Most mothers want to protect their children, not underwrite their nervous breakdowns. But in my defense, my daughter wanted this nervous breakdown, needed it, asked for it as a college graduation gift. “Nervous breakdown” is what I called it; she called it a “transformative life experience” that was to come in the form of a month-long residential yoga teacher training program. I thought college was supposed to be this “transformative experience,” but it disappointed. So for her graduation present, I wrote the check.

But I warned her: “You think yoga teacher training is going to be all spiritual and quasi-athletic, but they are going to take you apart and put you back together in a whole new way. You won’t even recognize yourself at the end of the month. You sure you want this?”

Only a few years earlier she had watched and listened to the blow-by-blow account of my own personal transformation at Kripalu, at the age of 51, when I submitted to yoga teacher training. She had watched her mother drive off frightened and wavering about her life’s purpose and direction, and return clear and steady. And now, she wanted this for herself. Who could blame her?

But I worried. Transformation isn’t the kind of thing that can be scheduled into your Covey Planner. Transformation is all about timing. Like the koan about the teacher appearing when the student is ready, the individual has to be ripe, the stage set. