I ended up in Thailand because it’s my philosophy that as long as you’re flying through a country, you might as well spend some time there. (Although this did once get me stuck in Brunei for too long.) I chose Chiang Mai because it’s known as a center for yoga, reiki, meditation, and Thai massage courses. Because I am very interested in and extremely afraid of (my two prerequisites for all my travel activities) touching people, a massage course seemed like a good way to end my trip.

I researched courses, asked friends for recommendations, and visited specific schools, but after a few days in Chiang Mai, I lacked the motivation to commit to 5 or 10 days with a hard-fast schedule, or pack up and leave my guesthouse, a tree-shaded complex in which I’d splurged on a $15/night garden-style room with a king-size bed and spacious living area. Resistant to signing up, I berated myself for my laziness. “When will you have another opportunity to learn Thai massage?” a voice asked. “When will you have another opportunity to live freely without your cellphone attacking you?” my own voice countered.

My first few days were marked by the decision-making fretting that has accompanied every new destination on this journey. I picked my fingernails, tossed and turned in my sleep, and ate my anxiety in mass quantities of mango, coconut, banana, and the occasional salted insect. The hardest decisions I’ve made on this trip have involved not doing something — not going to India, not posting the blog I wrote about trekking, and finally, not enrolling in a massage course.

Which left me faced with the backpacker conundrum — how to fill the next 10 days — move on to the river-town of Pai, volunteer at an elephant park, day trip to Burma? Everywhere you go on the road, if you take a look around, there’s always another destination, another must-see “monkey show,” another opportunity to miss. But here the activity touts were so passive, sleeping in their tuk-tuks or sangtheows, my only exchange seemed to be some version of:
“Hey, Mr. Long-Haired Guy, Where you from?”
“The U.S.”
“U.S.A., then why you so short?”

This “city,” especially the old city where I stayed, was so quiet and peaceful with its Wat (Buddhist temple) lined streets that I slipped easily into a near aimlessness, a daily yoga class as my only foundation.

Even though I’d launched my trip with a yoga retreat in Bali, I had not anticipated that yoga would become the through-line, the constant that I’d return to again and again at other retreat centers and studios, as well as guest house rooms and balconies. Here in Chiang Mai the class offerings and teachers were particularly strong, and I branched out beyond my usual vinyasa flow to take some special classes like “yin yoga for the digestive system,” “modified ashtanga series,”  and “mandala flow.” Each night I’d peruse the schedule and turn whatever class I chose for the following day into the main event, often surrounding it with a wander to a used bookstore or a vegetarian restaurant.

I kept to myself quite a bit for these two weeks, but by the end, I was regularly talking to people. It may be a universal rule of yoga that if you show up at the same studio every day, and the studio has a heart, you’ll eventually have friends. I started to feel at home at Wild Rose when I noticed that Rose would greet me before I’d even entered the place, catching me or my ponytail through the window.

On my last day, I booked the latest flight out so that I could attend a “visions and vinyasa” workshop led by Jenny Blake, a teacher and life coach from NY. I really wanted to take the opportunity for a body-centered inquiry into what I envision for myself when I return to San Francisco. Home had definitely been on my mind. My intention for this part of the trip was, as I’d written in my journal, to prepare for coming home.

This was the last leg (not counting a quick visit to a friend in Taiwan), my final chance to practice all that I’d learned without distractions. I ate most of my meals in silence (no reading while food was on the table), tried to walk everywhere with awareness, and sat for meditation in the mornings with a renewed focus. I also took the opportunity to dabble in my growing interests. I tried a one-day Reiki course and a half-day back/shoulder/neck massage course to see if next time a longer course might be for me. Mostly, I did a whole lot of nothing except rest and absorb, treating it like a savasana before I curled into the fetal position, sat up, and opened my eyes to face the Western world.

In yoga, savasana has always been my most challenging pose. To just lie there and do nothing is incredibly hard. To arrive in a new city and do nothing or close to nothing, emptying the space of activities instead of filling it with them is incredibly hard. ”Some people say that savasana is the most important pose of all,” Jenny said during that final workshop, “That it is the only pose that matters.” How true, I thought, how very true.

A dozen of us sit around an oval table, two candles offering the only light. In the main cities of Nepal, the electricity is out for around 12 hours a day. Load shedding (or rationing) it’s called, and the schedule varies day to day. Generators and solar power exist, but tonight, on the top level of the Sadhana Yoga and Meditation center, high above Lake Fewa, the candle flames set the perfect atmosphere for an impromptu concert.

A German guy has just returned from his trek, returned to this place where he’d previously spent a week, a place that feels like home. Those who know him hail his return with requests for songs on his portable traveler’s guitar. He opens with a narrative song about a monkey who yearns to fly only to realize he cannot land. Soon, I’m laughing harder than I have in weeks and singing along to a catchy chorus that goes, “Hey monkey, monkey… Hey monkey, monkey…”

On the far side of the lake are pinpricks of light from city of Pokhara, where every establishment caters to travelers — convenience stores that do your laundry, paragliding companies that will arrange your jungle safari, and too many restaurants misinformed about backpacker eating habits. I did not come to Nepal for white bread toast and spaghetti. Perhaps Lonely Planet can send a memo.

The scene in Pokhara is a more laidback version of Thamel, the backpacker neighborhood in Kathmandu, and a more uptempo version of the main town at Chitwan National Park — the other places I’ve been. Touts are significantly less annoying in Nepal than in other countries, but if like me, you don’t have a plan upon arrival, adventure-information overload is a danger. Whether you are ready or not, within a day almost any company can whisk you away to trek in mountains so high that altitude sickness is a reality. And I was not ready.

I came to Sadhana to rest my eyes from pinballing the storefronts, to find some likeminded and likehearted travelers, and to center myself before taking on the mountains, rivers, and as it would turn out, the sky.

The bell rings at 5:30 am, and we gather in the yoga hall for warm up exercises and morning meditation. The practice is centered around the repetition of mantras (“Om” and “So Hum”) externally and internally for concentration. My mind wanders as it always does during my own morning meditation, but I am surprised by lack of self-judgment, that in the past year it has become a tiny bit easier for me to sit still.

Following our morning herbal tea, Divyam rings the bell. “It’s Neti time!” he shouts from the balcony. When we are all gathered in the garden area, he begins, “Namaste and welcome to this nasal cleansing program.” All of the newcomers are nervous. Unlike me, they have never poured salty water into one nostril and watched it come out the other. Some people sound like they are choking or drowning, partially because they are laughing. The only appropriate way to end a group nasal cleansing is with a ridiculous physical exercises. Up and down we bounce, fingers tucked under our armpits in the chicken dance, forcefully blowing out excess water through our noses.

