Letting Go

Listen to Natalie Villacorta read “Letting Go”:

Section titles from Journey into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga by Baron Baptiste

1. Integration Series: Presence

Patty, the owner of the yoga studio, paced at the front of the room. She was in her sixties, but with her bangs and long chestnut ponytail, plump lips and lean figure, she looked much younger.

“I’ve been practicing yoga for thirteen years,” Patty said. “For thirteen years, I’ve been practicing this same series of poses. But I never get bored. Because within each pose, there is room for growth, for experimentation. For fun.”

Fun? I thought. We had been in downward-facing dog for what felt like hours. My arms burned; they felt like pretzel sticks trying to hold up a brick. The room was so hot and humid that just breathing required effort. My palms slipped forward on my cheap, spongy mat. This wasn’t fun. This was torture. What the hell had I agreed to?

I looked to my right to see how my sixty-year-old father, the only male student and one of the few people of color in the packed room, was faring; sweat ran down his tan chin, cheeks, and forehead, splashed onto his mat, turned his yellow T-shirt gold, but he was locked in: his gaze toward the back wall, his body in a V shape, spine straight, legs slightly bent, but heels reaching for the floor. Shit. If he could do it, then I had no choice but to persist, especially since the yoga class had been my idea.

Unable to think of a Father’s Day gift, I had proposed that we go to a yoga class together—yoga being the only activity I knew we both enjoyed, or were at least capable of doing. My father had suggested Down Dog, the studio his girlfriend, Nora, went to. Little did I know, however, that at Down Dog they practiced “Power Yoga”: a fast-paced, cardio-forward form in a room heated to 95 degrees. I quickly saw the free yoga I did on Saturday mornings at the DC public library for what it was: stretching.

“Travel forward to the top of your mat!” Patty shouted. “Halfway lift, fold forward! Samasthiti!” Everyone brought their hands together above their heads, tilted their heads back.

“Bend forward, halfway lift. Step or jump back into high push-up! Chaturanga! Upward-facing dog! Back to downward-facing dog! Don’t forget your ujjayi breath! Jump forward!” And without even a brief pause to catch our breath, the rapid series started again.

I considered myself a fit person: I went for runs; I went to the gym. But I could not keep up. While others planked in high push-up, I still reached toward the ceiling in tadasana. While they leaped to the top of their mats, I jumped back for high push-up. I managed the first couple chaturangas—moving into a low plank—but then collapsed onto my mat, unable to push into upward-facing dog. In an attempt to somewhat keep pace, I started to skip the whole push-up part and just stepped straight back into downward-facing dog. But even then, my arms became too sore to hold myself up, and I crumpled into child’s pose.

Arms stretched out in front of me, face smashed into my sopping striped beach towel, heart pounding, gasping for breath, I thought: How in the world does Nora do this? I was twenty-four and couldn’t handle it; she was nearly fifty!

“Why are you holding back? You only have one life, so what are you holding back for?” Patty growled. “You’re paying $20 for this!”

I felt like I might vomit. My head spun. My face tingled; it felt like my feet when they fall asleep. Sweat streamed down my forehead, ran into my eyes, blurred my vision. I could taste its salt on my lips. I was about to flee the studio for water when an assistant swooped in and offered to refill my bottle. I thanked him bitterly.

At the end of class, lying on my back in corpse pose—savasana, as Patty called it—unable to feel my face, every centimeter of my clothes saturated with sweat, my belly button a tiny vernal pool of perspiration, I swore I would never return to Down Dog.

2. Sun Salutations: Awakening

Four years earlier, my father had left my mother for Nora, his secretary at the time. She’d been his secretary—“assistant,” he would correct us—for a long time, and after my father left, he confessed that for six years, he and Nora had been having an affair. We were blindsided, or at least I was—though it did explain why my dad was hardly ever around. The thing was, we were used to that; he was a lawyer, and he’d worked long days to make partner in his firm. Then, once he made partner, he still worked late and often spent his weekends and family vacations golfing.

