-
11. Women’s Yoga: A Multigenre Meditation on Language and the Body
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Women’s Yoga 쮿 117 117 1 1 Women’s Yoga A Multigenre Meditation on Language and the Body Victoria Boynton On a good day, the yoga studio is a thoughtless place, a space where thought falls away, leaving a mindless body—a relief, a surprise, a miracle, really. Yoga practitioners cultivate this miraculous mindlessness in the bubble of the yoga studio—a space that acts as a container in which to experience this mindless body. Ordinarily, as busy women in a busy world, our busy minds ignore the body. Yoga allows us to pay attention to our bodies as we let go of our mental chatter. Medical research on the benefits of yoga and meditation shows that the temporary surrender of the mind through the ancient practices of yoga and meditation can prove to be powerful survival strategies for anyone, but especially for women. As women continue to step into positions of power and as expectations of women increase, women will need practices, spaces, and communities devoted to detaching from the everyday mind with all of its compulsions, stresses, and strivings. For millennial professional women, the yoga studio is a luxurious support. When the mind lets go, the deep relaxation that results nourishes the body and soothes the care-worn identity. When women enter the thoughtless space of the yoga studio, they are encouraged to lay themselves out, to loosen and surrender to the body’s presence—a presence that is ultimately shifting, undeniably fluid, and basically unrepresentable because it is beyond language. 118 쮿 My Life at the Gym The protected space of the studio encourages the yoga practitioner to let go of the defense mechanisms and psychic armor that she habitually must employ to operate powerfully in the outside world. As that outside world falls away, she begins to inhabit her body as a space beyond language, an open, breathing space. The presence of other women doing the same thing increases the power of the practice. This collective exercise promotes an intense experience of the body, its morphing physicality, its slippery identity, temporary as the breath itself. Preparation Lay out a mat, fingers, breasts, feet, face, lay out the eager gravity of age the lax coccyx the feral love-handle and the troubling. Lay out the strait-laced backbone and the sacred bone of sacrifice, fused at the spine’s end, and lay out the jawbone, tight as a trap. Lay out the magic coxa and the pelvic bowl, cup of hip, and fine lined skin. Lay out the being and trying to be. Lay it all out; your mat is an alter. Then leave. Your body will wait for the gods to start tinkering with these abandoned offerings. Postmodern theory has powerfully interrogated identity and the body, arguing a radical instability of the body that reminds me strongly of the results of yoga and meditation practice. In a yoga class, my experience of the mindless body parallels the descriptions of postmodern subjects as unstable and non-unitary. The identities of subjects are constructed in multiple and contradictory processes of becoming. [44.192.53.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:26 GMT) Women’s Yoga 쮿 119 Though there is no definable, solid being at the center of identity, there is a welter of moment-to-moment experience, infinitely complex and shifting. Yoga practitioners in the midst of practice often experience their identity as fluid and contradictory: through their intense physical engagement with and attention to the body, it seems both to be hyperpresent and to disappear. A revolutionary presence results—a sort of slipping out of identity (a stilling of distracting mentality and habitual discourses) as the body comes into focus, suddenly central to existence in the moment. All We Are Is In fact all we are is one heartbeat one breath one bloody rush of pulse. Now, all we are is. This version of the body is in striking contrast to the social construction of the normative, material body in the world, a construction that encourages an obsessive striving to match unattainable models alternately governed by norms of beauty, business, social, political, and economic power. So to enter another space in which a woman is encouraged to relax out of these tight fits is to enter a sacred space, that is, a space that points to and loosens women’s allegiance to the oppressive social. The studios themselves work on their practitioners. For instance, Wendy Sagar’s studio in Truth or Consequences, New...