Our morning yoga session is led by the center founder, Asanga. He reminds me of a wizard and leads us in pranayama (breathing exercises) that I know but do not practice often enough. During the physical portion, we begin with pre-asanas that are like kindergarten calisthenics and then asanas (poses) that we hold for three minutes, timed by a stopwatch. It is one of my intentions to be open to a yoga style that is different from my regular vinyasa flow. I figure if I haven’t cut off friends in the States who practice Bikram the least I can do is be open to this branch of Hatha that extends back to India and the very roots of yoga. And while the method is very different, I have to admit that in this Himalayan land, “downward dog” looks a lot more like a “mountain pose” as it’s called here.

Every few days, we practice laughing yoga, a traditional (Buddhist) practice that has us squealing and cackling for no reason at all. At this time, Santo, a young guy who speaks little English and works in the background, runs up from wherever he is on the property, bursts into the room and breaks into a fit of hysterics that energizes us even more.

Usually, our morning walk is short and leisurely. We stroll past the “Great Compassion School,” or down to “Happy Village,” or kick around a soccer ball. The highlight of the day is breakfast, either because we’ve already been up for four-and-a-half hours, or because the banana lassi, lightly spiced like the masala tea, and the muesli with curd (yogurt) is amazing. One morning we count almost a dozen different items from coconut to apples to dried dates in our bowls. Because I am language inept, I learn only one Nepali phrase, but I practice it (and am corrected) at every meal. “Mitho cha!” Delicious!

The bulk of the midday is for hanging out. This means we sit on the veranda, watch the paragliders twirl above the lake, and engage in the typical backpacker banter. Q: How long are you staying? A: I don’t know, maybe 4 days, or 7 days, or maybe 10 days. Q: Where are you going next? A: I don’t know, maybe Thailand or Burma, or maybe I’ll just stay here? Q: Where is the best place you’ve been? A: India. Definitely India.

Surprisingly, I find myself looking forward to the noon meditation session. I’m headed into a Tibetan monastery for a Buddhism/meditation course soon, and I’d been afraid that I might OD on meditation. But the opposite occurs. I feel like I’m just warming up. As my larger trip begins to take on a shape of its own, it’s apparently unfolding around yoga and meditation. I seem to seek this out wherever I land, as if I’m taking a real world survey course in Eastern philosophy and practice.

And I’m a spiritual lightweight compared to the two girls who are finishing up their 21 days at Sadhana shortly before going into a hardcore Vipassana meditation course. I like them very much immediately, and in the couple days that our time overlaps, our connection feels effortless. I make friends while I am here, those I will catch up with when, on our own schedules, we all  re-enter civilization.

In the late afternoon, we practice karma yoga, thirty minutes of kitchen help, watering plants, cleaning the yoga space, or one time, shoveling rocks. I enjoy this tiny contribution to the upkeep of the community, but there is a deeper intention behind this practice. “Yoga is union of body and mind,” Durga (Asanga’s wife) says to me. “And in this karma yoga, the yoga of action, we unite our work with our body and mind in meditation.”

It is hard to practice this work-meditation if anyone begins jabbering away while we are peeling potatoes. But I observe it in Sunita, the cook who sings softly to herself behind us, and in Ganga, the workhorse and family elder who cleans, launders, and hauls firewood, always with a smile so deep and pure it appears ancient, as if she discovered joy in a time long ago, and only she knows the secret to maintain it. Karma yoga, perhaps.

And finally, the moment we all wait for. No, no, not the snack of masala tea and popcorn, but after. Chanting! “Now we will unite our beautiful voices in beautiful melodies and spread our beautiful energy,” Durga says, rolling her T’s. No matter how many times she says “beautiful,” it never gets old. Just like her smile, equal parts love and mischief. A leader of the village women’s group, Durga is strong and nurturing, exactly as her name suggests.

Every day, we pick three mantras/chants from the list, many that I recognize from home, but that Durga explains differently. While we sing, she plays the tambourine and her nephew, Kaushal, plays the drum. He often wears a Sid Vicious “Smoke the Herb” T-shirt, and sometimes in between sending text messages, he’ll casually and naturally fall into a few repetitions of “Om Namah Shivaya.” He is passionate about chanting, and he downloads a bunch of Nepali devotional music onto a thumb drive for me, an exciting surprise for when I get home.

Kaushal is my favorite. When he suggests I get up and dance at the end of one session, I climb over my own internal  resistance and rise in my spot. Prodded by the girls, and there are only girls, soon I’m in the center of the circle dancing alone to a chanting encore. I’m stepping outside of myself in this place, or maybe it is into myself. I am at ease in this environment, and I I soon notice that I am a resource for those who are new to yoga, meditation, and chanting.

Divyam leads evening yoga, which is always a mental challenge for me. Divyam is unadulterated sweetness, disciplined and dedicated, but he has a disciple’s demeanor and lacks the knowledge of Asanga. He passes on to us only what he recently learned and is unable to answer basic questions (asked often) like why we greet the morning with moon salutations and end the day with sun salutations. I’m not sure whether it is empathy, sympathy, or compassion but even as I’m regularly annoyed by stopwatch yoga, I alternate between these warm feelings toward Divyam, as well as myself for my own frustration and lack of focus.

After dinner, we do a quick candlelight meditation. When it’s over, Divyam places his palms together and ends this session in the same manner that he ends all of them. “This program is over. Thank you and Namaste.”

Seven days is a short time for me to experiment with a new form of yoga. Seven days is a long time for me to be away from booze, bud, internet, and especially coffee. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without those habits and substances since I was fifteen years old. I was so fearful about caffeine withdrawal that I brought a small bottle of emergency Nescafe that I never opened.

I felt at home the moment I arrived in Nepal, but it is only at the end of my week at Sadhana that I feel at home within myself. We practiced everything from extreme stillness to excessive laughter to stretching our eyeballs, and in the process, we received a lifelong foundation for yoga, or an addition to my existing foundation, something I’ll carry with me on the rest of my adventure. Some people travel to discover a new world, but I think I travel to discover myself in a new world, and it took a week of focus on my “sadhana” — my practice — to turn in before looking out.

The faint moonlight silhouettes palm trees against a blue-black sky. Inside the open-air Yoga Barn studio, over twenty of us — travelers and ex-pats — gather for the first in a new bi-weekly evening series, Bali Dharma Talks, a lecture and discussion about local life.

A spotlight shines on a pull-down blackboard. “Mula Keto,” our speaker writes. It means, “That’s just the way it is.” It’s something parents say and reminds me of the American version, “Because I said so.” Except that here there is a nuance. It’s based less on about authority and more on faith. It means just do it, but also implies trust it, believe in it. “Mula Keto” is the response when kids question the many offerings, ceremonies, and rituals that define village existence.

Our speaker writes and connects “spirituality,” “humanity,” and “environment” — balanced in harmony. Above this micro-level is the macro-level, one word “Universe.” At the very top, he writes “God.” He explains that this organizational system does not come from a specific book, class, philosophy, or religion, but is the tradition imparted to him growing up. His lecture is a series of digressions, and I collect the pieces that resonate with me, tonight and at other times, creating a patchwork understanding of the culture, or many cultures (for each village is unique) here.

He describes Ubud as a village and shares a bit about his childhood back when the main street was a dirt road and the market a field, before the trees were cleared for the arrival of electricity in the mid-seventies. He is not romanticizing, but bridging, the past to present, and to the future, accepting his responsibility and teaching us about ours as the inevitable growth and change continues all around us.

Ubud is a thriving tourist town and my home base in Bali. On the surface it is similar in many ways to my true home, the Castro — a tourist mecca and a theme park that I call “Gay Disneyland.” Ubud is a Yogi Disneyland, a spiritual theme park. The stores and restaurants pull from Sanskrit and Hinduism — Satya Jewelry, Ahimsa Clothes, Atman Cafe, Lakshmi Books, Saraswati Bungalows, and Durga Burger — Ok fine, I made the last one up.

I absolutely love it here. I pretend the Yoga Barn is Yoga Tree and attend classes in the morning and events in the evening. A Kirtan led by a visiting Ozzie, Kevin James, is one of the highlights, a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, musical extravaganza, a beautiful co-mingling of voice and sound, celebrating community and expressing devotion.

With my ponytail, fisherman pants, and white (albeit tan) skin, I fit in well in this scene and am almost too comfortable. I branch out by trying a chanting night affiliated with a massage center and ashram. A candle flickers in front of a lone frangipani flower in the center of our intimate three-person triangle. A Balinese man, Putu, plays the guitar and leads us in familiar chants with unfamiliar melodies, including one with the twist of a local tongue that substitutes W’s for V’s. From our hearts, we repeat “Om Namah Shiwaya” over and over and over again.

I find it expansive to explore what I was first introduced to in my San Francisco yoga world in here in Bali. I like seeing a much larger form of the Ganesha I have on my home altar guarding the front of many of the temples, guesthouses, and stores, removing obstacles, clearing the entrance. I like seeing a performance of the Ramayana at the palace. Even though I do not take to Legong Dance, when Hanuman and his vanara army enter I excitedly poke the Canadian singer-songwriter I coerced to come along. “Look, Hanuman!” I say. “This is the best part.”

Unlike the rest of Indonesia, much of Bali is Hindu. I’m told that as time marched on, foreigners arrived, and Muslims conquered, Bali was safely isolated due to the coral that thwarted boats. The Hindu that remains is mixed with animism, and as I gather, because I’m always gathering, somewhat specific within each village.

A unifying trait is devotion, expressed in rituals and ceremonies that are so constant, time-consuming, and expensive (especially if a lot of deaths occur in a year) that I begin to wonder if they are excessive. On a long day of temple sightseeing, we pass a shocking number of processions and temple anniversaries. My driver, Apel, attended a cremation the day before. “Do the ceremonies ever get to be too much?” I finally ask him.

“Yes,” he says, laughing like I caught him. But in his laugh, I can also hear, “Mula Keto.”

I spend a big part of the day in the car with Apel, talking the whole time. He is married with a four-year old son, and he recently borrowed a large amount of money to buy a tiny piece of land, 125 sq meters, to build a house. “Every day, I wake up nervous,” he says, gesturing a hand over his heart, pumping it hard against his chest.

His English is terrific, not just the words but the slang and the sentiment. He calls one of his friends a “high-class playboy” with a hint of admiration. “But that is not me,” he says. “I have to be me.” He desperately wants to be a good father and husband, speaks apologetically about occasionally drinking Arak, the local spirit (made from palm leaves) with his friends.

He is so earnest and honest. My skin feels translucent, like it can no longer protect me. I discover we are the same age, a few months a part. He wears a Hurley T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. I feel a deep kinship with him. He teaches me much, including a new Balinese word, “taksu” — inner beauty, and I understand perfectly because I see it so clearly in him.

At Tanah Lot, I walk across the shallow ocean to the base of this temple; it’s so perfect it looks like it belongs in a snow globe. A couple hours later, I explore Uluwatu, another seaside temple, this built on a cliff so sheer and steep it is as if a sharp knife sliced off this bit of land. The view, the sense of the end of the earth, is the allure of these temples — homages to the ocean. It is a bit bizarre to feel the essence of God, then get in line behind a busload of Singaporeans to capture it in a picture. I enjoy my time in the car with Apel as much, maybe more than the temples.

On my last day in Ubud, I visit Sari Organic, the restaurant in the middle of the rice fields. I am thrilled to be outside the bustle of the town center. On the walk, I pass signs for places to rent by the month, and although I’d once thought I might seek a rental, settle for a bit and write here, I quickly realized that this trip is not for working on a project, but is a respite between projects.

I spend hours at this restaurant, many more than I intend, eating vegetables and chatting with a yogi and an Asia-phile who has been coming to Bali for twenty years. She is a New Yorker (it takes one to know one) but in the seventies, she lived in San Francisco, the Castro. She speaks with nostalgia about this time, a period along with the eighties and early nineties that I have pieced together from documentaries, archival footage, books, and friends.

The “Gay Disneyland” where I have made my home for the past 7 years may be full of tourists paying too much money for ironic underwear and bad dance music, but it is also the neighborhood where early liberation and freedom was experienced, community grew around enormous devastation and loss, and part of the foundation that allows for my queer existence was built. You can see Disneyland, or you can find the hallowed ground underneath.

As I walk back to my guesthouse on none other than Hanuman Street, I pass one of the places I have not visited on this trip, Taksu Yoga. In total, I’ve spent more than two weeks in and around Ubud, but I am only beginning to see behind the words painted on the storefronts, to discover what taksu means.

Perhaps next time I’m here I’ll rent one of those houses in the rice fields…

I am sitting on the veranda of my bungalow in a garden of blossoming flowers with Buddha and Ganesha statues shaded by the canopy of palm leaves. A mother’s foreign lullaby is punctuated by the crows of roosters, bird calls, and scooter engines. I slept for 12 hours last night, 10 hours the few nights before. I am not sure why I am so tired, whether it is the past couple years of busting my ass behind me, the emotional days of goodbyes from folks on my yoga retreat — the end of their vacation and the beginning of my adventure — or if hanging out underwater could possibly be that exhausting.

