The Healing Read online

  “Yep, that’s me.”

  The college year passed along and Buddy and I found ourselves becoming friends, talking and exchanging ideas. Mostly, he really listened to me. He listened to me so much that I thought, This guy is truly a friend, my best friend. I don’t necessarily think that I was his best friend, but he was mine. So, his comments about my new eating habits confirmed a fear I had: this lifestyle would separate me from others. I wondered if someday I would need to make a choice.

  The evening meal started with Mushroom Barley Soup. I watched carefully as their spoons reached their mouths. “Mmmm. Good.” Buddy said. And when they both raved about it, I felt perhaps this kind of cooking could actually appeal to my friends, instead of alienating them. Many other shared meals after that confirmed my suspicions that this kind of eating could be a way of connecting.

  One such meal took place on a business trip when I sat down for lunch with a group of colleagues at the Philadelphia hotel where we were staying. The maître d’ showed us to our seats at a typical round banquet table with a plastic flower centerpiece and burgundy cloth napkins. Looking at the menu, I saw beef dishes, pork entrées, and an ocean of seafood plates. There weren’t any whole grain dishes, and very little in the way of vegetables, except salad made with iceberg lettuce, steamed broccoli, and a baked potato. I thoroughly scanned the menu and couldn’t find a suitable entrée.

  I sat up straight in my blue corporate dress suit, teeth clenched, tapping my French-manicured nails on the table. My mind was chanting, What to eat? What to eat?

  Deciding what to eat should not be a big deal. But for me, at this time in my life, it was huge. The reason I was sitting at that table in the first place was because of an organization called INROADS. The organization’s mission was to prepare talented college-bound “minority youth” for positions of leadership in corporate America and in the community. I had never belonged to an organization that was really invested in my worth and cared about my success. INROADS intern program had helped me get my job at the bank. It was important that I didn’t embarrass them or myself.

  My INROADS training had taught me ways to navigate a sticky work situation, but this one was a bit out of my element. How could I have predicted that I would one day be eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet, and that people might react strangely to it? What to do? I didn’t want to seem weird or difficult. I had also learned to not make too many waves, especially on a business trip.

  For young corporate youth of color, INROADS was like Motown. Motown taught its young black musicians and singers how to walk, talk, and sit properly in white America. INROADS did the same for youth of color in the business world. This organization taught us to blend in with corporate culture as much as possible, down to what fork to use when. I was taught to be a positive example, a productive, professional African American career woman. I was given insights on how to tiptoe my way up the corporate ladder without too much fanfare and unfavorable attention, so that upward mobility could happen for me and other talented minority youth.

  INROADS put us through a rigorous training course covering all professional situations from how to run a corporate meeting to which eating utensil to use when dining out. INROADS wanted to make sure that the thirty students who had been selected from the 150 black students who had interviewed were prepared for this new corporate world. But it didn’t cover how to make holistic lifestyle food choices when a menu had none.

  My face began to feel hot, for fear that I might order the wrong way. The waiter came to me, and I cleared my throat and scratched out the question, “Sir, I know this is not on the menu, but is it possible to order pasta with sautéed mixed vegetables in olive oil and crushed garlic, with a wedge of lemon on the side?”

  He sighed. “Ummm, I’ll go ask the chef.” I was sure that I had annoyed him, but in a few minutes, he returned and said, “No problem.” He turned next to my colleague. “And you, ma’am?”

  I heard a voice come from the other side of the table. “What she ordered sounds good.” My eyes widened. “I’ll have that, too.” The waiter wrote it down.

  “Sir,” another one of my coworkers called out, “Can I change my order to that veggie pasta dish?”

  “Me, too,” someone else said.

  I was amazed at what had just happened. Five out of the six of us ordered the same customized, healthy dish. When the waiter brought out our covered dishes of bowtie pasta, we did not know what to expect. He lifted the silver cover and visible steam carried the pungent aroma of garlic. “Ooooh,” a few of us said. The sight of fresh julienne carrots, round yellow squash, and bright-green broccoli was a rainbow of color. Some sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan cheese on top or a squeeze of juice from the wedge of lemon. My mouth watered.

  That day proved to me that a plant-based diet didn’t have to be strange in the corporate world. Not only that, but others had followed my lead. I was the minority, in more ways than one, on a business trip with all whites. But this time my being different did not isolate me. Instead, it gave everyone a new option to try.

  However, I was soon to learn the hard way that this sign of acceptance would not prove to be the norm.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sivananda Yoga Ashram, Grass Valley

  THE PHONE RANG while I was lying across my bed reading the Sivananda Yoga Ashram pamphlet. It was my friend George, asking about my plans for Memorial Day weekend.

  George smoked and drank more when he was either out clubbing late at night or when he was under lots of stress from his financial banking job. I could tell he needed a break by the tone of his scratchy deep voice. George was another African American graduate of INROADS who worked for Mellon Bank. He looked the part—thick, tall, and wearing rimmed glasses and a Brooks Brothers suit.