I didn’t blame Nora; I was certain that it was my father, as her boss, who had initiated the affair. Still, I judged her for going along with it. What kind of woman had an affair with a married man with three children? Her boss, no less? A weak woman, a spineless woman, a woman with no self-respect.

Everything I learned about Nora served to confirm this narrative. She was a vegan when my father first left my mother for her, but after they moved in together, she resumed eating meat. My interpretation: She just did whatever my dad—a gluttonous, pork-loving Filipino man—wanted. With the affair out in the open, Nora had to get a new job; she decided she wanted to become a yoga teacher. But during the course of her teacher-training program, she discovered she had stage fright and ditched the idea. My reaction: Most people struggle with public speaking; what a wimp! Then, because she loved home improvement projects, she decided she would become a salesperson for Empire Today (forever will the TV jingle be ingrained in my brain: 1-800-588-2300, Empire! Today). But she was paid on commission, and when she struggled to make sales, she quit and went back to being a legal assistant. My read: She lacked grit!

Holding fast to this narrative made me feel better about my dad leaving my mom—Nora might have been ten years younger, blond and blue-eyed, but my mother was superior; my father just wanted a woman he could boss around. It also allowed me to justify remaining aloof from Nora. I was polite, but nothing more, no way was I letting her in—because there was nothing to let in, I told myself. But the real reason I kept her at arm’s length, I see now, was to punish her, to inflict on her a measure of the pain she and my father had inflicted on me and especially my mother, whose struggle with alcohol abuse had intensified in the wake of my father’s revelation.

After that first Father’s Day class, at the sunny, air-conditioned juice bar across the street, with each sip of a blend of fresh banana, mango, and kale, my mental faculties returned to me and with them upwelled a sense of accomplishment. Power Yoga was grueling, but I had done it! I had persisted! I hadn’t quit! I was tough! So when my dad offered to buy me a ninety-day new-student unlimited pass, I took him up on it.

A week later, I walked from my office in Rosslyn across the Key Bridge to Down Dog’s Georgetown studio. I followed my dad and Nora into the high-ceilinged studio and waited for them to put down their mats. Then I unrolled mine alongside my father’s, so he was between Nora and myself. I didn’t want her having any idea that doing yoga together meant we were buddy-buddy.

As with my first class, from the beginning, I could not keep up with Patty’s demands. I skipped vinyasas and, lightheaded, retreated into child’s pose. I repeatedly fled to the bathroom at the back of the studio to splash my face and douse my towel in cold water.

During tree pose, I was so desperate for relief that I put the wet cloth on top of my head.

“I like that hat you’ve got on back there,” Patty sneered. “I should get me one of those towel hats.”

I wanted to punch her. (“I hate her,” I wrote in my journal the next day.)

The towel hat did not help. I reeked of BO, and every time I inhaled, I was hit with the sour scent of the balsamic-vinegar salad dressing I’d spilled on my shirt at lunch (why was I wearing a shirt that was appropriate for yoga to work? Or maybe I’d forgotten a yoga top and was wearing a work shirt to practice? No wonder I was so uncomfortable).

A girl in front of me rolled up her mat and darted out of the room.

I was tempted to follow her. Brave soul! I thought.

Patty told us to get into forearm plank pose. Within seconds, my abs trembled and ached, my body begging me to lower my knees to my mat. I glanced at my father. He too was shaking but kept his skinny legs straight and off the ground. On the other side of him, Nora, I was displeased to see, appeared to be steady, strong.

“I think I have to leave,” I whispered.

“No,” Dad wheezed.

I pretended to do a few more poses, but mentally, I had quit. We weren’t even halfway through the series; if I was this exhausted already, the second half was going to be a complete slog.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going,” I said. “I’m dying in here.”

I rolled up my mat and, refusing to meet Patty’s gaze, which I could just feel trained upon me with as much focus as she set her drishti, I tiptoed through the cracks between mats and out the studio door.

The desk girl looked up from her laptop. “Are you okay?”

I nodded feebly.

“You know, it’s the first part of class that’s really challenging. You could cool off a bit and then return for the second part.”

“I think I’m good,” I told her.

