![]() I continued going to classes and spending time with those friends who had decided to remain neutral since they were friends with both of us. For the longest time, I was afraid to admit that I needed help.Īfter the assault in college, I turned inward. I wanted to spare them the details-or, rather, spare myself from judgment and pity. When my poem about being assaulted was published in the anthology Best American Poetry 2004, I was afraid to show my family. Because I wasn’t able to talk about my experiences, I turned to writing as a way of healing. The assaults left me searching for ways to be comfortable in my own body. And so I assumed that help was not something I deserved. When I was assaulted again my freshman year of college, by someone in my circle of friends, I reached out for help, but no one was able to offer any continued support, not even the university police department. Instead, what I said to my mother was that I was old enough to babysit myself. But after that, “beautiful” was something that had a tinge of shame, a liability, because in my mind, things happened to you if you were a beautiful woman. Up until then, when people told me I was cute or pretty, I felt proud, like it was something I had achieved. Afterward, I felt like I had a secret and, if I told anyone, they would think that something in me had brought on the assault. In fifth grade, I was sexually assaulted by a babysitter’s boyfriend. For me, yoga helps me to feel beautiful in my body-a feeling I didn’t experience at all between the ages of 10 and 30. I’m sure that some Western women today practice yoga because of these physical benefits while, for others, yoga offers a space to seek solace from our fast-paced, image-oriented culture. ![]() After she opened a studio in Los Angeles, Hollywood starlets took up yoga largely for the effects it had on the physical body. Not until Indra Devi came to the United States in 1947 was there a popular female yoga instructor in America. Yoga intrigued the Transcendentalists in the 1800s and, as a result, yoga migrated west as various swamis from India came to the United States. The history of yoga is a bit mysterious-begun as early as 5,000 years ago, somewhere in India, by a bunch of men doing nothing that resembles our modern-day asana-based yoga. I’d heard about yoga for the first time in the course catalog of my local Jewish Community Center under the classes for seniors, and soon after my seventh-grade speech, I asked my mom to sign me up. Why I was so determined to do yoga still confounds me. So armed with my books from the public library, I taught my fellow students how to do Tree pose, Vrksasana. ![]() I had decided I wanted to teach my class to do yoga, despite the fact that I had never actually done yoga. Rotar’s seventh-grade English class was to give a how-to speech. I remember shyly asking my classmates to take off their shoes, the school linoleum cold on our feet as we teetered and crashed into our desks and each other.
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