Author’s note: “I once had a friend who did yoga and wrote down her dreams and earnestly informed me that she could hitchhike alone and be safe because she was special. She seemed to truly believe that nothing could hurt her. In “Her Gestures, Her Rules,” I imagined that she had a daughter who would, like most daughters, go from acolyte to critic to something in between.”
Her Gestures, Her Rules
BY THE EARLY ’80s, when the new age was still new, my mother, a local legend, operated the most popular yoga studio in Ulster County. Valley Yin Yang catered to aging hippies, rich and poor. I, conceived in 1969 at an ashram in Goa, was a significant line in her biography: an illegitimate half-Indian daughter. Her students were fascinated by me, as they were by every aspect of my mother’s life—her clothes, her diet, her true beliefs, her original religion. And, of course, her long legs and her thick hair, so dark my hair could have come from her, not from a never-named Indian father... [Continue Story]