3. Warrior Series: Vitality

Since I had that ninety-day pass, I kept going to Down Dog, but I felt like a Protestant going to Catholic mass. Each class began and ended with chanting “Om”—“the hum of the universe”—three times. Absurd, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Nor did I obey the teacher’s occasional instructions to “sigh it out” or audibly exhale (“Ahhh”). No way, what was the point of that?

These actions felt so performative to me, and I dismissed the Down Dog instructors as frauds, charlatans—white people playacting at Eastern spirituality in order to make money. The studio promised the “practice” would bring enlightenment, thus convincing people to hand over fistfuls of money—and when results remained elusive, it replied with the refrain to “keep coming back to your mat.”

I judged Nora for falling prey to this scheme; she was a brainwashed acolyte who had surrendered independent thought. Nothing killed me more than when the instructor posed what I interpreted as rhetorical questions, and Nora answered them.

“Isn’t it good to feel your body?”

“Yes!”

“Keep coming back. You will grow each time, ya?”

“Yes!”

Dumb bitch, I thought.

4. Balance Series: Equanimity

A month after I started practicing, I was crouched in chair pose, weight set back in my heels, thighs squeezing together, arms stretching up toward the ceiling, gaze lifted, . . . bawling my eyes out. For once, I was grateful for the 95-degree room that made sweat run down my face even when I was lying flat on my back. I could cry, and it looked like I was just sweating.

About an hour earlier, I had been fired from my job at Politico, where I was a health care reporter. As soon as I’d read the email from my boss asking me to come to a meeting with her boss, I knew I was toast.

Even before I had accepted the offer, the job hadn’t felt right. Politics bored me, I had never even read the publication, and the editor who interviewed me sent emails on her Blackberry all throughout her questioning. But it was an “exciting time” to be covering health care as the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was being rolled out; Politico was prestigious; and my shame at being an unemployed Ivy League graduate who lived at home was immense. So I took the job, telling myself that I was a curious person who could get interested in anything.

This proved not to be the case. While my teammates focused on the House or the Senate or state legislatures, I never found my niche. I struggled to come up with pitch ideas, and the stories I did write were not what my bosses wanted—they were long-winded, missing the “zingy” tone that drove clicks and hooked readers, and news-deficient. I told myself that with time I’d learn, find my beat, fill my Rolodex. But a year into the job, when this still hadn’t happened, I accepted that it wasn’t a good fit and started looking for something new. I wanted to write about real people facing real problems, and I wanted to live in a major East Coast city. Such jobs were extremely rare. I didn’t get one.

Every Sunday, I dreaded another Monday team meeting where I’d have nothing to report. At work, I read New Yorker articles, scrolled on Twitter, Gchatted my friends, counted the minutes until six. I hated myself for being so useless. I considered quitting, getting a waitressing job, and freelance writing, but fear held me back. I knew I could always ask Mommy or Daddy for rent, but I was afraid of what people would think. Growing up, I had derived self-worth from good grades, from other people’s approval. If I didn’t have an impressive job at an impressive publication, what would I have to feel good about?

Even though I was well aware of my lackluster performance, when my bosses said they were letting me go, I was shocked. As the managing editor enumerated the reasons—not enough stories, stories on “minor subjects,” stories that required too much editing—I could feel pressure building behind my eyes, tightness in my throat. I desperately wanted to cry, but I would not reveal how much they’d hurt me, and besides, I didn’t want my colleagues to see me upset and ask what had happened—I couldn’t bear their pity, their judgment: It’s about time.

I wanted to sprint out of there, but I did not want to attract attention, so I willed myself to walk calmly back to my desk. I shut down my computer, packed my bag, and took the elevator down to the lobby. A few blocks away from the office, I let my tears rip. How humiliating that I had been fired. How embarrassing that I’d been bad at my job. Clearly I wasn’t very smart. Clearly I was a lousy writer. I cried all the way across the Key Bridge, turning my face toward the Potomac whenever another pedestrian passed by. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I remember the sunlight reflecting off the river’s surface and blinding me, causing me to squint my already scrunched-up eyes.

My plan had been to go to Patty’s six p.m. class with my dad and Nora, as had become our routine, but it wasn’t even four. What was I going to do for hours? I didn’t want to sit in some bougie Georgetown cafe and have people gawk at me while I cried.

Then I remembered there was a 4:30 class. I didn’t know the instructor, and the class was only an hour instead of my usual punishing seventy-five minutes, but it was something to do, somewhere to be.

The instructor was a much gentler woman than Patty—I suppose that class was geared less toward striving yuppies and more toward stay-at-home moms. During savasana, my mind drifted from my mat. I replayed my bosses’ words: not enough stories, minor subjects, too much editing. I had been fired. I had failed. I wasn’t smart. What would people think? What would they say? Again, the pressure built behind my eyes, and with my face already dripping sweat in the mostly empty studio, I wept, my tears dripping sideways into my ears, a ticklish feeling.

5. Triangle Series: Grounding

Now that I’d been fired, I admitted to myself that I had never really wanted to be a journalist. I’d pursued journalism because it was the closest paying profession to what I really wanted to do: write essays and poems and short stories. But it was still the case that I could not pay the bills writing such things. And if I wasn’t a journalist, then what was I? “The world was my oyster,” as the platitude goes, and I hated it. I’ve never liked lots of options; that’s why I love Trader Joe’s—only one of each product. The idea of deciding between myriad career options filled me with panic.

If journalism had been like bushwhacking—requiring me to come up with my own assignments, to figure out the story in a tangle of information—what I wanted now was a job with a clear path to success, a series of steps laid out for me, life as a yoga class. I brainstormed a list of professions: English teacher, clinical psychologist, doctor (I’d been an English and biology double major and was only a couple physics courses away from fulfilling all the premed requirements). But which path? I moved back in with my mom, in the Virginia suburbs, so that I could figure this out leisurely, rent-free.

In the meantime, I stepped up my yoga practice. Unsure of what to do with myself, I was grateful to have someone else tell me what to do for seventy-five minutes. I was grateful to be so physically challenged I could not think—could not worry about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

6. Backbend Series: Igniting

One day, when my dad, Nora, and I all arrived at the studio at the same time— unusual because my dad walked from home, Nora came from the metro, and I drove from my mother’s—the studio manager, Becca, exclaimed: “The family’s all here!”

Internally, I cringed. Nora was not my family.

How could she be when she had destroyed my family?

For the first two years after my dad left, I’d refused to see Nora. It was the only way I knew how to punish my father, which I couldn’t do directly: I was financially dependent on him, and I wanted to set a good example for my fourteen-year-old brother, who needed my dad but wouldn’t admit it.

But my boycott meant missing out on fun events because she was going to be there; it meant never going to my dad’s apartment, never just hanging out, sprawling on his couch and watching Planet Earth and swimming in his condo’s pool. This was tolerable until I graduated from college. Jobless and living at my mother’s, I was needy, hungry for distraction and support. So when my dad invited my brother and me over to his and Nora’s apartment for dinner, I agreed.

My mother was “not happy” about this. The night before the dinner, she sent me an email: “I must be honest and tell u I am upset that u would have a relationship with Nora and go out with them and to his house with her.” I couldn’t believe that my mother had emailed me while we lived under the same roof—it seemed so childish. I said as much the next morning when I found her at her usual post, reading the papers in the family room.

“I just don’t want you having a relationship with her. Going shopping with her, planning a wedding,” she said.

“Planning a wedding?” I said. I didn’t even have a boyfriend! It was just dinner. She was blowing things way out of proportion. I had no intention of “having a relationship” with Nora. I intended to be civil, polite at best, I said.

Still, my mother made me question myself: Was I being selfish? Was I letting my father and Nora off the hook too easily? “Or have I just adapted, realized this is the situation and I can either embrace it or continue to put up a fight, making everyone more uncomfortable?” I wrote in my journal.

