Neesha is a yoga teacher on a podcast called “Yoga Today.” I am old enough to remember a time when, if I said the word “podcast,” people would picture fishing in water filled with polliwog pods, or a child dressed as a sweet pea pod in her second-grade play about the four food groups. Yes, the early seventies in the last century were a time when people thought Tang, an orange-flavored powder that made a beverage when mixed with water, was good for you; as my mother put it, “If it was good enough for the astronauts, it’s good enough for you, Lady Jane.”
I remember a time before answering machines, when if someone wasn’t home when you called, the phone just rang and you called back later. You might leave a note taped to the person’s door asking him to call you, if he lived nearby.
Neesha, conversely, was born into a time of internet podcasts. In fact, her birth may be a podcast. You can probably view it on You Tube. Fifteen years ago a man who was once my lover got married online to a woman who was once my lover. He was at his parents’ house and she was in a treehouse in their backyard when they took their vows. In part, I attribute their wretched unhappiness since their wedding day to the circumstances of their ceremony. I don’t have anything against the internet; I just think people ought to be together in person when they get married. This might seem like an old-fashioned view for me to hold when you consider the fact that three weeks ago I moved 3,000 miles from Petaluma, California to upper Manhattan to live with a man I met on an internet dating site called Nerve.com.
That man, White Chocolate, is the one who told me about the Yoga Today podcast. He told me on the phone before we met. Now I live with him, very happily so far, and we get up in the mornings in our apartment, which looks out over a 1,400 acre park called Inwood Hill Park, we spread out our yoga mats on the floor (his mat is extra long because he’s six feet five), and we do yoga with Neesha.
Neesha, as I’ve mentioned, is young. She also has the flexibility of a flying Wallenda, the strength of an ox, and the lissome frame of a Greek goddess. When I complain about her to W.C., I never mention any of these facts. Instead I say,
“Neesha is a complete moron. When she was talking about hanumanasana (splits pose), she said Hanuman was a person going to seek his beloved. He wasn’t! He was a monkey, son of the wind god Vayu, who was going to seek his friend Rama’s beloved, Sita! Also, when she goes on and on about the nature of the universe, a lot of the stuff she says is just wrong.”
“She’s a yoga teacher, not a college professor,” W.C. says reasonably.
“She still has a responsibility to read a book so that the things she says are accurate. Or at least she could listen to an older yogini who knows what she’s talking about and take some notes,” I reply.
W.C. smiles at me fondly and a little tolerantly. He is a bright man, so he probably realizes that I hate Neesha for the following reasons:
- Neesha is young, and I’m middle aged.
- Neesha has an ass you could bounce a quarter on, and I just went on a diet for the first time in my life to prevent a looming expansion into an extra-large sweatpant.
- Neesha is perky and cute as a button, and when I was her age (somewhere between twelve and twenty-two), I was stringy, dour, and hunched over. At least I’m no longer stringy and hunched over, thanks to twenty years of chocolate malteds and yoga.
Yoga really improves the posture, and Neesha, who has perfect posture, is a very clear and precise instructor, despite the fact that she yammers happily on about esoteric truths that are no more real to her than the most recent “Star Wars” movie. Neesha’s mother probably wasn’t born yet when the first “Star Wars” film came out, whereas I went to see it when it opened in Los Angeles. Sometimes on the podcast, Neesha styles her hair in two buns over her ears and dresses in a white Princess Leia-like yoga outfit. I am not making this up. She talks about “the Force” and its relationship to yoga. W.C. looked over at me with genuine concern once while she was doing this; I think he was worried I would have a heart attack.
Here are some of the things Neesha says even when she is not dressed as Princess Leia:
“Feel the intrinsic essence of YOU! It’s good to be alive! Suh-WEET!” she says while I breathe into an intense awareness of the feeling that my hamstrings are about to snap.
“Intrinsic essence is redundant,” I snarl. I am too out of breath to complain about the dismemberment of the word “sweet” into two syllables, and the objectionable nature of the slang itself. I can’t see W.C.’s face because his head is between his legs, but I assume he’s rolling his eyes.
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