When I was nine years old, sitting on the living room floor, I saw my first yogi on tv. The show was called, “That’s Incredible,” and it featured acts of daring and extraordinary accomplishment. This night showcased a tall, dark-skinned man in a white loin cloth. In my memory, he stands next to a small, clear, plexiglass box set by the edge of a crystalline blue swimming pool. The man slowly, deliberately folds himself into the box, his body impossibly filling the small space. Throughout the show, there are cuts back to the man in the box, a clock ticking in the corner of the screen to show how long he’s been inside. The host sotto voices how his respiration and heart rate have slowed. At the end of the show, we see the side of the box open. The yogi emerges, uncoiling up to standing. Then he dives into the pool. I was mesmerized.

I looked up “That’s Incredible” on youtube yesterday. It wasn’t how I remembered it. There was no swimming pool, only the clear plastic box on a studio set and a man in a loin cloth named Yogi Coudoux. What is it about him that so entranced me as a nine-year-old? His calmness? His slow, deliberate movements? The fact that he made himself small? He almost disappeared inside that little box. He slowed his respiration, his heart rate, and he never spoke a word. The idea that someone could have that much control over themselves must have thrilled me, the crybaby, who could never control my emotions. Yogi Coudoux folded himself into the tiny box, and he stayed there, unmoving, breathing slow. He didn’t get scared. He didn’t panic. When the ordeal of the box was over, he stood up same as before, expression unchanged. His expression—the calmness—that must have been a big part of it. I wanted to be the one unswayed by emotion. Calm. I also must have been intrigued by his flexibility. I was naturally flexible, while not at all athletic. I was not strong, coordinated or competitive. PE was my worst subject at school, the hour I most dreaded. But I saw immediately that yoga was a physical activity I could excel at. I had a natural aptitude for it. From that moment on, I practiced twisting my body into any shape I could think of. Lotus position was obvious. But could I put my ankle behind my neck? Both of them? I’ve no idea where the inspiration for these made up postures came from. Other than Yogi Coudoux on “That’s Incredible” I had no other source for yoga. I don’t recall seeing it anywhere else—no books or other tv shows.

At some point I must have asked my mother for a yoga book or other resource, because I remember her response: yoga was evil. It wasn’t Christian.

I was unmoved. After all, despite my mother’s best efforts, I wasn’t Christian either. My father wasn’t Christian and didn’t go to church, and perhaps following his example, I remained unconvinced by the Bible stories I heard in Sunday school. I bitterly resented being made to go to church despite my expressed lack of belief. Prior to my mother’s proclamation about yoga, I was unaware that it had a religious or spiritual component. It deepened my interest. Yoga was no longer just a physical exercise my awkward self might excel at, but now it was also mysterious, mystical and forbidden. I wanted to practice it more than ever.

I was accepted to college in the middle of my senior year of high school and scheduled to depart in January. Up to that time, I’d been afraid of defying my mother, but now I had the courage to buy a pocket-sized yoga tutorial at a mall bookstore. I hid it in my room until I packed it to go to college with me. I still have that book, my first instruction in yoga. Published in 1988, it features little commentary and lots of photographs of women in leotards performing the postures. I practiced in secret in my dorm room, fearful of a roommate catching me in the act. I knew no one who did yoga and assumed it was subversive and weird, maybe even satanic, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t explain my attraction. I just had to do it.

It wasn’t until I was in graduate school at Tulane University that I discovered Lilias Folan’s “Yoga and You.” It aired on the local PBS station on Saturday mornings. Yoga instruction on tv—amazing! Folan was about as different from Yogi Coudoux as you could get. Here was a grandmotherly figure. Rather than stoic, she was gentle, joyful, enthusiastic. It still didn’t occur to me that an actual physical yoga class might exist somewhere in the city of New Orleans in 1991. I felt incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon this tv show that was anything but subversive and weird and certainly not satanic.

It was a couple of years later, when my future husband and I were both unemployed and living with his mother in Katy, Texas, just outside of Houston that I first got wind of an actual yoga class. I figured a city as big as Houston must have yoga classes on offer. I went looking, and I found one, a five or six week course. It’s hard to remember where one went to look for such information before the internet—a newspaper, the phonebook? I have no memory—but the class was a revelation.

It was taught by a man who had the quiet repose I craved. With a shaved head and the thin, sinewy musculature I would come to associate with serious yoga practitioners from then on, he emphasized the spiritual aspects of the practice. There were two books on the reading list for the course: Iyengar’s Light on Yoga and Ram Das’ Be Here Now, both classics of the 1970s counterculture and yoga’s renaissance in the west.

Yoga’s introduction to America had come much earlier. Thoreau and the other 19th century Transcendentalists may have been the first American yogis. Vivekananda spoke at the 1890s world’s fair, and Yogananda built his ashram in Southern California in the 1930s. But hatha yoga—the physical postures Americans most associate with the word “yoga”—exploded in popularity in the 1970s with the arrival of Iyengar.

