tie me up, tie me down

The nostalgia for my prenatal yoga class back in Washington finally drove me to search out a yoga studio here in Paris, though I was dubious about what the results might be. No offense to the francophone yoga practitioner – while I admire with all my being the ascetically toned “serious” yoga body, I do love my yoga to come with a healthy soupçon of affirmation and aromatherapy. And, preferably, some tinkling bells. I haven’t spoken very much with my inner self lately, but I find it comforting to assume I have one. This is really not very French at all, unless it involves a leather couch and an hourly rate.

The yoga studio in our neighborhood is on the main shopping avenue running up to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s actually more than a studio – it’s an Institute, which provides teacher training to its most serious students along with reluctant classes for the hoi polloi. The main space has big windows facing onto the street – discreetly shielded by sheets of frosted glass, installed to about halfway up, like bifocals – between a small brasserie and a shop selling fancy underwear. But you enter the studio through a courtyard door, accessed by a wrought-iron, glass-plated gate (When I went to the class for the first time, I actually got stuck in the courtyard on the way out. Most Parisian exterior doors have a wall button that you have to push in order to be let out of the building. Try as I might, I could not find the button for this exterior door, and only managed to succeed in opening the glass-plated window in the wrought iron – which of course I could not get to close again. I had to wait for my rescue, Estragon-like, until someone else was coming in the building, all the while being fanned by the cold wind gusting in through the wrought iron).

There are heavy red velvet curtains just inside the door, to keep out the cold, which you push through to get into a foyer with a small reception desk facing a set of bookshelves on which you are meant to leave your shoes. All this was familiar enough that I did not let myself be deterred by the extensive health questionnaire I was asked to fill out as precursor to yoga pour femmes enceintes – in France, pregnancy is a condition, which accords you all sorts of privileges and special treatment that I accept guiltily and gratefully, but may the anger of the gods fall upon you should you lift anything heavier than a hatbox or a champagne bottle. I only began to worry a little upon entering the studio space itself. It’s in what used to be the main salon or ballroom in the building’s previous life, still hardwood parquet floors with a grand fireplace and lots of decorative plasterwork. But directly beneath the plasterwork the walls are hung with wooden boards, which themselves in turn are hung with ropes and various tackle-like equipment. Silence reigned in the studio, even as a teacher or two appeared along with a few more lumpen pregnant women. I just stood in the middle of the room in my yoga pants, waiting, as the rest of the women started dragging out mats and pads and bolsters and strange looking wooden contraptions. Finally one of the teachers told me rather gently to sit down over there.

The yoga teachers (named Helga, Nanette, and Alexandrine) do not dress in the height of yoga chic or ballet tights, as I might have imagined. Instead they wear tee-shirts printed with the Institute logo and short, gathered knit bloomers. The whole effect is very Soviet-era gymnastics team, equal parts severe and silly. The teachers are presided over by Madame, who is married to the studio founder, is invested with an iron rod in her spine, and wears a skirt instead of the bloomers. She didn’t stay for the whole class, but every time she drifted into the room all the teachers suddenly looked like they were being tasered.

The fact that I noticed this at all is something of a wonder, since most of my conscious thought was taken up in absorbing the truly strange things that were happening to me. Instead of beginning with music or any sets of vaguely meditative stretches, the little clutch of teachers clustered around me and busily set to with a mass of straps, pillows and wooden blocks, arranging me and my limbs over the back of a low wooden arch in an uncomfortable back bend and then using the straps to fasten me in place. All of this happened with a minimal exchange of words – as happens often here, I felt like I had stumbled into a system whose rules had been inscribed in everyone else’s DNA, and that it could only be incomprehensibly rude for me to question what I ought to know already and would certainly come to understand in time if I were only patient and attentive. So by the time I thought to weakly raise my voice – what happens if there is a fire alarm? – the teachers had already moved on, in their bloomers, to the next pregnant woman and were out of range.

This went on for the next silent hour-and-a-half, and I moved from the wooden arch to a folding chair to a sort of balance beam to finally hanging from one of the wall-ropes like an untidy side of beef. I had a pounding headache, which I mentioned hesitantly to Helga, the most approachable-looking of the teachers. She scurried off to consult with Madame, with whom she returned, and they both stood gazing at my shoulders for a few minutes, frowning. Apparament it was all a question of posture, and the answer to the question was that mine was very bad. Madame sucked in her breath, planted her feet on either side of me, and wrenched my shoulders into the proper position while Helga exerted an equal but opposite pressure on my spinal column. I gasped, and Madame tut-tutted – “It is difficult the first time but it will be better when the muscles are re-educated.”

At that point Nanette, the smallest teacher, took the opportunity to ask Madame what she ought to do next with her particular pregnant lady. Without letting go of my shoulders or turning her head, Madame hissed, “Nanette, I am sick and tired of telling you one hundred times what you should already know. Go away.” Poor Nanette slunk away, and I wanted to. Re-education indeed.

It’s clear to me that the problem isn’t really the yoga, but actually about managing the sense of disjunction that is always present under the surface as a foreigner in another country. Most of the time I find the displacement exhilarating, a tonic. But the class was the first time that instead of a displacement I felt a dislocation, like a phantom limb wrenched out of joint. I thought, maybe I just don’t belong here. And of course, I don’t. That’s the point. But I like to feel more in control of my stranger-ness, and I suppose there was something distressingly literal about being tied up in a dark room where no one would talk to me.


I stayed through to the end of the class, and even came to one more – no one could say I didn’t try – but the next week I checked out a prenatal yoga video from the American Library featuring a long-legged blond Californian in a catsuit who softly coaches me through the poses while sitting next to a running stream. G and I watched the video together the first time through, comfortably ensconced in a pink armchair and letting our inner selves imagine the actual work of stretching.