When we first met, I would wait for her outside Jivamukti on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, watching the yoga girls emerge, one by one, from their secret world upstairs. I had never been inside a yoga studio, but as I bided my time with the other starstruck boyfriends, huddled around the bike rack or smoking apologetically at the curb, it seemed that we had stumbled upon a factory of perfect, agile women (and the odd male practitioner in tights and ponytail) who glided through life with a stylish little yoga-mat bag on one shoulder, a backlog of phone messages, and spa appointments to keep. It was thrilling to think that one of these creatures was mine—that she would come outside from her mysterious communion with the Creator of All Things Lithe and Beautiful, eerily erect and aglow with inner peace, and smile when she saw me.
I was in love with her, and she did yoga. She could spread her toes out wide like they were fingers, lift furniture with the dexterity of an Israeli mover, and take your breath away in a flimsy Ferretti dress. And, by some miracle that I never questioned until it was too late, she married me. It hadn't seemed possible that, within a year of standing at her side beneath a chuppah she had made for us, yoga's sunny handmaidens would creep into our house, chant Om Shanti, and steal her away.
I am a yoga widower, and this is my story. Go ahead—laugh if it makes you feel better. Tell yourself that it could never happen to you. But I am here to share what I have learned from bitter experience: Yoga is not a beneficent practice that borrows women for a few hours each day and returns them stronger in the arms and shoulders, more "centered" in their bodies, and smoldering with newfound sensuality and self-esteem. Yoga is a cult that wants to take them to a faraway reeducation studio where there are no husbands, no families, no professional careers—only a yoga mat, a throat-singing CD, and the requisite cardamom-scented candles to mask the smell of old sneakers, all watched over by Ganesha, an elephant-headed deity with four manicured hands, pictured variously with a noose, an axe, a lotus flower, and a tray of sweets. This is their idea of a divine entity. Do you see now what I mean?
It was typical of yoga's cruel dominion over its victims that we were allowed, for a long time, to be blissfully happy. We lived together on a Brooklyn block that felt like home. We took long walks in Prospect Park and talked about our writing projects. We shopped for food at our favorite specialty shops and cooked elaborate dinners for ourselves and our friends. We even left the country for more than a year and learned how to pick olives and hunt for porcini mushrooms in the Pratomagno mountains of eastern Tuscany. We would have stayed longer, but the nearest yoga studio was a two-hour drive from our village, along a winding road that iced over in the winter. I can think of a handful of times when we almost plunged to our deaths for her Sun Salutations.
Soon after we came back, she reached into the pocket of my jacket one night while we were standing on the subway platform at West Fourth Street and, before I could react, pulled out the family diamond I was planning to give her when the time was right. "What's in the ring box?" she asked. I can hardly be blamed for supporting her when, just a few weeks after our April wedding, my wife announced that she was thinking of becoming a yoga teacher and had signed up for an intensive month-long course with a renowned guru.
Was it wrong to encourage her? Was I thinking too much of that spring when we had first met and how, every time I saw her float out of Jivamukti in her favorite camisole top and yoga pants that ended just below the knee, my face had flushed and my heart had thumped in gratitude?
When she left our bed early one morning for her first day of teacher training, I had no way of knowing that Ganesha was feeding her his sweets and tightening his noose around my neck. The signs of a dark conspiracy had been all around, yet love had made me too trusting of the anatomy textbooks, the ever-more-tricky poses—Sideways Crow and Scorpion—she demonstrated on the living room floor, the steamed kale for dinner, and the stench of slow-burning incense sticks. Every day she left the apartment at dawn for her training and, when that was done, she went to yoga classes at her favorite studio all afternoon.
When she did come home, she had flash cards to make up and studying to do. Our income fell sharply and her yoga-related spending went through the roof—classes, outfits, books by smiling, ageless gurus, and body lotions with names like Soul Serenity and Mindful Movement. Whenever we watched a movie from Netflix, I sat by myself on one end of the couch while she sat on the other, upside down, her legs splayed and pointing up at the ceiling. It was only a matter of time before, if I ever wanted to see my wife, I actually had to sign up for one of the Basics classes she taught at a local studio. Let no other man know the lonely trial of watching the woman he married walk from stranger to stranger, adjusting their hips in Triangle Pose ("Feel the length in your tailbone ?Good"), even if she looks sort of sexy doing it.
The end, when it came, was swift and agonizing, with a soundtrack by the internationally acclaimed "devotional chanting" artist Krishna Das (real name Jeffrey Kagel—look it up) and our own "pose of the day"—a Vinyasa special I call Down Divorce. One moment my wife was enthralling, affectionate, quick to laugh, and intellectually fearless, and the next she was a prison guard for the Penitentiary of the Human Body. Our walks in Prospect Park became silent forced marches to her yoga class or opportunities for her to judge how everyone—including me—was"walking wrong". When we did find time to cook together, something we had once done every night over a glass or two of wine, she corrected my posture while I stirred the polenta or used the salad spinner. Standing was a fascinating subject, she claimed, and I needed to devote more thought to it.
The marital bed, meanwhile, had become a place where I was expected to bask in her expertise and perform, when my turn came, like a tantric yogi. (You know, like Sting.) The flexibility of her body in Bow Pose was admirable, yes, but did it make her more flexible and admirable as a wife, as a person? In our five years together, we had survived money troubles, family illnesses, the stress of publishing a book (for each of us), periods of separation, and even infidelity, all without growing estranged. Five months after she had taught her first yoga class, we were finished. I blame the soul-stealing ministrations of the yoga cabal for giving her the agility to wiggle free of our marriage and follow her bliss wherever it guided her, even if it meant abandoning a husband and the life we'd built. Yoga promises freedom from bondage in a unitard—?I worship the guru's lotus feet," a line from the"Yoga Taravali"goes,"awakening the happiness of the self revealed beyond comparison."But from what I've seen, joining Team Ganesha only leads to body obsession, selfishness, and an injury called"yoga butt."
My own flirtation with yoga is over now—for that I offer a hearty namaste, the traditional, all-purpose yoga blessing—and I have gone back to working out, upright, at a Manhattan gym instead of rolling out a smelly mat and getting on my hands and knees in Brooklyn. Sometimes, when I'm feeling nostalgic, I go to the Whole Foods supermarket on Fourteenth Street at around seven at night, the busiest hour, and do my shopping when the hordes arrive from the nearby yoga studios (including the relocated Jivamukti). I recognize the flushed cheeks, the pinned-up hair, the vacant eyes scanning root vegetables; I even smile every time a yoga mat nudges me in the back or knocks over a bag of organic tortilla chips. Recently, I was wandering the dairy case when an attractive woman in Spandex asked me if I could reach up and pull her down some yogurt from a high shelf. "How many do you want?" I asked. She answered,"Five. No. Six?" We smiled at each other. We shared a moment in the crowded market, and then we parted ways.
It could have been the start of something. But it was not meant to be. When I ran into her again, as we were both leaving with our shopping bags, I caught a glimpse of her shoulder blade and saw that she had a tattoo of an Om symbol in Sanskrit. She went right, glancing back after a moment to see if I would follow her. I went left.