Scuba diving is the only “activity” I’ve been doing for the past week. And by that I mean watching a turtle levitating to the surface for air, a reef shark swimming amidst a school of barracuda, a sting ray flapping along the sandy bottom, a scorpion fish camouflaging itself into the wreck of a WWII U.S. cargo ship, the flatworms and starfish and clams gripping on to coral as I begin to let go of the grip on my mouthpiece. With each dive, the tiny bits of life become infinitely more interesting, the details of this underwater ecosystem more vivid.

I am in Amed (Jemeluk Beach to be more specific), a strip of villages situated on black sand beaches on the east coast of Bali. There is seemingly not much to do here. And so I wonder, “Why am I here?” This is a question I have been asking myself for weeks, with differing tones of fear and wonder.

It started with a retreat, something that felt like a mix between the Real World: Yoga Edition and yoga camp in a college dorm. Slightly outside the main part of Ubud, our compound was planted in the center of rice fields, a pool its only attraction. On that very first afternoon, a new friend and I, resting on the pool’s ledge, looked out into the jungle and eyed each other with the same trepidation: What the heck would we do all day after the yoga session?

The question was quickly answered by the two kids on the retreat, young girls who jumped into the water and proceeded to engage us both for the next one, two, or was it three hours with games — searching for my lost hairbands under water, catching rocks off the diving platform, racing to touch the bottom.

Time and space — the greatest burden and the greatest luxury.

I didn’t expect my yoga retreat to be full of Hide-and-Seek, Go Fish, I Spy, or that literally the only words I’d read during those ten days would be the book “Should I Share My Ice Cream?” I didn’t expect that my biggest adventure would be a rain-soaked, mud-drenched journey with the kids across the rice field to a temple instead of the day I climbed Mount Batur before the sun rose imperceptibly through dense clouds. That morning I fell asleep on volcanic rock heated by the earth’s core, but it was the heat of two girls sandbagging me on the dorm floor later that afternoon that warmed me the most. It’s been a long time since I’ve had friends under the age of ten. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much time.

A white flag floats in the middle of the rice field. During yoga practice my gaze, my drishti, settles upon this flag, this symbol of surrender.

There is actually nothing that needs to be done after yoga. This is an event, the main event. Each morning, we dance, laugh, sweat, and chant. During these first few days, Michael Franti plays his acoustic guitar in savasana. There is a richness to these early mornings, as if I’m touching the depths of why I am in Bali, on this trip, on this earth, and it comes not in words but tears.

There’s a reason I’ve been following my yoga teacher around for the past couple of years. When every fiber in my being is resisting joy, the simple sight of her, all that she embodies, makes me smile. And when I’m ready to take on a challenge, but unwilling to step forward, she creates an opening, asks if I want to assist in a yoga class one morning.

This is something I’ve been putting off and would’ve gladly put off until returning home. It would’ve been safer to try it in the candlelit dark of my home studio, where I could clutch the wall, bathing in a stew of my uncertainty, discomfort, and futility. But I offer what I can, what little I can, relishing the moments when I can, and pocketing the “thank you’s” of my new friends as a reminder that a little goes farther than I think, that trying is enough.

Sometimes I feel like a baby, like I’m just learning how to walk and talk — to touch with love, to laugh with kids, to connect with my eyes — to engage with my surroundings, be part of the world.

After the retreat, I sloth around Gili Trawangan for a week with friends. A dirt road skirts the perimeter of this island, and the only transport beside bicycles are tiny horse-drawn carriages. It’s amazing to see the sun rise on one side of the island and see it set from the other. In between, we eat pizza, drink Bin Tang beers, listen only to Bob Marley, and gazebo-hop from one white-sand beach to the next. Occasionally, I take a break from maximizing lethargy for a yoga class or a dive with the batfish, sweetlips, and angelfish in turquoise water so clear it seems unreal.

It isn’t all perfect. The stomach ailments, bizarre rashes, earaches, sunburns, and flip-flop chaffing wounds remind me constantly of the fragility of the body. I have been outside almost all day every day, the elements (and bacteria) are taking their toll. The brown on my feet is either tan or dirt; my hands are peeling from the salt. I need to restock my medical kit.

The goodbyes have been the most challenging — leaving the kids, my teacher, my friends from the retreat. Each one felt like my heart was being extricated via my throat, like a clown pulling endless links of a paper chain from his mouth. Some mornings I wake up with an air bubble of longing behind my solar plexus. In these times, I breathe deeper, smile wider, wrap my loneliness up with all that I can find inside. I take out my yoga mat, my inflatable meditation cushion, and my mala beads — these, and band-aids, are my most prized possessions. They anchor me when I feel lost and afraid, when I spin on where I should go, what I should do?

I decide to stay here in Amed another day even though there are must-see things I’m missing and there is nothing to do here.

In the morning, I watch women leave out their offerings of incense in front of the bungalows and upon the altar in the cafe that doubles as a bird feeder. I read and write and say hello to all the Made’s, Wayan’s, and Ketut’s on the strip, making a note for each in my journal so I can remember the names that many of the men share based on their birth order. In the afternoon, I watch boys of all ages play beach soccer, sliding and falling on the sea glass and plastic bottles and scraps of coral. Men unfurl their fishing nets or cast a line from the shore or take out their boats with peeling paint.

I walk this black sand cove in the early evening to cries of Barack Obama as the locals call Americans, and from the sounds of the languages spoken around me, I’m seemingly the only one here right now. At the end of the cove there are a bunch of large rocks, one that is particularly flat. I sit here, next to a dead crab, and chant loudly as the sun falls behind Mt Agung. I think of the kids from the retreat, and how a laundry bin became a hiding spot, the spiders became personalities with names, the little hut behind the kitchen became a clubhouse — that compound became a wonderland.

On the drive from Amed back to Ubud, I track the white flags in the rice fields. In between our marathon singalong to American stoner classics, reggae hits, and Dido, I ask my driver about these flags, and he tells me they flap in the wind, scaring the birds and keeping them away from the crop. I nod. His answer suffices. But curving around the narrow windy roads, the vista opening to vast flatbeds of water-saturated fields, I find the white flags, my own meaning, why I am here.

I recently completed a four-part yoga series for the Original Plumbing blog. Here are the links to all of the columns.

