Yoga Cocaine

Chapter 1

1

I’m not exactly Zen. Sure, I do yoga. I chant and bow a reverent Namaste to Sati, my beautiful, waif-like yoga teacher, but last night I did a line of coke off the backseat of a toilet and this morning I woke up awash in my own vomit. So, no Zen zone for me.

The worst part of being hung-over in yoga is that, before last night, I had a week sober. Still, I’m here. I’ve dragged myself to Sati’s class on a crisp March Friday morning, unrolled my wilted mat, and plastered on my emptiest, most vacant, expression.

“Stand in Tadasana.” Sati is a f*****g fruitarian. She reeks of patchouli.

As I stand at the top of my mat, my body swaying, in spite of my brain’s instructions for it to stay still, I don’t feel sturdy, like a mountain. I feel like quicksand—a bottomless pit of need.

“Be the pose,” my teacher says. “Embody your most enlightened self.”

Enlightenment, my a*s. She can keep her patchouli and her fruitarianism. I’m here to sweat out toxins, so I can stop feeling like an animal carcass that’s been decomposing in the noonday sun. I breathe. My mind drifts back to last night in a bar in Center City—the straw, the white confectioner’s sugar (as sweet and addictive as candy), the heady rush. That was Nirvana. This is a room full of middle-aged white women with the bodies of twenty-year-old girls.

I’m thirty-two, too old to be doing coke, too young to stop.

Shit. Everyone else has stretched their arms toward the sky and I’m still standing at the top of my mat. I reach up too late, fold forward several seconds after my Sun Saluting peers. I don’t catch up ‘til Chaturanga.

“Lower your body into a pushup.”

That reminds me… I left my push up b*a in the backseat of some stranger’s car last night. I didn’t have s*x with him. He wanted to. I did too. Until I puked.

I got out of the car to clean myself in the bar’s gender-neutral bathroom, and, when I returned, the guy had disappeared, taking my b*a with him.

“Downward Dog,” Sati says. “Or, if your body, not your mind, has a desire to flow, take a vinyasa.”

I don’t flow.

She materializes behind me and adjusts my hips. “Nice form, Jessica.”

I catch another whiff of campfire, mint and charcoal and fight the impulse to hurl. It was a bad idea to come to this power-yoga-masquerading-as-Mt.-Airy-crunchy-granola class. I should’ve stayed in bed and slept through the hangover, and the regret.

The woman in front of me is wearing oversized underwear. It bunches over the top of her spandex. I try not to giggle, but laughter leaks out of me. Like sweat.

I hope my sweat doesn’t smell like beer.

One time, I went to a hot yoga class the day after a bender and flooded the room with the noxious scent of skunk piss, with the accompanying undercurrent of rubbing alcohol. Luckily, everyone there was too “enlightened” to confront me.

I’m such an addict. But, no matter how many times I fail, I keep going to meetings and coming to yoga because my sponsor assures me that, if I do, at some point, my life will amount to more than a series of disappointments.

“Utkatasana,” Sati says. “Padangusthasana.”

I’m craving euphoria. It doesn’t come. Yoga is a poor substitute for cocaine.