When my father fell ill, around 2002, I moved in temporarily with my parents on Long Island while my husband moved to Indiana for a visiting assistant professorship for the year. My father was in both physical and cognitive decline and I found his two doctors woefully inadequate. I had a long list of tasks that included finding a new neurologist, figuring out my parents’ finances, finding a lawyer to draft a durable power of attorney, and so on. Because symptoms included a stiffening of his limbs, shaky balance, and difficulty walking, I was also scouring local low-cost resources that might help.
There was a time when I thought yoga was a silly new agey fad for skinny white women, a hippy thing that was going mainstream. I didn’t want any part of it. But I was willing to try anything that might help my father, and gentle chair yoga for seniors seemed as good a place to start as any. I must have read somewhere that it helps with flexibility and balance. The class met in the evenings in a smallish, dimly lit room in a senior center. On the first day, I asked the instructor if I could join my father to help him and translate if needed even though I wasn’t signed up for the class, and she agreed. She was a compact, dark-skinned Black woman with long braids down her back. I remember noticing her muscular arms highlighted by the lycra tank tops she wore, but it was her energy that stays with me.
My father and I sat in the front row, and I prompted him to “breathe” in Korean again and again. Always a talkative, inquisitive man, he had lost much of his speech by that point and it was hard to tell how much he was able to follow along. The instructor had a gentle, encouraging way about her that all the seniors responded to, including my father. After one class, she cupped my father’s face with her hands and looked him in the eyes; they both smiled widely and held each other’s gaze for a few moments. It was a wordless human connection without judgment or pity. In witnessing it, I felt a mixure of awe, gratitude, and shame. The yoga teacher was warm to my father, but cooler, more guarded with me, because, despite my strained politeness with her, I couldn’t disguise my curt, impatient directives to my father, and tone doesn’t need translation. My grief came out as anger; the energy I was bringing into the room was all wrong. I don’t know how much the yoga helped my father physically, but it was in that room with that instructor that I witnessed the power of the mind-body connection.
When my father died in early 2004, my husband and I were living in New Jersey. I needed a way to manage my grief. The community yoga class met once a week in the evening, so I signed up and bought a yoga mat. The instructor was a short, round white woman, maybe in her 40s, with loose, light brown curls that framed her round face. She had the patient tone of a cheerful but firm grade school teacher. She was very precise in her instruction not just about posture and breath, but about how each movement was affecting different bodily systems, how they connected to the functioning of various internal organs. She led us through meditation with soothing words about releasing tension, feeling it leave through our fingertips with each cleansing breath. I marveled at her flexibility when she demonstrated various poses, as if even her bones were pliable – back bends, forward bends, side twists all executed with fluid ease. Obviously this came from extensive practice, but also, it seemed, from belief, from the mind willing the body into position. At the end of each session, lying in shavasana (corpose pose), the weight of my body relaxing into the ground, I felt my former skepticism give way to something like surrender.
Talking to my father’s neurologist, I’d come to realize that western science and medicine have few answers, especially when it comes to understanding something like the human brain. Neurology may offer many fascinating questions for researchers to pursue, but doesn’t yield many satisfying explanations for families like ours about what caused the cortical degeneration of my father’s brain – was it the long-term effects of viral infections from childhood? childhood poverty and poor diet? genetics? chronic stress? Maybe all of the above. But, I believe, mostly the stress, a lifetime of it. Worry can wear a body down.
Over the years, I’ve noticed more health news headlines about the effects of chronic stress that only confirmed what I felt to be true for my father. And along similar lines, more headlines about how to manage stress, about the benefits of mindfulness, meditation, and practicing gratitude; about the critical role of our gut microbiome in overall health, including mental health. I was unlearning the atomistic approach to health along with the rest of the west, I suppose; decolonizing my mind and accepting that maybe cultures that have been around for many thousands of years knew a thing or two about keeping human bodies alive and well that modern western epistemes could not recognize.
In Korea, seaweed soup (miyuk guk) is the traditional food one has on one’s birthday. But I only learned much later that the soup is really for the benefit of the birthing mother, not the child. Full of iron, calcium, and other nutrients, it’s what mothers eat after delivery. My mother, who has always felt she knew better than doctors anyway, made gallons of seaweed soup for me, along with a pumpkin porridge, after the birth of my first child. I ate and ate until I could eat no more.
Contrary Frog 