Yoga Anyone? (Oct 4, 2011)
When I first stepped into my local yoga studio three-and-a-half years ago, at the peak of my gender questioning phase, I was simply trying to get over a breakup. A couple trans guys had invited me to an ass-whooping, spiritually eye-opening class that was also quite the event with tambourine-led chanting and a soundtrack that mixed the Jackson 5 with devotional music.
Read more…

A Trans Guy Walks into a Yoga Class… Score (Oct 24, 2011)
In my early twenties, I discovered Eastern philosophy. I read books about Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and I grew very attached to non-attachment. For a brief period, I spoke in universal “We” statements, as in, “Our fundamental problem is that we deny death.” Sometimes, I went by myself to Spirit Rock Meditation Center for daylong silent retreats for LGBT folks, after which I’d scan Craigslist Missed Connections to see if any girls thought I was cute.
Read more…

Creating a Yoga Space for All: Q&A with Jacoby Ballard (Nov 9, 2011)
For this series, I reached out to Jacoby Ballard, a yoga teacher whom I admire and respect  for his dedication to bringing yoga into queer and trans community. He is the co-founder of Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, where he is an herbalist, yoga teacher, organizer, and fundraiser.
Read interview…

Spiritual Activism: A New Frame for Social Change (Dec 1, 2011)
Several years ago, I had a girlfriend with a history as a direct action activist. The cause deepest to her heart was animal rights, and she had spent many hours screaming into a bullhorn, “Your mother kills puppies,” at the homes of employees of huge companies that tortured animals for mascara testing.
Read more…

On Friday night, I was out at a queer-ish club. I don’t go out after 10 p.m. very often. I’m more of a morning person than a night owl. But since I’d already gone through the effort of leaving my house for the evening, I decided to stay after my friends bailed, long after, dancing alone. When I told them this the next morning, they were astonished. “Who are you?” more than one of them asked.

Ten years ago, I would go out semi-regularly to the spots that didn’t get going until other places closed, the Endup in particular. I was often with a friend who wore vinyl pants and feather boas. She would spend the whole night on the dance floor surrounded by shirtless gay boys with glow sticks, and I would sit in the back courtyard in my baggy Gap jeans and REI fleece, chain-smoking cigarettes and talking to the methheads until dawn. My friend would come out every hour and check on me, sit on my lap, give me a sweaty hug, and kiss me on the cheek before returning inside. Our dynamic worked. She danced. I didn’t. Ever.

From childhood through my early twenties, I only really moved my body in one setting: sports. I dove, ran, leaped, kicked, shot, hit, ran and lunged across soccer fields, baseball diamonds, rugby pitches, basketball and tennis courts. I accessed many parts of my body in those endeavors. I would dribble basketballs with my pinkies to build  strength and have friends toss lacrosse balls against my goalie helmet to eliminate flinching. Every move I made was in response to something external–a ball, a stick, a defender, someone or something to chase.

The thing about dancing is that it comes from the inside. It is self-expressive and physically creative. To have rhythm is to align with a beat, a sound, a vibration. Sometimes in yoga class, my teacher turns up the music and says, “move your body in whatever way feels good.” Cement feels good, I used to think to myself. I am moving like cement, can you tell? I almost stopped going to yoga classes because of these spontaneous dance parties. A friend just wrote a piece referencing these “painfully awkward mandatory dance breaks” with the request, “Teachers: please stop doing this.  Please. Just. Stop.”

I couldn’t agree more with this request, except that it was on my mat in a drenched tank top, totally sober that I learned to dance, or to let myself dance. I kept my eyes closed the first few times, then I would sway my arms in a forward fold. Eventually I got myself to stand upright and sway. A discomfort would pervade my whole body; I felt so visible standing and moving at the same time. If the music allowed for bouncing, I would often try that, calming myself down like a parent does a baby. Now when I know the dance break is coming on from the staple songs that serve as cues, I remind myself that yoga is a practice, a time to confront that which is “painfully awkward.” Lately, I’ve been working on getting my hands above my head. I immediately feel a tightness across my chest, a reflexive need to drop my shoulders, draw into a hunch, and hide the breasts I no longer have.

A few days ago, I watched this video of an Australian trans man, Paige Elliot Phoenix, on a reality singing/dance show. When he speaks, he has that look in his eye that says, “I survived the trans journey”—it’s a look I feel more aware of lately, or one that I’m simply seeing more often as trans folk become increasingly visible. Paige says that he could not have auditioned for the show before his gender transition. Some things just had to fall into place first. I understand. Completely. I could not have stood on a stage, or a yoga mat, or a dance floor and let life express itself through my body. My body was a walking corpse.

So much of my self-understanding has come in retrospect. Uncertainty was my only companion for a good many years. But you sit with uncertainty long enough and the fear and anxiety separate from the instinct and self-knowing–that’s what I want to tell people when they ask how I know I’m transgender. For me, it’s not about the toys I played with as a child, the clothes I wear, about masculinity or femininity. It’s about trading my Mrs. Doubtfire costume for that of Spiderman, dropping the padded, suffocating woman suit for a skin tight, breathable, superhero suit. Still a costume. But one that allows me to move.

Dancing alone at the club, I thought of my old friend and our times at the Endup, how she could just go for hours and hours. On this night, I felt that I could too. I search for the appropriate word to describe this feeling—freedom, liberation, connection. But powerful as they may be, I’m not sure they capture this transformation for me, the external and internal, the morphing of my flesh and form into something that I can identify with, the willingness to practice letting go of my self-consciousness to discover a self I do not know, or perhaps have always known and can see more clearly now that there is no obstacle, distraction, or blight of persistent pain and confusion.

My friends may have wondered about who I am now. But the question I want to answer is, What am I? I am alive.

Often, talking to my yoga friends makes me feel like I’m at a breakfast buffet. One of them will inevitably turn to me after class and say, “Wasn’t that yummy?” Calming, challenging, expansive, breath-filled, heart-opening, healing, transformative–there’s a plethora of words and spiritual cliches to choose from. But I refrained from cracking jokes about all the food language, figuring there was nothing original about this humor. Thousands of people practice yoga which means surely, thousands of people must wonder how shoving the palms of their hands under the soles of their feet in a forward bend could be “juicy.”

I let the pressure of my confusion mount until a retreat, when a good friend of mine smacked her lips together and referred to a certain teacher as “delicious.” Did you lick him like an ice cream cone? I wanted to say. “What’s going on?” I said instead. “I’m into the chanting. I get the deity thing. But what’s up with all the ‘nom nom nom’ business?”

By her response, I could tell that my friend, who is a yoga instructor herself, clearly had never wondered how padahastasana could be “tasty”? “Well, what words do you use?” my friend asked.

“Cool. Awesome. Rad. Sick,” I said, rattling off every word from the surfer/skater/stoner lexicon in the tone of someone who has waited too long to have this conversation. “Sweet.”

“Sweet!” she said. “That’s a food word!” And it was. Apparently, I was fine using dessert descriptors as long as they were also used in the movie, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

I was pleased with the outcome of our discussion, reminded of how completely literal I can be, and handed the retrospectively obvious conclusion that language is cultural, and the culture of yoga is well, “yum, yum.”

