Life metaphors tumble out on yoga mats in Manhattan

A yoga session reconciles Deborah Lindsay Williams' divergent lives in Manhattan and Abu Dhabi, even if her chakras remain unaligned.

Revisiting downtown Manhattan is a stark contrast to Deborah Lindsay Williams' other life in Abu Dhabi. Ron Antonelli / Bloomberg
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We are in New York for our annual holiday, a whirlwind of juggling work, family and friends, and as usual New York’s assault on my senses both overwhelms and delights me. Arriving here from the quiet of Abu Dhabi during a summer Ramadan, I am aware that I’ve lost my “Manhattan callouses”, which used to inure me from the city’s noise, dirt, and general chaos. And yet of course, the chaos is part of what makes New York what it is: that you can turn a crowded corner and happen upon a few musicians playing salsa music in a little plaza while people dance, happily whirling and shimmying with complete abandon. It’s chaos, transformed into an impromptu celebration of summer.

Unlike Abu Dhabi in the summer, when we all hibernate in the air-conditioning, summer in New York is lived outside, which means that everyone in the city must confront a ubiquitous urban species: the exercisers.

These people roam the streets in winter months, too, but then they are swaddled in cold-weather layers. Come summer, all the bodies emerge: gym rats with bulging biceps and tiny T-shirts, type-A workaholics whose spinning classes are their raison d’être, shuffling joggers in concert T-shirts from 1978, maniacal cyclists tearing through the streets on bicycles that cost more than my car. This endless parade of fitness makes me wistful for Saadiyat Beach, where it is still possible to walk for long stretches in relative solitude.

The other morning as I walked to a coffee shop, two twenty-somethings with perky ponytails and fluorescent trainers almost ran me down as they chattered through their morning run. They looked so offended that I had taken up space on their pavement that it crossed my mind to stick out my foot and see if I could get them both to fall over, like spandex-covered dominoes.

But I resisted my baser impulses and instead gave in to the urban version of peer pressure: I went to a yoga class. Yoga is everywhere in New York. Every gym, it seems, offers a yoga class that promises thinner thighs and inner peace, all for one low introductory fee. And while yoga is great for bodies like mine, which spend too much time hunched over a keyboard, I’m not a real yogini. If you ask me to “breathe out of my left nostril” or “unblock my chakras,” I will burst out laughing.

Inspired (and infuriated) by all the Lululemon-clad bodies hogging the sidewalks, I trotted off to my favourite yoga studio. I’ve been going to this same place on and off for years – I’m a creature of habit, I guess (probably because my chakras are blocked). Yoga teachers like to say that the way we work through the various poses shows us how we deal with life’s obstacles: do we breathe through problems, do we clench and get frustrated, do we wobble, fall over, try again?

I don’t usually take comments like these seriously, because who wants to admit that she finds her life metaphors on a yoga mat? But then as I struggled with a pose called Warrior III, I realised that maybe there’s some truth in what the teacher said. Warrior III involves making the shape of a capital letter T with one’s body: balance on one leg with arms stretched forward alongside your ears and the other leg extended backwards. Like many yoga poses, Warrior III works through contradictions: find balance by reaching in opposing directions. As I wobbled, the yoga teacher suggested thinking about my leg and arm as a continuous line of energy rather than separate parts. Sure enough, the wobbling stopped.

There’s the metaphor: in our increasingly transient world, where people move around for work or school or love, don’t many of us struggle with feeling pulled between two (or more) places? When I’m in New York, I think about Abu Dhabi, and vice versa. But perhaps the trick is to see my different cities as extensions of each other, rather than as “home” versus “away.”

That’s a yoga metaphor I can live with. Just don’t ask me about my chakras.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi