Once we entered her living room, Liu took charge. Without further ado, she began by having me sit cross legged on the floor a few feet from one end of the mat. Noticing my awkwardness in assuming and obvious difficulty in maintaining this position, she suggested that I draw up my knees and wrap my arms around them, thereby relieving both my legs and back. Then, satisfied that I was reasonably comfortable, she walked to the center of the mat, turned to face me, dropped her hands to her hips, and slowly began lowering her upper torso. In concert with the descent of her body, she raised her head so that her eyes continued to look directly into my own. She stopped when her torso was horizontal, remaining completely still except for the expansion and contraction of her ribs when she took carefully measured breaths, always through her nose and never through her mouth. I was struck by the look of utter tranquility and contented self-absorption on her face, but I had only a brief time to study her features.
Dropping her head, she continued her descent until her chest was espaliered to her legs, her face was resting against her shins, and her hands were clasped to her heels. Deprived of her face, my attention turned to the aesthetically pleasing contours of her bent body. As I have said, Liu's body lacks the sumptuous curves of her Caucasian sisters. Nonetheless, her pose highlighted those curves that she has. Above, her hips and upper thighs flared on either side of her narrow waist, and below her ribcage and shoulders hid her knees and most of her lower legs. Wanting to have a view from the other side, I rose and circled her in much the same way as an art connoisseur might circle a statue, and like a piece of fine sculpture, the view she presented from in rear was just as appealing as that from the front. Especially appealing was the way her buttock and the backs of her upper thighs were displayed. Like most Asian women, Liu's lacks the padding that Caucasian women have on their buttock. As a result, the contours of her compact rear are more subtle but no less pleasing. Similarly, there is only a thin layer of flesh to mask the sinews in her thighs, and so the tension in them and her hamstrings were clearly visible. In marked contrast to that tension was the serene expression on her face, which peered through and was framed by her calves. Succumbing to temptation, I leaned forward to run my hand along her tightly stretched muscles, doing my best to ignore any lascivious implications of what I was doing, even when my hand passed over the junction at the top of her thighs and grazed over the pouting purse of her vulva.
As soon as I had completed my inspection of her body and returned to my seat in front of her on the floor, Liu released her heels and spread her arms while raising and simultaneously twisting her torso, ending in a pose in which her upper body was turned at a right angle to her hips with one arm pointing directly down toward her toes and the other arm reaching in a graceful line toward the ceiling. In spite of the skewed position of her upper body, Liu's head was at the same angle it would have been had she been standing normally, staring at me with that same enigmatic composure which it had had since she began her exercises. I noticed that it was not only her face but also the half of her body below her waist which were in the same posture that they normally are. Indeed, her hips and shoulders had remained parallel to the floor, the twist in her body taking place entirely at her waist. After she had taken a couple of breaths, she slid one leg forward until its knee touched the elbow of her lower arm, at which point she wrapped her forearm around her leg and leaned back,drawing her leg up as she rose.
With her torso once again upright and one leg hugged to her chest, she resembled an exotic water foul who can stand for hours balanced on one leg. The only sign that the maintenance of this pose was less natural for Liu than it is for one of those birds was the increasing evidence of sweat, which was no longer confined to the perspiration on her brow and had begun to weld her leotard to her skin. If anything, by now her leotard only drew attention to every detail of the body to which it had become plastered. Apparently unaware of or oblivious to the exposure of her body, Liu continued her exercise by lowering the leg which she had raised and gracefully reproducing the same pose with her other leg.
When she finally lowered the second leg, she placed her hands on her hips and acknowledged my presence for the first time since my arrival.
"What you have been watching is a few of the basic yoga poses. As you will have observed, yoga is distinguished from other forms of athletic activity by the fact that it never involves herculean feats of strength or heroics but only intense concentration and discipline. The idea is to get the body to perform in ways which would be completely natural if the muscles which perform them had not atrophied from disuse. Further, yoga teaches you to use, rather than numbing it with calisthenics, your mind to regain the use of those muscles. Of course, the adage `no gain without pain' applies to yoga as well, but here too there is a difference. Rather than tough it out, in yoga one is supposed to surrender to and then rise above discomfort. That's the reason why an essential component of the yoga discipline is to keep one's face impassive no matter what demands one is making on ones body. You surely noticed the expression on my face never varied during my exercise. Thus, you had no way of knowing which of my poses entailed discomfort, much less how much discomfort. The best way for you to gain an understanding of what I am talking about is for you to join me on the mat and find out for yourself how these subtle exercises can teach you about your body and mind."