I think that being a bit skeptical when you join a cult is a good thing, and for as much as I am on this path, I’m not sure that I’ll ever speak of it as paved with donuts. Or maybe I haven’t practiced long enough, haven’t let go of all the bad food metaphors I’ve come across in erotic writing, porn, and sex. Please tell me you know what I’m talking about. Or are you, or is your you-know-what, hungry for more?

I show up at an all-weekend Anatomy for Yogis class, and I’m a little nervous when I realize I’m the only participant who isn’t a yoga teacher. Within the first hour, a guy in the class is modeling his anatomy for us, something we’ll all do at some point in pairs. His shirt is off and now I am very, very nervous, too aware of what I’ll reveal when my shirt is off. My concern expands beyond my chest to my entire body. I am an anatomy complication. The potential disasters begin to swirl.

I pray that when the instructor talks about the tightness of a man’s hamstrings, or the small relative size of a man’s hips, I am not the model. I steel myself for the dozens of times he will exclude my body from the conversation. I hope I will be able to tell him that I have scars on my chest before he asks me to take off my shirt, something I’m fine doing, as long as he is aware of the situation.

At the end of class, I approach the instructor with my short speech, tell him I am transgender, take hormones, had surgery. I explain my body is female and male, male built upon female. His eyes are warm even as it takes him more than a few seconds to comprehend. I can tell that in my sharing, I have given him a gift, one that he has absolutely no clue what to do with. I have averted disaster, but I have not taught him any skills to improve the next few days for me.

On my walk home that night, I think about how I used to keep my shirt on because it was the only way I could remain comfortable, and now the only reason I ever keep my shirt on is to keep other people comfortable because that keeps me comfortable. I think about education and change and empowerment, and I know that keeping my shirt on tomorrow isn’t an option. I want to bail on the class by claiming it is too “advanced” for me, and even if it is, I know quitting is not an option. I want to cry, but I can’t.

The next day, I hope for a young and cute partner. Young means there’s the potential for trans awareness. Cute means there’s the potential she will flirt with me. Outing myself can be fun in the right crowd—I was once befriended/cruised in a yoga class by someone because she recognized my chest scars. Unfortunately, today I am stuck with an older woman who arrived in a BMW and is probably from Petaluma.

While my shirt is still around my neck, an “Oh My God, What Happened?” escapes from this woman’s mouth. I am prepared. I may be the only trans person she ever (knowingly) meets but what if there is a second. I must be an ambassador, even though I am not representative. My genes are not so great, my scars worse than most transfolk, I want to say to her. Do not pity us, I want to say. I have seen that look of shock, concern, and near-horror many times before. How I take this in is my choice. Do not pity yourself in her reflection, I think to myself.

“I am transgender,” I say calmly. “I had my breasts removed,” I add for complete clarity.

“I didn’t know. I don’t know,” she says defensively. I tell her it’s okay, mollify her discomfort, as it goes. Then she attempts to clarify, “Wait, you were a___ and now you’re a___?” I did just tell her I had breasts removed, but I realize I also threw her whole universe into a tizzy, and she is spinning. Despite spending the last  four years writing a book about not being a woman or a man, I fill in her blanks, simplifying to an extent that feels untrue, because I know that learning has to begin with building blocks.

“You really do look like a man,” she says. She means it as a compliment, even though it hits about 100 miles off the mark, and she leaves me standing there in my shorts so she can inspect my posture. I try to stand tall, proud, even though she will inevitably say my shoulders roll in, that I shrink into myself, because I do.

I know that when I tell my friends about this incident later, the transfolk will crack jokes about this person’s ignorance, and the ire and rage will come from the women, the ex-lovers who protect me with fierce intensity. I know why some of us do not step outside of our queer ghetto, why I sometimes get funny looks when I invite friends to the yoga studio, and that even to those who practice, a retreat sounds like social torture. I also know that the yoga community is my home, the people I have met and continue to meet an ever-expanding family that extends well beyond the studio walls out and out and out. I know that ignorance is not intentional, that I was once ignorant about the things that I now embody.

My next partner is also an older woman, but I like her immediately because she is Italian and calls herself an “indie” yoga instructor which as we speak more, I come to think means she teaches stretching at an art school. While my shirt is off, she is at my back, watching the shape of my spine as I move from side to side. She is silent about my chest, and I am grateful.

When it’s her turn, I call the instructor over. After a day of evaluating and analyzing and failing to recognize someone’s *obvious* scoliosis, I feel like a bum partner and I want the instructor to help me so I can help my partner relieve some of her pain. He walks me through the exercise and soon my knuckles are pressing ever so slightly into the problem areas in her erector spinae muscles. It’s hard to believe I’m doing anything since the pressure on her back is minimal, but once I am done, she does her stretches and says she feels better, freer.

Then she starts to cry as she tells me that she went to the emergency room a few months ago. She thought she was having a heart attack, but the pain had come from her muscles, so extreme that it radiated from her back and wrapped around her side, her whole chest burning. The ER doctor told her she was not having a heart attack, but had only “worked out too hard.”

She is trying to laugh at herself as she speaks, and yet she cannot stop crying. She is now apologizing for crying, making excuses that are unnecessary, and I try to stay there with her even as I say little, as there is little to say. I think about what was barely mentioned explicitly in the course, but was underneath everything and known by all in the room: emotions are stored in the body.

When we come back together as a group, the instructor turns into a binary-spewing machine. He is addressing us directly, “Ladies, your body does this…” and “Men, your body does this…” He has no idea he’s discounting me completely, or even if he does, he has no idea how to speak about anatomy and separate it from his perception (or perhaps what he considers fact) of how this defines a person. His words are hammering away at me, and as much as it’s not what I want, not what I wish for, not what I’d choose if I felt that I had any strength left to make choices, I know I will not speak until this is all over, that I have gone numb.

At the very end, the Italian woman thanks me for sharing her emotional moment. She’s apologizing again for her tears,  but I am jealous of them. I yearn for my own release, to heave and shake and sob and let out all that is trapped inside me. I must not be ready, and I wonder if I ever will be, or if I’m just building more scars on top of my scars, creating another layer of protection.

***Part I: Obstacles***

There are thoughts that always seem to spring up during my yoga practice:

“I bet I look ridiculous right now, like a monkey doing an arabesque”; “I was pretty good at basketball, and soccer. Tennis, too. Boy, those were the days”; “Why, oh why, is my right hip so tight? What is in there? Daddy, are you in there? I know you’re in there. Get out of my hip!”; “How thankful am I to have a body that works. Okay, fine, how thankful I should be to have this body. I am thankful for my body, right?”; “If only I was still with that last girl, or the one before that, then I could think about hot sex while stuck in this stupid room balancing on one foot with my legs and arms crossed”; “That second paragraph in chapter six, maybe I should use ‘patio’ instead of ‘deck.’ No, no, deck. Or patio. Deck. Fuck!”