That first dinner was tense. My brother refused to speak to Nora the whole night; each time my dad called Nora “sweetie,” it was like a stab in my heart; and Nora made comments that made me want to disappear (“I probably wouldn’t have stayed in my current line of work for so long if I hadn’t been working for your dad”). She was also trying too hard: She’d made an involved dinner of Vietnamese pork skewers that she said required her to go to two grocery stores, and she’d also prepared the “optional” sauce: “When you’re going to all that trouble anyways, it’s like, just make the sauce!” she said.

“Poor thing knows we think she’s trash,” I wrote in my journal the next day.

But with each encounter, we loosened up. My brother started speaking. Nora’s cat, Tasha, helped; my brother loves cats. Alcohol helped. Additional enticing dishes helped (fried rice, Korean braised short ribs, leche flan). Even as I relaxed, however, I made sure to keep my distance from Nora, to remind her that she was not one of us. At my sister’s wedding, I made sure Nora was not announced when the DJ introduced the families of the bride and groom to kick off the reception.

But now the studio manager was describing Nora and me as “family.” What did this mean? In going to yoga with Nora, was I “having a relationship” with her? And, in doing so, was I being a bad daughter, betraying my mother?

Back then, I resisted doing anything that my mother didn’t agree with—I thought if she didn’t approve, then I was in the wrong. After I was fired, when I told her I was thinking about becoming a high school English teacher, she’d narrowed her green eyes. “We didn’t send you to an Ivy League to become a teacher,” she said.

Welp. Then forget teaching. I proceeded with my other ideas. To see if I might like being a psychologist, I volunteered for Crisis Text Line, texting with people struggling with suicidal thoughts, loneliness, homophobia. To see if I might like being an MD, I got a job as a medical scribe in the emergency room of my local hospital, filling out medical charts; I enrolled in a physics course.

I soon learned that the ohm—named after the German physicist Georg Ohm—is the unit of electrical resistance, the measurement of how much a material opposes the flow of electric current. How funny, then, that “Om” was what we chanted at the start and end of yoga class. It was like we were chanting Resist, Resist, Resist, when what we meant was the opposite: Surrender, Surrender, Surrender.

That day Becca called me and Nora “family,” I felt a hand, my father’s, grip mine while we were lying in savasana at the end of class. I knew he was thanking me for being there, for spending time with him and Nora, like family.

Part of me wanted to free myself from his grasp. I still didn’t want to accept Nora as family, to let her in. But I squeezed his hand back.

7. Abdominal Series: Stability

Little by little, I resisted the temptation to retreat into child’s pose, to skip chaturangas, to straighten my bent leg in warrior, to flatten during wheel. Downward-facing dog became the “resting position” the instructors claimed it to be. I stayed balanced on one foot in tree and eagle and scorpion poses, training my drishti to a single spot on the wall or floor. I even accepted the instructors’ invitations to make poses harder: twisting deeper in chair, binding my arms in revolved crescent lunge, “growing my branches” toward the ceiling in tree. I found pleasure in the previously excruciating pigeon pose, my hips, where the instructors said women stored their emotions, opening. At the start and end of class, I chanted the “Oms,” feeling proud when mine were among the longest lasting.

My progress filled me with pride. I was stronger, more flexible, more stable in my body, and though I didn’t know it, the practice was also working on my mind. As my favorite YouTube yogi says, learning to be calm and collected in warrior pose meant that I “could be calm and collected in the most stressful of times.” Or, at least, calmer and somewhat more collected.

8. Inversion Series: Rejuvenation

Though at first I’d dismissed the instructors’ philosophizing about inner peace, my favorite instructor became a guy named Khalil, precisely because of his commentary. Unlike the others, all young women in their twenties and thirties, Khalil was in his late thirties or forties; it was hard to tell because he was bald, clean-shaven, and fit. He looked like Popeye the Sailor Man. He’d had experiences, it seemed to me; thus, he was wise, or at least wiser than the twentysomethings.

Khalil told us he’d been a biology PhD student until the day he had an epiphany that the lab was “sucking his soul” and quit. It was the best decision he’d ever made.

“We all come in with stories,” Khalil said. “We all pride ourselves on how tough our story is. Unless it’s about rainbows and butterflies,” he urged, “let it go.”

Let go. This was something I’d heard before.

