three grandsons: always running, making loud thuds, sliding about in their socks on the polished wooden floor, wrestling, or playing video games. They seemed intent on tootling away their youth instead of using it to get ahead, doing their homework, and refining their minds with books. She had expressed as much to her forty-something daughter.
“You’re so driven, Mom. Just relax, be in the moment,” Rebecca had said.
Cassandra was in the moment, look at how much she was accomplishing at the moment. She was not rolling up her mat and stomping out in a rage. She was breathing. She was relaxed…ish. According to her middle grandson, Samuel, ‘ish’ was an appropriate verb modifier. She smiled thinking of him explaining it to her in a very serious tone when she’d challenged him.
“Think of it, Nana, you could be ‘willing,’ but if you’re ‘willing-ish’ it means you don’t really want to do a thing, and someone will have to convince you. It’s the halfway point between an affirmative and a negative,” Samuel had said.
That boy. His circular glasses had made him look so studious. He was going to be an academic, or maybe a lawyer, Cassandra thought.
“I am… me,” the dolt said again.
Breath in… out.
Besides, why relax, when you could get ahead? Life was a competition. Staying ahead of the schedule, the deadline, your colleagues, that was the key to success. That was how Cassandra had advanced so far in her career, why she was so well-off now.
Finally, they went to hands and knees. They moved through cat and cow, arching the spine, curving it, but then Patience added some rotations in the hips and neck so that they were wriggling in the most imprecise fashion. Cassandra felt ridiculous. She cast a quick look at the others in the class and was relieved to see they looked even less dignified. Seeing them all wriggling on the floor she had a sudden flash of Davy, Samuel, and Charlie all wrestling on the floor like a great writhing mass of worms. For some reason, Charlie had been mooing very loudly.
Cassandra had had no idea what to make of it, and glanced at Rebecca, expecting her to tell them to stop that. But her daughter only smiled. Rebecca seemed to be naturally good at motherhood in the way Cassandra hadn’t been.
Circling her hips, thinking of that ridiculous moo, her mouth cracked into a smile.
Thankfully, they moved to downward dog and pedaled out the feet. Cassandra kept her hips perfectly square, a long slope from her tail bone to her fingertips, and got her heels down quickly, calves stretching. She was pleased to see that no one else in her immediate vicinity had their feet flat on the mat like hers were. Though she was naturally flexible, she had been practicing consistently. Young people tended to be more flexible, so Cassandra cast a quick glance at Patience, and found she was still peddling her feet out, almost like she was playing. Cassandra sighed impatiently.
The practice picked up after that. They moved into plank and then lowered. Cassandra held at halfway just a little bit longer, feeling the burn in her biceps, then moved into upward dog, her spine curving up. They moved into child’s pose when Cassandra wanted to move into mountain, standing tall and powerful, like when she had been at the head of a boardroom, discussing capital and rights. But she couldn’t do that without attracting attention, so she curved in on herself, arms reaching to the top of her mat, and measured her breathing, the tension in her hips beginning to release.
At some point, the tangled knot of her grandsons had unraveled into three laughing bodies flopped out onto the carpet. They had so much freedom. They didn’t care how they looked, not thinking about the homework they surely had, simply enjoying their own physicality.
Cassandra had never thought of herself rolling on the floor with them, until that moment.
“I. Am. Me,” Patience said again.
Cassandra’s throat tightened with some emotion. She swallowed it down hard.
They moved fluidly back into downward dog, then into a low lunge, warrior one, warrior two, crescent moon, triangle, runner’s lunge with a hand on the ground stretching upwards. Each move she slid into perfectly, strong, rooted out of her core. She knew she was better than anyone else in the class, but she wondered suddenly why that mattered. What did she get out of it? It wasn’t more fun, not fun like wrestling on the floor with one’s brother’s might be.
They repeated on the other side, and Cassandra saw, now, with each new pose, how she wasn’t grounded in herself. She glanced around. Were the others focusing on ‘I am me’? She couldn’t tell, their eyes were closed. Then she realized it didn’t matter, because only she could know what it meant to be her, and none of them could do that as well as her.
Cassandra continued through the motions, enjoying the deep feeling of her muscles stretching and relaxing and sustaining her with strength. Moment by moment she was less aware of the people around her. Of the old man next to her who was too stiff to paddle his feet out more than wiggling the hips. Of the large woman in her forties who couldn’t do a proper plank, could barely push up into a cobra. Of the young woman to her back right who may have been more flexible but had terrible posture. They stopped being ‘the other,’ and slowly became ‘the whole,’ the group.
“Three-legged dog, stretching back, lots of space. And now that our hips are nice and warmed up, bring that right foot up to your left hand, into pigeon,” Patience said.
Cassandra obeyed, lining up her foot and her knee and easing into it, lowering her head. Her hand was wrinkled with age, flushed with the effort, and she suddenly felt so much fondness for those fingers which had typed documents and signed contracts and had just carried the weight of her body throughout the class. Her head eased onto the mat, allowing the muscles time to adjust.
Breath in… out.
Heat built up through her throat in the extended silence, the pressure finally releasing in salty tears down her buried face. Then it was gone, and a vast space opened in her chest as she realized she didn’t care what other people thought. She was happy simply to be inside herself, with them. She breathed through the stretching in her tight hip, floating on the strange high.
Patience’s voice came out muffled, forehead pressed to the mat.
“I… am… me.”