My first yoga class also included a worksheet describing how to meditate using a candle flame. This I never quite grasped. Though I tried to meditate, I was too restless. I needed the physical exertion of the postures to quiet my mind. I remember only one specific thing this first teacher—whose name I’ve regrettably forgotten—said, “Learn how to deal with your pain now, because you’re going to have more of it.”

The postures were meant to be uncomfortable, to provoke a certain level of suffering that was controlled. You learned how to deal with that suffering, how to relax into it, let go of your resistance to it, so when suffering came upon you unexpectedly—as life insures it will—you would know by virtue of your yoga practice how to relax into it, not to resist. This was accomplished by releasing tension in the muscles. It was about becoming intimate with how your body and mind respond to stress, where emotions and resistance itself, cause tension that compounds suffering. Ultimately the goal is that elusive “flow” in all of life, to instinctively greet its vicissitudes without resistance, to tense only where necessary and let the rest go.

My mind was always getting in my way. I’ve always had an intellectual bent. Hatha yoga was a good medicine for it, but in quiet moments, I rediscovered my mental torment, all the unresolved anxieties eager to lead me back into depression. When my future husband and I moved to Hawaii in 1994, I found myself in a second suicidal depression. I wallowed there for about six months, emerging with the help of a psychiatrist, who in addition to the medication he prescribed, gave me Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. The medication deadened my creativity, took away my ability to write, which made me appreciate how important it was to me. I quit the medication. I kept the book. Though I found much of it inscrutable, it motivated me to attempt sitting meditation practice. I once again failed at it. I rededicated myself to the physical practice of hatha yoga, asana being the only thing that could calm my restless mind.

It was on a trip to Molokai just before we returned to the mainland, that I met my first Ashtanga yoga teacher. She described the rigorous practice of vinyasa—or sun salutations. That’s it, I thought, I want that.

As luck would have it, the small Southern California town we moved to had an Ashtanga yoga studio, and I began my practice straight away. The exquisite exhaustion of Ashtanga yoga intoxicated. It was a physical high like I never experienced before. I was devoted. When a Bikram’s studio opened across the street from my apartment complex, I went there, too. I loved the heat. I loved sliding my limbs into a pose as a balming sweat coursed my skin. Before long I was taking a class almost every day.

In September of 2000 I did a week-long intensive with Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga yoga. He was eighty-five years old and as strong and fiery as anyone I’ve ever met. He terrified me. With the air of a drill sergeant, he barked the names of asanas. I knew the series cold at this point and could do the poses without thought. My body moved to his command.

It was as if I was reliving the worst part of my depression, the whole sadness of it, in pure emotion without any associated thoughts. Sadness pulsed through my body like rhythmic ocean waves. Sadness encompassed and radiated from my being. I was helpless to respond. It owned me. I was alive with it. It animated me, and I had no choice but to let it. I lived the sadness until it was gone, because by the end, it had dissolved out of me, left me clean, relieved, profoundly puzzled and above all, grateful.

Yoga poses guide you into feeling where there is hidden tension in your body. The tension can be from bad posture or it could be from traumatic emotion that has gotten “locked in” to muscle tissue. This is what I learned from Pattabhi Jois. I was forced into unusual, uncomfortable positions, and thus I was forced to confront and release those hidden tensions, tensions of intense emotions related to traumatic events throughout my life.

Since that time of my workshop with Jois, my depression in its severest form has never returned. Something that was held in my body, possibly for decades, was released through that experience never to return. It was not an ending, but I turned a corner on the path. Looking back was not only no longer necessary, but not possible.

The couple who owned the yoga studio across the street also lived in my building. We became friends. They were devotees of Amma, the hugging guru. It was at this time I was planning a trip to India to coincide with my thirtieth birthday. I wanted to spend time in an ashram as well as do some travelling around the country. I was far too intimidated by Pattabhi Jois to go to his ashram in Mysore, which would have been the natural choice. When my friends suggested I stay at the ashram of their guru in south India, it sounded like a good idea. When I discovered Amma was taking several busloads of devotees on an India-wide tour at the exact time I would be there, the coincidence spoke to me as something preordained. It solved all my dilemmas of where to stay, the logistics of travel and the fact that I was going alone. For one very low price I would spend two weeks at the ashram then another four weeks travelling by bus and train all over India. All my meals, accommodations and transportation would be taken care of, and I would have the security of travelling with a group, not as a tourist but as a devotee, a bhakti yogi. I signed up despite one most serious reservation: I felt no affinity for the guru, Amma. She was opaque to me. She didn’t speak English. The translations of her talks were what you would expect of an Indian guru. There was nothing scintillating or original. Her main appeal rested in her physicality. She was forty-seven at this time, the same age I am now. She was plump, soft and matronly. Devotees stood in line for hugs. For the briefest of moments, Amma grabbed you. You sank into her softness, enveloped by her amber and rose perfume, while she whispered in a husky voice, “My child, my child,” then gently pushed you aside, reaching for the next devotee in the same fluid gesture. It was an experience. The greater experience was watching her hug thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people in succession, never taking a break to stand or eat or relieve herself. Every so often she would raise her head to one of the devotees standing by her side, and the devotee would pour water into her open mouth.