  “I’m going to California for a yoga vacation. This place sounds awesome.” I read him the brochure. While he listened, I explained the schedule to him. At the ashram, we’re expected to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to the sound of a gong. Then meditation starts at 6:00 a.m., followed by a two-hour morning yoga class. After the class we are offered a full-service buffet vegetarian brunch. Then we’re assigned a community service project. When our chores are done, we have four hours of free time. We could choose such activities as swimming in the pond or hiking a trail. At the end of the day, there’s another two-hour yoga class, buffet dinner, and, last, a two-hour session of meditation and chanting. Then, lights out by 10:00 p.m.”

  “Eeewww,” he groaned. “You’re fuckin’ weird. Who would go on vacation to get up earlier than they do for work? That doesn’t sound like vacation; that sounds like prison.”

  I was disappointed by George’s reaction. I wanted to be supported by my friend, not criticized. I hadn’t processed that he might not understand. This schedule excited me so much that I didn’t stop to think about how he might react. It was a different kind of vacation. There wasn’t a beach, an alcoholic drink, or club scene in sight. My family didn’t vacation much while I was growing up, but I always thought vacation was doing what you wanted to do when you had the money and time to do it. I didn’t think I had to conform to a vacation stereotype.

  But because of George’s reaction I was too shy to fully share with others what I was planning to do for Memorial Day. Instead, I was vague and told people that I was going to California to just chill and see what trouble I could get into. Friends seemed to nod affirmatively at that explanation, and then we would easily move on to the next topic. I did my own thing, but I didn’t like that I couldn’t be fully myself with my friends for fear of their criticism.

  In college, my peers had spent lots of money and time going to spring break parties, but I was never interested in traveling just to drink and party. I decided that if I ever got enough money to go on a trip, I would make it a life-changing experience. So while my peers were going on spring break during sophomore year, I saved money to do a summer trip. I booked a ticket to Taiwan t
o live with a Chinese family for two weeks. My language tutor had arranged for me to visit her family. I knew I didn’t have the same advantages as other college kids, who had grown up taking vacations abroad, and I was starting to see how valuable it was to build relationships with people different from me, especially from overseas. I could become a citizen of the world, not just a poor kid from Braddock, Pennsylvania.

  Boarding the plane to California for my ashram weekend brought up the same feeling I’d had when I went on that trip to Taiwan. I went halfway around the world to see how other people lived. This was true of my yoga vacation, except this time I wanted to explore deeper parts of myself and meet others who were doing the same. I was twenty-four years old and realized that I was once again making very different choices from those of my peers.

  Four days before Memorial Day, using frequent flyer miles from my business travel, I flew from Pittsburgh to San Francisco on a nonstop flight. The terminal was crowded. I had been told to wait in a specific area for the Sivananda Ashram station wagon to pick me up. The San Francisco air had a unique smell to it; I didn’t know how to recognize sea air or ocean spray then. Still, my nose knew that I was not in Pittsburgh anymore, maybe in the same way Dorothy knew she was not Kansas anymore.

  I spotted the ashram station wagon and got in.

  West Coast spiritual types had an unfamiliar way of talking about things. They reminded me of the people from Gia’s classes, reinforcing that everything is energy, but the West Coast discourse sounded informal, almost like a different language.

  “This your first time to the Bay Area?” the driver asked. I said it was. “Where you coming in from?” he asked.

  “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” I replied.

  “What’s the vibe like in Pittsburgh?”

  “Vibe,” I repeated in my head. What does he mean? Not knowing, I said, “It’s an old steel mill city. US Steel Corporation is now called USX. The X has to do with the company now developing more chemical products, or something like that, than steel. It used to be the third leading corporate city in the United States. Pittsburgh is also known for its hospitals and colleges.” That was about as much as I could say. People didn’t often ask me what the vibe was like in Pittsburgh.

  “Far out,” he answered, slightly dragging out “far” and raising then lowering in pitch when he said “out.” It was almost as if he were singing it. I was taken aback. Wasn’t “far out” a 1960s expression? I looked around the station wagon. There were photos of two brown men, one bald and one graying, a tiny elephant statue on the dashboard, chanting music coming out of the speakers, and the driver smelled like incense. I felt relaxed, yet nervous.

  We arrived in the dark to an open plot of land. The stars were bright. The place was quiet and had a strange kind of peacefulness to it. I arrived close to bedtime, so I was led to my room, which I was to share with five other women who were already tucked in. The night was very cold—not how I expected California to be, although I had been told to bring warm clothes for sleeping. I bundled up, got into bed, and fell asleep.

  The next day we began following the schedule that I had described to George. The gong woke me up at 5:30 a.m., and by 6:00 I was wrapped in a blanket, meditating, or, more accurately, just sitting there cross-legged with my eyes closed. At 6:30 I poorly chanted strange Sanskrit words from a songbook. At 7:30, I was listening to a spiritual lecture on Hindu mythology. And by 8:00, I was practicing Hatha yoga on a beautiful hardwood floor. This place felt weird, but also like an honest place for me to be. I could live like this.