A few months after my dad left, he had given me and my siblings a book titled Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. It looked self-published, the design like something out of Microsoft Paint: The cover was divided diagonally, the top triangle white, the lower triangle smiley-face yellow. It was paperback and shrink-wrapped. Dad said his therapist (“Dr. Bob”) had recommended it to him. He’d found it very helpful and thought it might be helpful to us as well.

Lying in bed later that night, I looked at the back cover. In the upper right corner was a black-and-white image of the author, David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD. He was a balding white man, his forehead deeply lined, his gray beard scraggly. He wore a tunic that exposed a gnarled neck. I found his closed-mouthed smile creepy. I read the description: “Over the years, thousands of students had asked for a practical technique by which to remove the inner blocks to happiness, love, joy, success, health, and, ultimately, Enlightenment. This book provides a mechanism for letting go of those blocks.”

Immediately I knew, or thought I knew, why my father liked the book. It had given him permission to do what he had done: Let go of his wife, whom he no longer had use for, now that she was all used up by motherhood, age, addiction. Let go of his children, his responsibilities. Or Dr. Hawkins had at least made him feel less guilty. Now my father wanted me to let go of my anger so that he could let go of his lingering guilt.

No chance.

I put the shrink-wrapped book on my shelf. Sometime later, I threw it out. Now that I had been “let go” from my job, however, I saw the idea differently. I appreciated that holding onto my reporting job had been a real “block” to my happiness, and that losing it had set me free from my suffering—or a lot of it. I told anyone who would listen that getting fired was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Maybe there was something to “letting go.”

I began to wonder: What else could I let go of, that wasn’t “serving” me?

9. Hip Series: Opening

After class, my dad, Nora and I would strip off our sweaty yoga gear, plunk it into the plastic bags provided by the studio, change into clean clothes, and go out to dinner. One Tuesday, over a bottle of half-price sauvignon blanc and a large sausage and ricotta pizza, as I expressed confusion about my career path, Nora told me how her first career hadn’t turned out. She had been a physical therapist for a few years after college—I hadn’t known—and had quit because she found the work bogus: Most patients, she said, were unwilling to do their exercises, just wanting massages and heat treatments, and the patients who did do their exercises often still didn’t heal.

Prior to my firing, this story would have only fueled my narrative of Nora as a weak “quitter,” adding physical therapist to the list of her abandoned identities, along with vegan, yoga teacher, and Empire salesperson. But now, having failed to quit my job myself when I should have, I appreciated that quitting wasn’t weak; it took guts. Nora had guts, maybe more than I did.

In those early months of yoga practice, when I was cutting corners, I couldn’t help but notice that Nora never did; she never retreated into child’s pose, never skipped chaturangas, never gave into the temptation to straighten her burning legs, never collapsed onto her mat during bridge, never uncoiled from pigeon pose. And whenever the instructor gave the option to make a pose harder—to twist deeper, to go into a “bind,” to lift an arm or a leg—she always went for it. There was no denying it: The chick was not weak. She was tough as hell.

Over dinners in the coming months, I learned more about her past. Because her dad was in the air force, growing up she had moved seventeen times in sixteen years. Though now a petite woman, she had once weighed two hundred pounds. She had been married and divorced twice before the age of thirty. She had sewn her own bridesmaids’ dresses.

Previously, I would have viewed much of this as evidence of her weakness. But now I saw it as the opposite. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been to be uprooted every few years as a kid. Or to have lost all that weight and kept it off. Or to have had two marriages fall apart in such a short time. Nora had been through some shit. She had not quit physical therapy or her marriages, I now saw, she had let them go. She hadn’t given these things up because she was weak, she’d given them up because she was adaptable, flexible, agile, because she had self-respect. It took bravery to let something go, to refuse to settle, to want something more for yourself.

What allowed for this shift in perspective, for me to let go of my old story about Nora and embrace a new one?

I think it was the shift in how I felt about myself. Now that I was no longer drenched in self-loathing, now that I felt more kindly toward myself, I could be kinder to everyone in my life, including Nora. Because I was no longer hurting, I no longer needed to make Nora hurt.