In India, Amma’s darshan—for her, a non-stop session of hugging—would last twelve hours or more. All night long the line of people waiting for hugs would snake around the pavilion. Devotees took turns sitting by Amma’s side; at the end of each hug, she would hold her hand back, and a devotee would place into it a piece of candy wrapped in a small packet of ash—the prasad—a gift she gave to each huggee. We worked in shifts through the night. Each shift was about an hour long. I sat by Amma’s side, handing her the prasad one after another in quick succession, the faces of her devotees passing before me, many wracked by spectacular emotion, one I had never felt, an ecstatic reverence, something more than love. It looked painful, often conflicted. I was simply confused. While in awe of Amma’s fortitude and boundless generosity, I felt no warmth toward her. She was impossibly exotic to me, and so I felt myself to be an imposter amongst my fellow devotees, who constantly waxed over their love for Amma. Their devotion sounded personal and intimate. I felt none of it. Before her hours’ long darshan, Amma would sing bhajans. The devotees sat with the crowd for this part of the program. All around me people swayed, keened, held up their hands and faces streaming with tears of apparent ecstasy. How I longed to feel what they felt! I wanted to be so transported. I travelled all this way in hopes of experiencing it, but all I felt was out of place.

Physical hardship—which we called, tapas—was a feature of the trip. We slept on the floor, used squat toilets and washed from spigots. But there was no hell quite like the hell of the bus. Early in the trip I contracted pneumonia. I was feverish, and every breath felt like taking lava into my lungs. It was because I was so sick that I didn’t eat much and thus avoided the food poisoning that made its way through our caravan on the twelve-hour drive to New Delhi.

The bus was packed; seats were three across, and I was in a middle one. All around me people began vomiting into plastic bags. One poor woman sat on a bucket in the aisle amidst the overflow of baggage, groaning in shame and agony. This swirl of misery filtered through a fevered delirium. When the bus stopped for a bathroom break—crouching below the berm alongside the road—I lay down on top of the berm, not caring about the shit, grateful for a moment to feel the cool dirt on the side of my face before some fellow devotees made me stand up again. Getting back on the bus felt like re-entering a torture chamber.

It was chilly in New Delhi or maybe it was the fever. I had to wait for others to bring clean water. Some brought juice. People were kind, the ones who weren’t sick. Around me people screamed from the pains of dysentery. One young Finnish woman of whom I was particularly fond, sobbed to me, “It’s nothing but blood and pus at this point.” I was helpless. We all lay on mats spread out on the upper floor of a temple. It was drafty, and birds flew in the eaves above our heads. There were two bathrooms with squat toilets for forty or so people, most of whom had diarrhea. I crawled to one of these bathrooms to relieve myself, and it was while lying on the floor next to the toilet that I made my bargain with God: “Just let me go home, and I’ll forget about finding enlightenment in this lifetime.”

The train ride to Calcutta was surprisingly pleasant. We had room to move, room to breathe. Most had recovered from their food poisoning, and the antibiotics I’d started taking back in Pune finally began to offer relief. I could breathe without the searing pain in my chest. The atmosphere was giddy—we’d survived a horrible ordeal. In Calcutta I was well enough to walk around. Two more days and nights on another train delivered us back to the idyll of the ashram. Two days after that I boarded a plane to return home.

After India, I took a teacher training class with Tim Miller, student of Pattabhi Jois and a wonderful teacher in his own right. I taught yoga for about six months at the little yoga studio two blocks from home. I enjoyed teaching, loved my students, who were mostly women twenty years older than me, but didn’t see in myself the same enthusiasm for teaching as I saw in my fellow yoga teachers. I was interested in yoga as it applied to life, not hatha yoga for its own sake or the sake of physical fitness, which seemed to be the motivation of my students and many fellow teachers. I wanted to use yoga in another way, in service of some other practical goal and ultimately as a means of spiritual development. I still wanted to be a writer, still felt desperate to publish. I quit teaching. I signed up for a guitar class at the community college.

I didn’t give up yoga. I found some balance. I was able to sit in meditation for longer and longer periods and discovered I no longer needed the long, vigorous asana practices.

The gratitude I feel for my many teachers along this path exceeds all expression. Beginning with Yogi Coudoux on “That’s Incredible,” who first lit the flame of desire for yoga in me, to my current teacher. As William Blake wrote, “Gratitude is Heaven itself.”