Poser my life in twenty-three yoga poses

“We didn't want to look good. We wanted to be good.”

Claire is a new mom, a wife, and a writer and she is so close to having a nervous breakdown that you can see her shaking hand on every page of this typewritten manuscript. She takes up yoga in the midst of her crazy life and somehow yoga saves her.

“I had a sudden thought: What if the opposite of good wasn't bad? What if the opposite of good was real?”

“I had started going to yoga because I wanted other people to admire my goodness. I came to yoga with my plate held out, asking yoga to give me the same old stuff I'd been receiving all my life, repackaged and in a groovier new form. Going to yoga was part of my goodness project. And yet what yoga seemed to be teaching me was this: Who cares? Who cares about goodness? Who even cares how it looks? There's only this: a woman in a heap on the floor....If I wanted to look at how things really were, I was going to find imperfection. What would real look like? Without good there, gussying it up, brushing its hair?”
“We left in a whirl....We carried Bruce's depression and my anxiety with us, on the roof rack, as it were. They weren't going to leave us alone. They were just part of the deal.”

“I thought I would do yoga all my life, and I thought that I would continue to improve at it, that I would penetrate its deepest mysteries and finally be able to perform a transition from scorpion directly into chaturanga. But here's the truth: The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. I can't tell you what a relief it is.”