[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Kerri Garr”][/title]
I’m the worst student in my yoga class. This is not an exaggeration. This is fact. I should get points for showing up early, though—I always show up early—so that I can get my spot in the far corner, away from the giant mirrors.
My instructor, Kerri Garr, says everyone’s practice is beautiful. She also says there are no saved places in yoga. We are all supposed to be these loving creatures, and our places in the room should be interchangeable. She says this from her spot at the head of the class, where the lighting from above is reflecting off her golden hair, making her hair look as if it caught the sun.
Beside me, my sister Jan sits with her back straight against the wall. This is another plus of getting to class early. You can sit by the wall with your back supported, without your core muscles doing a thing. I talked her into coming with me several months ago—I told her about Kerri with her golden hair and her golden heart—and my sister took the bait. She is better at yoga than I am. I am having some un-yoga-like feelings about this.
Next to my sister is Janet, who is approximately my age but so much stronger. She can stand on her head. She was once in the military, I think. She probably crawled beneath barbed-wire fences and scaled walls and woke at three in the morning to do it all again.
When Kerri asks us to come up with one thing we love about ourselves, I struggle. Finally, I think, I’m a good dog owner. I’m thinking about this morning, how Rudy sat at my feet as I wrote, how he lay atop my heated blanket in my cold house and how I let him stay there even though he was ruining the blanket, which is a dry-cleanable thing and electric, and now that I think of it, irreplaceable, in a I’ve-had-this-so-long-I’ve-developed-feelings-for-it way.
We are all breathing in unison now, this group of twenty-five or so that meets twice a week at Fitness One in Alma, Arkansas. Brent, two rows up from me, breathes like a pro. A rush of air in. A push of air out. He is strong like a mountain. He is strong like a tree.
The first time I met Kerri, she put her arms around me. She smelled like the 1970s: patchouli, incense, freedom. She was wearing a knitted hat. She was wearing pants that looked like they’d been lifted from Aladdin’s closet. I wanted to roll my eyes at that hug, but there was something about it. Good energy? Sincerity? I wasn’t sure.
We are standing with our prayer-hands at our hearts, eyes closed. In a few minutes, we will be doing a series of chaturangas, where we start in the plank position, lower to the floor, lift our upper body into a move called upward facing dog and end in downward facing dog. Downward facing dog looks like an inverted “V” with your butt being the point of the “V” and your hands and feet the two widest points on the letter.
Some people call downward facing dog a resting pose. Those people are not human.
The next week, classmate Rhonda, arrives just after I do. She has a runner’s body and makes people laugh. She has black, shiny hair and a Deep South accent. She turns the thermostat up so that the next sixty minutes it feels as if we’re doing hot yoga. I’m wearing mascara when I arrive. I’m wearing black circles and sweat rings when I leave.
“Great workout!” I say to Rhonda. But I don’t mean it.
The following Monday, Kerri again asks us to think of something we love about ourselves. This is a hard part of the class, but I decide I love that I can write. That I get to write.
In the class, we’re “flipping the dog,” which is a move that takes you from three-legged dog (the inverted “V” with one leg lifted) to what looks like a crab. Imagine what you would look like if you lay on your back, then lifted your feet and hands so that your torso looks like a table top. Imagine it all you can, because I could never show you.
Mike, one row up and to my left, can do it. His hair is silver. He likes good books. His form is perfect. I may not like Mike anymore.
Yoga, or my version of it, is becoming a habit. There’s something about Kerri. When she walks by, I think, She walks with intention, and even though I can’t explain what that means, I know it when I see it.
I realize, finally, that what I think makes Kerri beautiful is more about what’s on the inside. Often, she’ll tell us she loves us, and I will look at her and know she means it.
I’m in a pose called half-pigeon, leaning forward on my mat, one leg tucked at an angle, at hip-level, under the other, when it happens for the first time. Kerri mentions that relationship problems can show up in our hips. If my hips can be believed, my relationships suck.
Kerri says, “The pose begins at the point where you want to release it.” If that’s true, this pose started the second I began. But I stay with it. And then I feel it. Tears. Not cry-me-a-river tears, but still. I squeeze my eyes shut. I’m glad I’m in the corner.
Something is changing inside me. Getting out of my mind, focusing on my breath and my body is helping me feel centered, is making me feel a new sense of gratitude. At the end of class, during meditation, I feel lighter. Nothing earth shattering, but I notice. My sister says, “I felt like I was inside the music.” It sounds like something an over-achiever might say, and I give her a look. Maybe I have more work to do.
Kerri tells me she started doing yoga seven years ago. At the time, her personal life was in tatters. At first, the language of yoga seemed off. Kerri’s Baptist upbringing made her suspicious of words like Namaste, a word derived from Sanskrit, a spiritual greeting that’s given at the end of each class. The teacher says it and bows. The students say it back and bow.
Kerri used to answer with a hearty “Amen” at the end of those first classes.
Then, the extraordinary happened. Yoga started healing what was hurting inside Kerri. She faced what was causing her unhappiness, got serious about yoga, and started to believe in herself.
When I ask her where she would be without yoga, she says, “I wouldn’t be here,” and tears fill her eyes.
The “here” she means is not Alma. It is “not here at all.” The statement is monumental. Is earth-shattering.
Which is why she believes so much in what she’s doing. Which is why, when she hugs someone, when she says, “I honor the light in you because it’s the same light that shines in me,” she means every word.
During our next class, it happens again. Kerri is leading us through a guided meditation. We are imagining that we are floating, the water perfect beneath us. When we arrived, Kerri told us to leave all our cares at the door, but mine kept coming back. But now, lying on my mat, I feel a little less worried.
The tears that come seem more like a celebration. My sister is right beside me. My word, I love my sister. And then I realize I love everyone in this class, and all those beyond these walls. I stretch my legs and almost touch Amy, the woman in front of me, so small and adorable and flexible it might be possible to fold her up and carry her out like a handbag.
The thought makes me smile. Outside, the world is an uncertain place. Crimes happen, marriages fold, families struggle. But here, on this mat, everything is working. Kerri says to us, “I want you to know how strong you are,” and I believe her. Because I don’t think she’s talking about physical strength anymore. I think she’s talking about something much more important, and so valuable it feels like gold.
Kerri teaches at Fitness One in Alma, and at Yogaterrium in Fort Smith. You can find out more about Kerri on her Facebook page, Freedom Wellness.
