I don’t need to reintroduce Nduta, do I? Neither do I need to rehash Dar’. Or how twisted you guys are here. The response, even surprised her. But she feels that the story may have cast her as a one dimensional kind of chick. Which she insists she isn’t. She was a girl who had been chaste for 300 days and jumped at an opportunity that presented itself. Very few of you know what that feels like. (The 300 day chaste thing, not the other thing).
So she said she would write something that doesn’t involve her kneeling (cough) and hopefully exorcise the demons of Tanzania. So she wrote about what anyone else would write about; yoga.
By Nduta
You can always tell who’s new at yoga by how they breathe. Regulars at yoga class take deep, regular breaths through the nose. Even when doing one of those crazy poses like side crow, where you are basically carrying your entire body weight on your wrists, they never gasp, and they never, ever pant.
I love to watch these newbies, especially the men who have some gym experience, but have so obviously came to yoga just to check out women in yoga pants. Yoga pants, by the way, are a necessary part of the practice – you have to wear something that is fitting enough that it doesn’t get in the way as you are twisting & contorting away. These guys strut in, chests puffed out and looking everyone in the eye (regular yogis hardly look anyone in the eye during practice; yoga is such a private, meditative thing that it almost seems intrusive). They stride in wearing those noisy track suits, chuckling as they take off their shoes and socks, because, seriously, what kind of sissy exercise routine is this where you have to be barefoot? I mean, really?
So they take off their triple padded sneakers and the class begins with child’s pose – you kneel on the mat, knees far apart, then you sit on your heels with your arms stretched out in front of you – and even with my eyes closed, I can feel them grinning away at all the behinds now in the air.
But shortly, the stupid grins disappear & the huffing and puffing begins as we get deeper into the practice. The grins turn into grimaces as we step on our palms with our heads on our knees in gorilla pose (these names!), hardly any of them can touch their toes, let alone step on their palms. And by the time we are doing wheel pose, they have basically collapsing into a huffing puffing heap.
I don’t blame them though – yoga is tough for men for anatomical reasons. Men have narrower hips and less flexible joints than women, and that makes it difficult for them to make their bodies fold upon themselves. Proportionally, men get injured more often than women during yoga, and suffer damage that is far worse, including fractures, dislocations and shattered backs – especially if you are a macho guy trying to force yourself into a challenging pose just to prove a point.
It doesn’t help that yoga is done in a quiet room, with soft music piping at volume level 2. The kind of music played depends on the instructor – there’s one guy who likes playing some instrumental clarinet or flute music; there’s another lady who plays empowering stuff like Alicia Keys’ Superwoman, and there’s another one who goes the full shebang and plays Hare Krishna chants. It’s easy to underestimate an exercise routine that is done with flute music at volume level 2, especially if you’re from the world of gym/aerobics where the standard is that infernal techno electronic dance music at full blast.
The newbies who do well are the ones who are newly single. I can tell from the fire in their eyes’ the determination to prove to themselves, and the world, that they are still here. If you take the concentration, passion and intensity they exude, and bottle it, Kenya would attain middle-income status way before 2020.
There’s one woman at yoga I really admire. First of all, yoga in Nairobi is generally a mzungu thing, with a few Asians here and there, even though it originates in India. A friend of mine likes to rant against the “cultural appropriation”, and though I hear where she’s coming from, I don’t agree – culture is really all about borrowing and sharing ideas. Imagine if the Hittites of Anatolia – my history books, if I remember, said they were the first to smelt and work iron – started calling in their iron tools, because, yo, it’s a Hittite thing. Where would that leave us all?
Anyway, this mzungu lady is built like a real African woman, with a narrow waist and heavy hips. She’s not thin, but is clearly the most advanced in the class, with incredible upper body strength that supports her entire body weight seemingly effortlessly. These days, I can almost do what she does, when I summon strength from the deepest part of my soul.
Still, there’s a part of me that feels like an impostor. Growing up, I was always the fattest kid my class. OK, second-fattest, there’s one girl who had these rolls around her belly like I did. During P.E., if she was absent from school, you can be sure that I would come last in running. I even empathize with those huffs and puffs coming from the back of the room, considering that pretty much described every single P.E. class of my life.
But I didn’t dwell on it too much as a kid, for two reasons. One, my mum always told us how beautiful and healthy I was – I believed “healthy” was a compliment, which, coming from my mum, it was. But the other reason is that I was always top in class. When you are number one in every single subject, you can brush off the P.E. thing.