I expected those thoughts and so was truly surprised when the one I hadn’t anticipated trumped them all, lodged itself into a huge ball in my forebrain: I am transgender. I am DIFFERENT.

I guess I don’t have to think about that as much in San Francisco, or in the Castro where even if I’m the only trans person in my yoga class, my ego is at least comforted by the knowledge that in the distance between my studio to my home, I have received both a girl’s phone number and a guy’s tongue in my mouth.

But the second I arrived in Guatemala, I felt my difference: I laughed uncomfortably when the hotel concierge said, “That’s not your real name right, you don’t strike me as a Nina,” and I quaked in my zip-off pants when a uniformed officer with a gun said, “Good afternoon, sir” while staring at my open passport with the big letter “F,” and I panicked for a moment at a bar in San Pedro when I was directed to the “bathroom,” a cement hole with only a bare bones partition blocking it off from the center of a crowded courtyard.

And the second I arrived on my retreat, I felt my difference: When I met my new roommate, who was upset to have been matched with a guy, me, I took on the burden of the situation, as if I had solely caused the problem, as if my being was an irreconcilable problem. And when I removed my shirt, I realized that even though top surgery was without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt stigmatized, a tiny bit ugly, when my scars were acknowledged: The mom who asked, “Are you okay?”; The child who asked, “What are those lines?”; The massage therapist who asked, “Are those tribal markings?” And every time I heard someone address the woman named “Mina,” I felt my entire stomach drop before I’d realize that nobody knew my birth name, that the present incarnation of myself was safe.

At this point in my life, I find it easier to out myself instead of biting my tongue when I’m about to tell a girl I used to play sports against her all-girls school, or explicate that I played in the Sydney Gay Games as a dyke not a gay dude, even though I’m at least kinda gay-ish now. It’s also easy to out myself because I’m writing a transgender memoir and since writing is what I’m most passionate, it’s often the first thing I want to share with new friends.

Within the first few days, I’d told several folks I was trans (although I always said the full “transgender” and tried not to wonder if they had any sense of what I meant by a word that I believe holds a great deal of diversity). If I didn’t tell someone, I assumed they either heard or figured it out, and then, once everyone knew, I developed it into a new worry: I am only a Trans Person, that’s all I do, all I am, all I have to offer.

Different may have been the word I used to describe myself initially, but separation, isolation, and loneliness were the blocks that I turned it into inside my head.

*** Part II: Intention ***

On Tuesday, when I had settled into the retreat enough and still knew I’d have enough time to relax when done, I pulled out my manuscript. It took me a day-and-a-half to get through, and I read it as planned, in a hammock without a pen in my hand and without an eye towards revision. But I also read it with an intention I would not have considered had I not had a brief exchange at breakfast with my teacher who framed my upcoming task as a “nod to the work done.”

Four years of my life, a great deal of pain and triumph, and hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing and revising went into those pages. Some of those paragraphs had been sentences that became chapters that became words that moved from chapter 3 to chapter 5 before finally finding a home. I nodded in acknowledgment, in awe really, of the journey my words had taken. When I bumped into my teacher later, she said I looked clear. She wasn’t aware that I’d read my manuscript, and that after four years, I believed, for the very first time, that I may actually have a book on my hands.

But perhaps the clarity came from the experience of reading a story about a narrator who just happens to have been me, and the new perspective this gave me. For I’d just read a “book” that at its core is a queer coming out story about a person afraid of becoming an outsider, of not being “normal.” And there I was now, a person so comfortable in the Castro as a queer and outsider that “normal” people scared me. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, at the circularity of my course.

***Part III: Yoga***

We practiced yoga every morning and every afternoon, except for the one morning when a few folks climbed a volcano, an adventure I didn’t even consider after focusing on this concept of intention and setting my own for the week: not to go anywhere or do anything; to banish “should” from my head, to let go of any notion of achieving anything.

Yoga can be a complicated endeavor. It can be about trying to get my leg behind my head (I’m not even close). It can be about learning that my pelvis has a floor and if I can just convince it to feel like its holding onto a tampon for dear life, I might be able to do a handstand. It can be about discovering that there are words like kapalabhati and uddiyana bandha that I cannot physically understand, nor even pronounce.

Yoga can also be profoundly simple. It can be about being compassion to oneself and being compassionate to others. It can be about learning what happens when a handful of people who do not know each other take off work, leave behind children and husbands, drop some cash, shed their defenses, and connect. It can be about discovering that my experiences, my story, may be different from that of others, but that a good story, a real story, is universal—that we all experience joy, worry, pain, sadness, anxiety, passion, loss, grief, pressure, fear, loneliness, and if we’re lucky, some gratitude.

***Part IV:Transformation***

In the end, I didn’t leave the retreat property for six days. I’d wanted to see what would happen if I stopped moving, what would move inside of me if I stayed still. I’m not sure when it happened, or how it did, but I visualized the change in a ritual, an image, my separation going up in flames, and in the experience of diving into the icy volcanic lake every morning and sloughing off my coat of isolation

What took its place shocked me: the words of a friend who said I seem “really happy” and another who said I’m “magnetic” and exude the sense of someone who knows it; a friend on the mat by my side, stabilizing me with her steady strong breath; the pale blue eyes of a friend locking her drishti onto my heart every time I opened my mouth; the ease of skinny-dipping in the womb-warm watsu pool under a swollen moon; the cohesiveness of a circle, undulating, and the flickers of light that powered us from our center.

***Part V: Return***

I went to yoga class on Monday night, the first day I was back. I’d told myself I didn’t *have* to go, but after practicing daily, it seemed easier to go than not to, to stick with a good habit rather than force myself into a bad one. And besides, it was less than a five minute walk to the studio from my house, only a few minutes longer than the walk from my retreat room to the yoga palapa. I’d just spent a week with people who flew to Guatemala from NY, Minnesota, and Colorado to practice with my teacher, and now, back in San Francisco, the distance to her seemed even shorter.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was happy to see me, for she is human and not immune to the retreat withdrawal I was experiencing; she too had to let go of the community we’d created; she too had to acclimate back into the urban chaos.

After class, she was excited, telling me that she could see it, that my practice had shifted. Although I downplayed it, as I do, I would agree. I’m a little stronger, a little less self-conscious, a little more aware of my body, able to breath a little deeper. But it is off the the mat where I’ve noticed the shift the most. I waited for the panic to hit when my travel plans went awry after I left the retreat property, and I waited for my job annoyance to hit when I went back to work, and I waited for the overwhelm to hit when I got back to my manuscript and realized I have less than five months to finalize this book. But nothing hit, at least not as hard as it used to, not hard enough to knock me over.

