The Highly Haphazard Woman

EVERYONE WANTS WOMEN TO BE MINDFUL, CALM, AND DELIBERATE. BUT, AS TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER WRITES, SOMETIMES A LITTLE CHAOS GETS THINGS DONE.

- Taffy Brodesser-Akner

My yoga teacher, who is 23 and beautiful as a song and who told me one day that she had gone into the yoga arts because the acting business made her feel like she was “being eaten alive,” stands over our inert bodies, and this is what she says: “We are slaves to the noise in our heads.” Then she says, “Leave your thoughts at the door. You can pick them up on your way out.”

She says this twice over a full 10 minutes of a 60-minute class that could be spent exercising but is instead spent lying on the floor. She says it in addition to the six-minute speech she gave before class and the three-minute period of rest she’ll give us after class, at which point we’ll get another 90 seconds for her to remind us of these values and then invoke spiritual themes to thank us for having shown up.

In the middle, she’ll comment on the fact that, by now, our thoughts, which were left at the door for us to pick up on the way out, may have crept back into the studio. She says to regard them like clouds passing by in the chyron of my brain, nothing to be addressed or absorbed.

We make eye contact when she says this. I narrow my eyes slightly and purse my lips and nod thoughtfully, and I wonder what she would do if she knew what was going on in my cloudy-sky mind right now. I wonder what she would do if she knew I had no intention of stopping my thoughts. I wonder what she would do if she knew about my thoughts—how I was thinking these thoughts about thoughts when they were supposed to be drifting away like clouds. I think if she knew, the roof would blow off this entire purple studio.