The Yogi

Kathy Elder is sixty-five. Her body’s flexibility and her warm, almost mischievous smile, make her seem decades younger. Kathy teaches Hatha Yoga four times a week at Kalani, and lives nearby in a spacious hexagonal-shaped house, overlooking blue waves that crash against black volcanic cliffs. Kathy is famous around Kalani for infusing her yoga practice with ancient Sanskrit texts, and infamous for disciplining her pupils’ incorrect postures with the sharpness of a traditional Indian yogi. Nothing gets by Kathy. Her keen sensibility glides with her as she meanders through the aisles of students vigorously saluting the sun. Kathy is the yoda of yoga. She is also a survivor of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.

Kathy picked me up at ten on the dot this morning. I was several minutes late, as per usual at Kalani, and it was duly noted. We drove over to the hexagon house together, small chat about the rain that has consumed Hawaii this past week. Finally, after brewing a cup of peppermint tea for my stomach, we began sharing with one another. Twenty-six years ago, when I was teething and alternative cancer treatments were still illegal in the United States, Kathy was told she had a year to live. She had four children, a husband, a career. She endured months of radiation and the subsequent side effects. She still does. We talked candidly about feeding tubes, using marijuana to fight just about every side effect imaginable, and the isolation that comes from knowing no one, not even your doctors, truly understands what you’re going through. I cried to be in the presence of someone with as much wisdom as Kathy, who could look me in the eyes and say “I know.” We turned to the subject of interest, yoga. Yoga, Kathy explained, is a vast concept: a sea fed by rivers fed by streams. For centuries, before fitness clubs discovered their ass-chiseling powers, ancient rishis used the meditations and postures as a way of finding inner peace. “Truly,” Kathy explained, “that is all yoga is: the practice of finding peace with oneself.” She explained that finding peace begins with the breath, which in yogic practice is called prana, or life force. Everything extends from this. Breath is healing, it is life. One’s breath is a barometer for all that is happening inside. When you get scared your breath becomes shallow. Fight or flight, right? Breathing deeply inherently brings relaxation, peace. This peace is the catalyst for all healing.

What we refer to as pain, yogic practice renames sensation, or intensity. Rather than flee from it, yoga invites you to breath into it. “Welcome the pain, embrace the pain!” Kathy smiled. After eighteen months of sitting with harsh side effects, even becoming affectionate with them, I understand this concept viscerally. Kathy laughed with me. “Other people jump out of airplanes and swim with sharks to try to peer over the edge of themselves. You and I were brought there without choice, and pushed over without warning.” To have peace is to stop believing you have control over anything other than your own will.

Before I left, Kathy handed me a beaded necklace, a string of 108 beads called mala beads. Hers was made of tulsi wood, a basil tree that grows in India. “When you are scared,” she said as she wrapped it gently around my neck, “hold these beads, count them, and remember to breathe.” She embraced me. “This too shall pass.”