Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Silence. Something damp and murky in the air. I realize I'm sitting with my back to her again. Why am I drawn there like that, to the anger at her, over and over again, as to a yearned-for childhood memory that burns my throat? She sinks into herself too. I have no idea where she is, and for a minute I don't care either. I'm fighting against an ancient whirlwind, superfluous now, which still sucks me inside with glee. The thing is that she always knew how to protect herself from the torments of others.

People who know her wouldn't believe it, but she had built a fortress, and I had encountered it, really slammed into it. Sometimes crashed. It was like a transparent protection layer, spiritual of course, but very dense, ironclad, which surrounded her entirely; she would hunch behind it, and no thing or person was allowed to penetrate it. When I finally dared to ask, I was about twelve-just to think that I could once talk with her like that, just come to her and ask directly- and she explained that thanks to that defense, that barrier of hers, she could give of herself to more and more people, she could flow freely. Precisely because none of them could take any of the powers she held there. When I insisted, because that one time I did-I remember the vague and frightened sense of churning that rose from the bottom of my stomach, and how what she said suddenly congealed into a lump inside me, into words, into a verdict-she explained with total honesty, with her criminal innocence, that if she let anyone infiltrate it and take things from there, she would no longer be herself. And she wouldn't be pure, she added, and wouldn't be able to be the utterly clear vessel, the transparent conduit for the healing powers that passed through her.

I understood, and yet I didn't. How could I understand such a thing? She tried to explain. She told me about the ocean of nectar inside the heart. About the island made of precious stones. She said I also had a place like that inside me. I tried to feel it, but all I found was darkness. She went on talking and I saw her on her island like a round, perfect animal, a mythological circle-creature, smooth with closed eyes, sprawled in complete and eternal rest, with its tail in its mouth. But what will happen if I'm sick? I wanted to ask. What will happen if I need all your powers, even your powers from there? I didn't ask. One touch of the electrified fence was enough for me. And she, as usual, heard my silence, and instead of answering, she kept trying to teach me how to take care of myself, how not to let the sorrow of the world, or anything else, penetrate my private place. "Not even the love of your life," she used to emphasize again and again, and I had not a single soul in the world to love back then. "Even your most beloved love of all-don't let him in there." And then she would smile her most charming, tempting smile and say, "Don't even let me in there."

On the third day, at the end of an exhausting class during which she had tired him out with fifty-four consecutive "sun salutations," and after bringing him to the place where his brain simply emptied of all thoughts-and that is when it occurs, when she feels it spreading through him, throughout all of him, the shine, the quiet, the internal crystal-he lies on the mat, a pillow under his head and one beneath his knees, and she softly guides him to relaxation. In the silence that descends, she thinks it was worth coming to this awful hotel for six years, two weeks every year, and suffering the rudeness and the contempt and the ignorance, just so that she could improve him like this. And it's good for her too, she knows, to see him this way,

opening up like a flower in her hands. Her voice sweetens with happiness and gratitude as she tells him about the soles of his feet relaxing, about his knees slowly sinking, about his hips loosening, his chest. "The body is so beautiful," she says with the newly found wonder she senses. "So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet." She whispers, "It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we're only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what's really good for us." She relaxes, opens up. "If we only understand what it's trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is. "

The sound of gulping opens her eyes. His face is tensed like a tightly clenched fist. His shoulders are hunched up almost to his ears, and his legs twist and squeeze each other forcefully.

"What's the matter, Kobi?"

He opens his eyes. His look is dark, confused. "What? Why did you stop?"

"I thought you. Do you feel okay?"

"Yes, I don't know …" He gets up with a wild look. "Let's take a break. I'm hungry."

"Wait"-she hurries to the door after him, not willing for him to leave in this state. Not understanding what happened, she suspects herself, maybe when she surrendered to herself for a moment it went wrong.

But he's already rushing away, and when he reaches the hallway he starts running. She goes back and sits down. You're using him, the probes in her stomach tell her; you can't resist it, can you? From the minute he walked in here you've been using him, that's what you're doing, a piece of easy prey for your ravenous ego fell from the sky at your feet. Haven't you ever heard of "erasing the self"? Isn't that the essence of yoga? And what about canceling out individual will, pettiness, competition, endless settling of accounts with the world? Just look at how every cell in your body keeps shouting out me me. That's not true, she protests weakly, backed against an in-

ner wall. But if she were to admit it, even a little. Why should she admit it, what is there to admit, goddammit, what crime has she committed here?

She gets up abruptly, extricates herself, and walks briskly around the room, pacing in truncated lines. "All these years," she mumbles to herself, and shakes her hands in front of her, "all these years, from the very first class, I always said I disagreed with yoga about this bit, and I said that I, personally, was not willing to erase myself for yoga. Didn't I say that all these years? And that yoga has to accept us as we are, with our stories and all our complications and our little screw-ups and our urges-our human story-did I or did I not say that?

"Because maybe according to the books and the theories, and according to everything you've heard until today, I may in fact not be teaching you yoga." She stops suddenly and announces with a soft voice to the empty walls, showering them with her warm, broad smile, her introductory smile: "But I'll certainly teach you my yoga. Yoga as I see it, as I believe in it." She keeps on talking calmly, in her saturated voice, linking her hands with humility and depositing all her little secrets, her hearty shortcomings. She will let them choose whether or not to accept her as she is, thus easily overcoming the evil voices of her colleagues, who always accused her of being a charlatan, an ignoramus, lacking any theoretical or philosophical basis. She summons up her goodness to come to her aid-her horn of plenty, which shuts up all the cowardly mouths. And she summons the dozens or even hundreds of admiring students to testify on her behalf, and the patients she has treated with infinitely enduring work, thousands of hours of exercises and poses and breaths and massages and guided imagery for a sprained ankle, a pulled muscle, blocked intestines, a broken heart. And the terminally ill, whom she compassionately and courageously accompanied to their deaths, who became more addicted to her than to sedatives and painkillers-to her voice, to the touch of her hands on their tortured bodies. There were those who wanted only her at their side during their final hours; one young woman, whom she treated in the last months of her life, begged her to adopt her son, a three-year-old. "Be a mother to him like you've been to me." She walks around the bare room for a long time, the mist of memory enveloping her sweetly. She smiles at this one, caresses that one, drawn in a kind of self-inhalation, until she stops where she is, tilts her head a little, and from inside, without even meaning to, she produces the old sparkle, almost forgotten, her sparkle of charm and seduction, which sprays out and dances like a ray of light over the four walls. And Nili stands, a slightly dreamy smile on her face, and looks at it.