The weight fell off inexplicably when I had my first baby, and after the second one, I lost even more weight. I don’t like talking about this because I really don’t know how it happened, and when I say that, most women think I’m lying and just flossing. But it’s true, I’m 10 kgs lighter than before I had kids, and I don’t know why. It troubles me because I didn’t learn anything, so in the future, if I need to lose weight, I don’t have any lessons to draw from.
I started doing yoga about nine months ago, and soon after, that famous song on yoga that gets radio play a million times a day was released. So that brought a lot of curious faces to the yoga studio – but nearly all of them never came back after one or two classes. Especially the men.
So I started doing yoga not to lose weight, but because I had trouble sleeping. Physically, I’d be tired, but my mind would refuse to shut down, whirling and whirling around endlessly. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that just a few months earlier, I had been gasping for a different reason – my partner of four years, with whom I had two children, strangled me within an inch of my life. As his fingers crushed my throat, our son, six months old at the time, woke up and rolled over in his crib, to see his mother suffocating under his father’s hands. My son didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound. He just lay there wide-eyed and silent, and for months after, I couldn’t get his face out of my mind as I tried to go to sleep.
So yoga helped. It made my body tired, but crucially, there’s a point at the end of a yoga class where you focus your mind, and bring it under your control, without dwelling on any particular thought. Think of water flowing over a surface, but the surface actually doesn’t get wet. The room is utterly quiet, except for the Hare Krishna chant.
Some people have a problem lying on their back in a quiet room with a Hare Krishna chant playing in the background. I understand why, especially if you happen to be familiar with the idea of “backmasking”. If you’ve never heard of backmasking, you probably have never played a cassette tape, and your music memories start with CDs, or (the horror!) an MP3 player or iPod.
Anyway, backmasking is when a sound or message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. It is usually associated with Satanism and DMX for some reason, but although everyone said you could hear devil messages when you played the tapes backward, I’ve never met anyone who could actually play anything backward. (You were supposed to press Play, Rewind and Record simultaneously to hear the backmasked message, but I don’t know anyone whose cassette player could actually do that).
So there are those who think it’s kind of spooky to listen to chants, in case there’s some subliminal programming going on. I don’t, I dumped the whole idea of backmasking with a bunch of other beliefs I had grown up with.
Most of my unravelling came at university. When I was 21, in third year, I had a boyfriend who was an incredible preacher. He was the kind of preacher who would begin a sermon with a quiet intensity that would build and build, until it reached its crescendo and people would come trembling to the altar.
After service, we would walk back to his room in that post-service afterglow. But there’s an emotional vulnerability that comes with that kind of intensity, I think, so after church he would always want us to kiss or caress each other, and I would, because it felt good (but not going the whole way, because we were saving ourselves for marriage).
So one afternoon, after showing me what a 69 was, he said we should pray and repent from our sins. I knelt, and he prayed that God would help me be stronger to say no to him. What surprised me was his sincerity – really, he genuinely believed that our purity was my responsibility. That struck me as terribly unfair – why was I always the one expected to say no? What if I wanted to say yes? In those circles, there’s something that sexualises women all the time – you must watch how you dress, how you sit, how you sway your hips, in case you are leading someone astray. But when a woman goes ahead and acts sexual, then it became huge uproar, since the burden of chastity is all yours to bear. So that’s the reason why I don’t feel responsible for someone else’s purity.
So going back to the silence at the end of the yoga class, as I lie there on the yoga mat, I realise that there’s some inconsistency in my beliefs. It seems fuzzy and New-Age ish, the kind of stuff on Oprah – the stuff about being one with your consciousness and so on. My yoga instructors don’t go the whole way into the chants and meditation because that scares people away. But yoga is all about conquering the body, though conquering the mind. If you can make your body a slave to your mind, then you begin being more aware of yourself. Inevitably, you become more aware of others around you, and the consequences that your actions have on them. No wonder every session we end the class by saying, “May the light in me shine the light in you, and the light in you, shine the light within me.” You can’t say this 3-4 times a week without starting to actually think about it.
Still, even as the class comes to an end, I realise that there’s one thing in yoga that men have an advantage in. Remember when I said you’re supposed to lie there and not think of anything in particular? Now that I’ve tried it, I think men really mean it when you ask them what they are thinking about, and they say, “Nothing.”