After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

Forgive me for combining holidays here–but it’s only at Valentine’s Day that I’m able to reflect with the type of retrospective so common at the turn of the New Year. I’ve always been slow, thoughtful, deliberate, late. Though taking the two holidays  together makes more sense in context. For 2009 was the year of love, or almost love, or not really love at all, or self-love perhaps. It was the first year of my life as Nick, and the first year my gender and body were no longer impassable obstacles to my becoming involved physically and emotionally with others. It’s no surprise that I spent the year in relationships, four of them to be exact, though “relationships” is a term I’m using in its broadest sense to include engagement with another in a serial (and for me) monogamous (though unintentional) fashion.

I met the first girl at the start of 2009, literally, midnight-ish on New Years. Re-met would be a more appropriate term since she used to hang out at my house years ago, flirt with my back in the day when I’d run away scared of anyone who wanted my clothes off. When I re-met this girl and she saw my room, she shook her head in disappointment. All I had was one map of the world. For the three years I’d lived there, it was the only thing that made me feel comfortable, a map with its millions of escape routes. I didn’t have a home. Home was something I couldn’t create inside my body and it was something I couldn’t create in my surroundings.

Shortly after we started hanging out, I asked this girl to make a decoration suggestion. “Curtains for your bay windows and a comfortable reading chair,” she replied. The chair is where I’m sitting as I write this, my windows framed by my handsome blue and gold curtains.

I didn’t get to ask the second person for room advice. We never spent an entire night together. But he showed me boundaries, the beauty of the queerest of bodies, helped landscape my internal home. The third suggested a duvet cover for my bed, and how her of her to have the perfect one, to give it to me and make a home for me to rest. The fourth picked out a plant, bringing life into my home.

I’m still feeling the fourth, enough to know it’s time to regroup, time to be alone inside this home I’ve created, time to watch the leaves on my new plant, the hair on my new body grow. I’m feeling her enough to know that today would be a special challenge, and oh, how I love challenges.

I had decided Rusty would be my Valentine long ago, looked forward to yoga today for all that I knew it would be and all that I didn’t. There’s something about his tone, part pleading, wisdom and command, the way he says, “Don’t miss this moment,” so that even if my legs are trembling, and I’m so uncomfortable I want to call it pain, I cannot help but think, “Do not miss this moment,” and that when I’m so beat I can’t see through the sweat in my eyes and he says, “I want this to be the most challenging part of your day. I want this to be the most challenging part of your week,” I know that I can hold sadness, loneliness, loss, and even more, that I don’t want to miss the moment.

The hardest part was towards the end, a two-minute meditation, stillness. Rusty challenged us here too, offered us a couple mantras and goaded us to try them. “I dare you,” he said. “For two minutes, I dare you to repeat to yourself: I am worthy of love. I am worthy of love.” I certainly believe it and I certainly tried, but let’s just say my mind wandered a little. How easy it is to give love to others, and how easy it is to receive love, but  how very very hard it is for me to sit with my own love.

He ended class with words he’s said a lot since he opened his new studio though the meanings are infinite. “Welcome home,” he said

“Welcome home,” I said to myself.

I almost never talk to my yoga teachers, especially the ones I like. Because there’s no talking to a yoga teacher without hugging them. And it’s not even like a post-conversation hug. You make one move to open your mouth and their arms open wide, like they couldn’t possibly concentrate on an introduction or anything really until they’ve felt your bare sweaty skin. So part of my avoidance is the intimacy, and part of it is that my favorite yoga teachers have offered me so much spiritual guidance, I think of them like gods. Just imagining a heartfelt hug with a god makes me want to crap my pants.

I always told myself that my only goal of yoga was to show up and be nice to myself. If I was afraid or just didn’t want to approach my teachers, so be it; it wasn’t on the to do list. I’ve been going to yoga semi-regularly for almost two years, and that’s still my only goal. In that time, I’ve only spoken to one of my favorite teachers.

It was a Sunday night, Mother’s Day. Janet had turned the whole class into a beautiful homage to mothers, and at the end, she demanded that everyone whom she’d never met before say hello. It’s the only demand she’d ever made and it sounded more like an invitation like a demand. So, I obliged, even waited uncomfortably in the short hugging line for my turn to rub sweat on Janet and wish her a happy Mother’s Day.

I hadn’t spoken to a teacher since Mother’s Day, and certainly not Rusty, even though I still have a “get well” card on my refrigerator from him–a friend brought it to class for him to sign last year when I had top surgery. A couple months ago, he started paying more attention to me in class, making it a point to help me in a couple poses each time. And by help, I mean entwine his body around mine and open me up in ways that allowed breathe into places that I’m absolutely sure had never received breathe before. His adjustments were more intimate than most of my one-night stands; there’s no way I could talk to him.

Last Friday, I went to his class, and despite having a pretty rough week, I was feeling rather comfortable, stable, strong in my body. That is until the the end of the class, backbend time. I love backbends. I’ll half-ass it on crunches, and go to the bathroom during chair pose, and take a long time to rise into plank, but I always give it my all on backbends.

I like backbends because they feel awesome, and because they are the ultimate heart openers, the foundation of heart opening in all poses really. Plus, a teacher once said you always give the benefits of your last backbend away to someone else. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but since my favorite part of yoga is dedicating my practice to someone else at the beginning of class, it’s not that surprising that my favorite pose involves giving it away; I think of it as selfish selflessness.

In Rusty’s class, I inhaled to my crown and exhaled all the way up and nothing felt right. My body quite simply did not want to do a backbend, so I went back down. Rusty came over, stood by my head and nodded. I knew what it meant, since he’d assisted me once before, having me hold his ankles. I grabbed his ankles and popped up and he supported me, did half the work for me. It felt good, maybe even great. I was very relieved when it was time to come down.

As everyone prepared for the final backbend, I didn’t even think of dedicating mine away. I didn’t even think of going up. I was tired. Rusty saw me on the ground and he came over again. He stood by my head and smiled, so I had to go up, holding his ankles again. This time he instructed me to do push-ups, something I’d done in this position with him once before.

In my backbend, as I started bending and extending my elbows, the term “emotional calisthenics” popped into my head—something my pal says to me whenever I’m going through a rough patch. Emotional calisthenics, I thought as I gripped Rusty tighter for support, raising and lowering myself again and again in this heart opener.

At the very end of class, I started to cry, just a little, and I knew that today was the day. Afterward, I approached. “Hey Rusty, I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said. His arms were around me before I could even say my name.

He thanked me for being so open, for being an amazing presence in his classes. He told me to keep trusting him. I wanted to thank him for holding me up, strengthening me, helping me rise when I couldn’t alone. Instead I just thanked him from being my teacher. It was all too much; I hope we never talk again.