10. Forward-Bending Series: Release

In January 2016, six months after my firing, my dad invited me to Nora’s fiftieth birthday party. To go would mean meeting Nora’s family. It would suggest I had finally let go of my anger and bitterness about the affair. Had I? Could I? Would going be a betrayal of my mother?

My sister, who’d always been more on my dad’s side, was a yes, but my brother was a no. Ever the middle child, I agreed to go but told myself I wouldn’t stay long. I had an early shift at the hospital.

My father had gone all out. From the private room in Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place, you could see the Potomac right outside, and downriver the Kennedy Center, its white marble glowing like the moon. The open bar was stocked with Dad’s favorite bourbon, Woodford Reserve. Guests could pick from an array of cuisines, visit a pasta station manned by a guy in a chef ’s hat. A DJ played my dad’s favorite music: Genesis, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac.

All the guests who weren’t family appeared to work with or for my father and Nora. Raymundo bartended at Sea Catch, where they loved to go for crab legs. Steven cut their hair (sensing my disdain for my father, perhaps, Steven insisted my dad was a good guy: “Believe me, I’ve cut a lot of hair”). Even Patty was there, along with several other Down Dog instructors—though not Khalil, who had bowed out, citing social anxiety. What was wrong with my dad and Nora, I thought; why didn’t they have any real friends?

But after a few drinks, I stopped being such a bitch and loosened up. I looked at the display of photos from Nora’s five decades of life and admitted she’d been a cute kid. I greeted her mother and father—a wheelchair-bound Air Force veteran whose seventy-fifth birthday we were also celebrating. I got out on the dance floor, and my dad and I did The Bump and The Walk, dances he had taught me years earlier, before he’d left.

After his departure, when I would listen to Fleetwood Mac, I’d think back to us dancing in the family room, furniture pushed against the walls, my dad doing The Walk, stepping forward with one foot while snapping with the opposite hand, his ashy flat feet shuffling across the wood floor. It hurt to think about how easily, it seemed, he had walked away from us, let go of us.

But that night on the dance floor, I knew that it hadn’t been easy for him, and that letting go of his marriage and making room for Nora had returned my father to himself and, thus, to us. Before he’d left, he would never have cooked me dinner or done yoga with me.

I was also starting to understand that letting go of my anger and bitterness wasn’t just good for him—a way for him to relinquish his guilt—but also for me; accepting Nora wasn’t selfish, and it wasn’t betraying my mother. It was me choosing a bigger life, a bigger family. As yoga guru Baron Baptiste writes in Journey into Power, letting go was not the end of a life, it was the beginning. It was not failure but the pursuit of something better.

In the weeks to come, I would quit working in the ER. I’d gotten a second job, as a long-term substitute teacher at my old high school, and there was no comparison. At the ER, I was bored: Most of the “emergencies” were not emergencies at all, or at least not what they looked like on Grey’s Anatomy. We spent five minutes with each patient, and then it was on to the next. In contrast, I found teaching literature thrilling; I loved leading discussions about Dracula and George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” witnessing students think their way through their own confusion, seeing the texts anew myself thanks to the students’ insights. I could see myself doing this for the rest of my life.

But even this I soon let go of. In the winter, when I’d started to have my doubts about becoming a doctor, I’d secretly applied to a handful of MFA programs. Secretly, because if I didn’t get in, I didn’t want people to know I’d applied—I didn’t want people thinking: She thought she could be a writer? and guffawing.

That spring, when I was accepted to two programs, I could finally admit that writing was what I really wanted to do, what I had wanted to do since my first poetry workshop at eighteen but had been too scared to pursue.

One of the programs was just a thirty-minute drive from my mother’s house, the other on the opposite side of the country. My brain—and my mother—said I ought to go to George Mason: I could keep living at home and save money on rent, I could keep substitute teaching. Also, I realized, I could keep an eye on my mother’s drinking. But my heart longed to go to Oregon State. I’d fallen in love with the towering red rock formations of Smith Rock State Park, the lush, almost fluorescent forests of the Coast Range, and the enormous dunes on the wild, largely undeveloped coast.

