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April 13, 2012
Upward-Facing Soldier
By lauren k. walker
YOU are sitting behind the
Humvee where you’ve dragged a wounded soldier. You’ve wrapped the gaping hole
in his leg, given him a shot of morphine and radioed up the line for help. Your
eye is trained on a distant, hazy point through the scope of an assault rifle.
You can see the tiny, magnified bodies of your enemy. Maybe they are waiting
for another explosion. A bigger one. Your heart starts pounding harder. The
temperature is over 100 degrees. The kid next to you, a kid you always found
slightly annoying, with his Massachusetts accent and his unwillingness to walk
in the front position of the line, is now holding a bloody pad to his thigh and
biting down on a bandanna to keep from screaming. Sweat is pouring down his
face.
There is no easy way out. You
simply have to wait and try not to give away your position. Through your scope
you can see their rocket launchers in a pile on the ground.
What you do, without moving
your hands from the rifle, is to start breathing, because you realize you have
been holding your breath for a long time. So you deepen it. Slow, deeper,
deeper. The hiccups
of fear start to mellow out. You can feel your belly soften a bit. Then you
visualize your breath. In the left nostril, out the right. In the right, out
the left. After just a minute, the mad thumping in your chest begins to slow.
You hold the fingertips of one hand to your forehead to calm the fight-or-flight
response so you can think clearly. The situation has not changed, but you feel
yourself change, and you are now able to deal with it.
Back in the safe and cold
green mountains of central Vermont,
I walk into the yoga
room to face a roomful of boys and girls. They are 17, 18, 20 years old, but
they seem more like boys and girls than men and women. The stress in my
students’ lives is not at combat level. Yet. Right now, most of them have the
stress of being in the Corps of Cadets at a military college. That means P.T.
at 5:30 in the morning, and constant building, running, gunning, learning,
hiking, jumping and being yelled at.
Norwich University, the birthplace of R.O.T.C. and the oldest private
military college in the country, trains both military cadets and civilians in
discipline, integrity, confidence, loyalty and honor.
From here, many of my
military students will deploy to the deserts of Afghanistan. I have a boy leaving
next week.
They are young. They are
strong. They have incredible stamina. But they don’t have fluency or ease
within their bodies. They do push-ups and pull-ups and bench presses and
weighted lunges. They run 10 or 20 miles with heavy packs on. But they don’t
know how to breathe or to access the core muscles in their abdomens that could
help them hump their packs or carry a buddy to safety. I teach them this, and
also, how to find that place deep inside that is whole, untouchable, sacred.
Halfway through the semester,
I ask my students how they think yoga will help them. Why did they sign up for
this class? “It helps us to focus on the good,” one says. “That’s the only way
we can get through this place.”
I think of them as if they
are in the Bhagavad Gita, the great Indian treatise on war. The soldier Arjuna
stops on the battlefield and cries out to Lord Krishna: “Do I have to do this?
Do I have to kill?” Krishna, instead of
telling him what to do on the battlefield, teaches him yoga. So that is what I
do. I teach them yoga.
I am humbled by this
prospect, but I come in to the classroom strong. This is a community used to
leadership. They stand at attention and call me ma’am. I have to show that I
have enough strength to lead them. But I don’t teach them strength. They learn
that enough. One girl said to me, “This is the only class where I don’t get
yelled at.”
I want them to love and
respect themselves. At the end of class, when they lie on their mats in
savasana like children at nap time, I nurture and tuck in these bodies. I hold
their ankles and swing their legs back and forth to let their hips soften. I
roll their shoulder blades under their backs to help open their hearts. I hold
their heads in my hands, while they lie there. They don’t get touched here, at
military college. They don’t get nurtured. Everything is hard and harsh and angry
and fast and sharp. Some of them are so stiff and rigid. They hold their heads
at attention even when they’re lying down.
“Let go,” I say. “I’ve got
you.” They relax their necks and let their heads sink into my waiting hands.
Their hair is buzzed to the scalp or tied back in a tight bun. I hold their
heads and pray over them. I pray with all my might that God does the right
thing by this boy or this girl. I place their heads down on the blankets and
hold my thumb over their third eye, hoping that they keep their intuition
strong and will remember that their inner souls are stronger than any enemy
outside of them, seen or not seen.
Nick Roberts, a sophomore, finds focus
in the author’s yoga class at Norwich University, the oldest private
military college in the country.
In the beginner’s class, it’s
all I can do to keep my students breathing while they move. In the advanced
class, I teach these future soldiers the profound philosophy of yoga: how to
sit in a stress position and still breathe, smoothly and steadily. How to keep
minds open and flexible, to develop non-attachment, compassion, contentment.
We talk about what it would
be like to have a buddy blown open next to you. How you would immediately feel
yourself flooded with the stress hormones cortisol
and adrenaline. How your natural impulse would be to run like hell to get out
of there, or to train a machine gun at the horizon and blaze away at everything
in your path. How much harder it is to remain calm, to analyze the situation
and respond from a place of strength.
It may seem out of whack to
hold chaturanga for 10 breaths and think this will be preparation for war. But
in fact, this is what yoga is all about. And in fact, if there is anything at
all that could truly prepare them to go and fight, it is yoga.
Many people ask me about
ahimsa — the grand yogic tenet of nonviolence. I respond with what the revered
yoga teacher T. K. V. Desikachar says: It simply means that we must always
behave with consideration and attention to others.
So I teach them this, too.
Indeed, Arjuna killed members
of his own family. He was following his dharma, and his conscience. He was
fulfilling his destiny, playing out the role in the world that he, and only he,
was created for.
In the world we have created,
there is a huge divide between the ideal and the real. If everyone truly wanted
no more war, we would have to change the behavior that leads us into war. But I
am not here to teach the world to have no more war. That is for the Dalai Lama.
I am here to teach these soldiers, these young men and women who are willing to
pay for our system of democracy with their lives, how to uncover the truth of
who they are. Who they are — warriors, lawyers, doctors, mothers, fathers,
teachers, priests — is each one’s own specific path. I am here to help them
find their inner souls, and to help them walk their paths with honesty,
integrity and grace. It is what I teach in every yoga class.
But here at this military
college, it feels weighted with much more consequence.
Lauren K. Walker runs the
yoga program for veterans, cadets and civilians at Norwich University.
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