“This is who you are,” Nevine told Mario. “This is who you were born to be.” She had slung a strap around his back, looped the other end around hers, and swayed them both into a diagnostic sort of dance. Nevine was reading his body. She scanned his eyes, the position of his shoulders, and the angle of his seat. Looking at how his parts sat in relation to one another and to what Nevine calls the less-visible implicit nature. I was imagining what she must have been seeing: moons orbiting Mario’s head, seasons traveling up his spine, and a grid of numbers each with a story to tell. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about Katonah Yoga, Nevine Michaan’s 30 year old studio now based just north of New York City. Amongst other yoga teachers it was always a “you just have to go” conversation– an indescribable, intellectual mysticism that could only be experienced. Intriguing, sure, but I wasn’t really hooked. Until I saw the maps. With blind interest, I ended up chatting with Susan Fierro, who works with Nevine in Bedford Hills to illustrate these diagrams. Susan, who studied art and art history, has taken class with Nevine for two decades now. Several years back, Nevine tapped her talents to begin formalizing a host of theories, metaphors, and territorial wisdom. “She calls them maps, so I guess I’m a cartographer,” Susan told me. The two get together in the afternoons to draw, revise, and re-revise what’s now becoming a full atlas of self-understanding. The maps are useful only when embodied. Literally. Their right-left orientation is not so much meant to be viewed as much as it is meant to be worn. Digested. Realized. The map’s right is your right, it’s left, your left. Think of a compass not viewed in your palm but worn on your chest. For Nevine, it’s all about direction. “Know where you’re going so you’re not just driving,” she’d teach. “You need maps.” But as much as I love a good map, I’m torn. Because getting lost is just so poetic. Having lived in New York City for almost 10 years, nothing is more alluring than something like the desert– an unbridled antithesis of my grid-life. I found myself mapless once while on a hike at Harriman State Park. I had trekked with only a semi-confident idea of what paths and intersections I’d take, only to realize hours in that I hadn’t been successful. It wasn’t until I realized I was lost though that my senses became fully alive. In being lost, I noticed a rosy sun in a western sky. A trail only lightly-trodden. And finally a glassy Lake Skenonto, surrounded by deer, near which I’d pitch my tent. In the relatively small park, getting lost was wondrous! It was a similar sensation in a class I eventually took with Nevine. Folded forward with my legs latched over one another, I felt unsure of things. What the heck was happening? Was I well-aligned? Or was I going to fall? Again, it was in the not knowing that I had become acutely aware and intensely present. “Perhaps, to be aligned, and to feel found, are to accept the shifting of things.” I wonder how both wandering about and following directions work together in our lives. How can you engage the unknown with a knowing, and experience knowing with a sense of the unknown? I look at Nevine’s maps and interpret an alignment, order, and general symmetry to things. But she’s also orchestrating something less fixed. With words wrapping around other words, flames rising between phrases, and glyphs filling out vacant corners, it’s all very free inside a grid of squares. Her class was similarly designed: inside the sequence were side-conversations among students, participating teachers offering adjustments, and people generally milling about. For 90 minutes we were a river racing forward, but also sideways, back and around. Perhaps, to be aligned, and to feel found, is to accept the shifting of things. “Everyone is tuning an instrument together and playing a piece of music,” she’s quoted. “Pranayama is the pumps. It’s like putting gas in the tank and air in the tire so that the vehicle can drive. You don’t drive a car with your mind. You drive it with your breath.” She says a map is good at three things: showing you where you came from, where you are, and where you might be headed. In revealing space, it inevitably dances with time. “One reason I make calendars [with maps] is to figure out how you’re spending your time.” In Tadasana, standing-pose, she described the weight backwards as energy in your past. You’re “digging in your heels,” she’d say. Shift forward and you’re in your future, your cosmic potential. In one step, “present becomes memory” and “memory potentiates future.” In this way, I understand alignment as just a tool, motion as a metaphor, and the maps as templates to propel you in the pursuit of your intentions. In this way, you can follow the directions and still feel free. And I can see the poetry in that.