So after some agonizing, I said yes to Oregon, an important step in letting go of something else I’d held fast to for years—my belief that I was responsible for my mother, for her recovery, that my actions could cure her drinking.

That night at Nora’s party, just when I wanted to leave, the DJ announced it was time for cake. I could have slipped away, but I decided to stay and sing “Happy Birthday” to Nora and her dad (and get a slice). I watched Nora blow out her candles and make a wish.

11. Surrender-to-Gravity Series: Deep Rest

For many years, I stopped practicing yoga, except at home. I was a graduate student, and yoga seemed like an extravagance. Then I was a rookie professor, overwhelmed with new responsibilities, and yoga still seemed like an extravagance, self-indulgence even. Then last year my mother suddenly died of a stroke.

Feelings that I thought I had let go of—my anger and bitterness toward my father—resurfaced. I felt he was partly to blame for my mother’s death; in cheating on her and leaving her thirty years into their marriage, he had dealt her a blow from which she could never recover. My anger deepened as I found his response to her death—and all the work it entailed—bafflingly inadequate. So I did what I tend to do to anyone who hurts me: I pushed him away. I vowed not to let him in until he demonstrated contrition and stopped disappointing me.

I started going to yoga again; I figured I could afford it now, thanks to my inheritance, and the loss of my mother allowed me to be kinder than usual to myself.

The instructors at my new studio, Highland, are much more lenient than they were at Down Dog. They always invite you to do what feels good in your body, to move with your breath. “You can always take a child’s pose,” they say. “Chaturanga or skip it,” they say. At the end of practice, they welcome you to remain in savasana instead of rolling to one side and pushing up into a seated position.

At first, this mercy irked me. I didn’t want them to go easy on me. I was paying $20 for this, as Patty would have said, and I wanted to get my money’s worth of punishment.

But the thing was, I was no longer capable of every chaturanga. Downward-facing dog was not a resting position; child’s pose was. Lying in savasana, I did not want to get up. I was demoralized by this. I couldn’t fathom how I’d once enjoyed this abuse. Maybe my hot yoga days were over, I thought.

But my instructors forced me to be kinder to myself. They made it seem normal to skip some poses, to take some breaks, for the mind to wander and think weak thoughts. And so I kept coming back to my mat. I let go of striving for a perfect class and let just being there be something to be proud of. Sometimes squatting in chair pose, arms reaching up for the ceiling, I would realize how strong I was, not just physically, but in character. I thought about all I had dealt with in the months since my mother’s death—her cold, uncanny body, her cigarette-smoke-infested house, her years of unfiled taxes—and I was moved. A sob rose up, and I would let it, because with all the straining and sweating in that studio, not a soul would notice.

Months passed. On the anniversary of my mother’s death, the regret that had been intense in the immediate wake of her death reappeared. In the last two years of my mother’s life, I had spoken to her little and saw her even less. Her alcohol abuse and depression and general self-neglect made her difficult to interact with, and for a year I cut her out of my life. Her sudden death at age sixty-six now made this choice incomprehensible. How could I have wasted that precious time? How could it have taken me so long to accept that she was never going to change? I know I was always going to try to fix her, to resist her self-sabotage; I just regret that it took me so long to let go of the idea I had of her, of us, and to accept who she was, the relationship we had.

I know this about myself now: I hold on for too long. I fight for too long. For the rest of my life, I will be asking myself when to hold on, when to let go; when to keep fighting, when to surrender.

I realized around this time that I was doing with my father exactly what I had done with my mother, what I have always done: holding out for too long. My father, like my mother, was not going to become the person I wanted him to be. I had to let go of the idea I had of him and accept him as he was, or continue down a road that I knew would lead only to regret.

On my next visit to Virginia, I texted my dad to ask if I could come over for dinner, like no time had passed.

“Sure,” he replied. “Fried rice and chicken adobo?”

When I arrived, he was cooking and opened the door with a white hand towel draped over his shoulder.

“Nat,” he said. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me tight. For what felt like a long time, he held me, and when I tried to pull away, still he held me close.

Read more from Issue 22.2.