  The smell of incense swirled through the air, the saffron color radiated through the ashram like the sun, and the vibe, my new word, was that of everyone actively practicing to become their spiritual best. I felt like I was doing something good for myself, even though it seemed much like a cult—at least according to the pop cultural definition of one. There were guru pictures on the walls, we chanted words like “Hare Krishna,” and at 10:00 a.m., we ate vegetarian food communal style. More than a few times I thought, if George could see me now, he would definitely think, “You’re fuckin’ weird.”

  From 11:00 to noon I was doing assigned chores in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and washing dishes. We all did whatever needed to be done.

  From noon to 4:00 I had free time in the sun by the pond and talked to my fellow yogis and spiritual enthusiasts.

  From 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., I was in my second Hatha yoga class of the day. To my amazement, I had actually, for the first time, done a headstand. I felt terrific. In truth, I felt I was better than those around me who were struggling to get it right. Holding my headstand, I felt like saying, “Hey, look at me. Watch me hold the posture that is considered the king of postures.”

  In this upside-down pose, I thought, “George probably can’t do this.” Then I started to wobble and had to come down to rest in child’s pose. In child’s pose, my mind drifted into thinking that I had come a long way from my childhood. I was in sunny Grass Valley, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains on a yoga vacation, and not in my old neighborhood, agonizing over which boy from Project Tower A should love me.

  As I transitioned from headstand to child’s pose and back into headstand several times, a whole host of memories were triggered. I went back and forth, comparing my present-day life to that collection of past experiences.

  During the summer of 1985, one day in particular stood out. I had received a phone call from one of my friends from the old neighborhood. Paula and I were catching up, talking about our college experiences and summer plans. As we were talking, her brother Paul, also my friend, entered the room she was in. He asked who she was talking to, and when she answered, I heard him yell out to her, “Sy thinks she’s better than us!” When I heard him say that, I wondered if I actually did think that. The word “better” meant quite a few things to me. Was I inherently better than my neighborhood friends? Or did I just want to do better and not be troubled by the chaos of lower-income life?

  Since going away to Temple University and spending my summers at Carnegie Mellon University, I was spending less and less time with the old gang in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and more and more time with my new friends from INROADS and CMU.

  I was home from college, and about to start my second summer internship at the bank. I found cheap housing through a friend at CMU—the Spirit House on the CMU campus. This house was primarily filled with African American students. I did meet new people from all over the world; in fact my summer posse was made up of four Chinese guys who were also CMU students, one each from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore. But this was my first time being introduced to all different kinds of African Americans from other areas of the country. David was an electrical engineering major linked to Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Donald was a chemical engineering major who had an independent way of achieving his goals, while Gail, in mechanical engineering, had a tutor in every subject and carried a 4.0 GPA. My friends from high school were not like these people and neither was I, but I wanted to be like those CMU students. They had a confidence about living life. No one seemed to conform. In fact, they seemed to encourage each other’s uniqueness. No one said, “You think you’re better than us,” like my old friends did. My old friends didn’t seem as focused. My new friends were doing better. I knew that both groups were intelligent, but my new friends were making smarter choices.

  I fell out of the headstand and started resting in child’s pose again.

  My mind and body were fully back in the ashram, in the yoga room.

  I felt stronger, so I went into another headstand and while holding it, I drifted into another space and time.

  I am eight years old, in our off-white Ford Mustang with my parents, and they are yelling at each other while my dad is driving. Their voices become louder and louder. The bass in my father’s voice increases, and the treble in my mother’s voice vibrates, but it
is not music that I am hearing. It is a cacophony of chaotic sounds making the air in the car suffocating. The atmosphere in the car is so smothering. My father pulls over to the side of the road and the two of them get out of the car and continue screaming.

  Looking out of the car window, watching arms wave and mouths move, I have had it with these two. I open the car door and scream, “Get back in the car! Stop fighting!” They stop. They look at me. My face is wet. I’m panting, an exhausted eight-year-old. They get back into the car and we all drive off in silence.

  That was the very first time I consciously felt a sense of being better than someone else. I was better than my parents. At eight years old, I knew that domestic violence was not the way, and I felt like my parents were not smart enough to figure that out. It was in that Ford Mustang, riding in silence, that I knew I was better, and maybe the deeper truth was that I had to do better, but I probably didn’t know exactly what that meant then.

  Upside down in that headstand, I was gaining a new perspective. I had to do better. Maybe the practice of standing on my head periodically could help me walk firmly on the ground and in the world.

  Over that summer, the more I talked to the old gang the more it seemed that no one was progressing, and some were regressing. I was determined to be better and do better, even if that meant leaving my friends and family behind. I realized that having an attitude of superiority was how I’d survived many pitfalls because there had been lots of opportunities tempting me to crawl way down into a seductive hole of escape in drugs, alcohol, and sex.

  I came out of the last headstand, feeling exhausted and invigorated at the same time. I rested in child’s pose one more time, and then I sat up, resting on my heels. I remembered the time that I had refused to drink alcohol at a friend’s sleepover.

  I was in the ninth grade. My explanation to my friends for not drinking was that my grandmother was an alcoholic and she had died from cancer of the larynx. I explained that every day for years my grandmother drank straight whiskey from bottles covered in brown paper bags that she kept hidden in her bedroom. She drank so much it seemed to burn a hole in her throat.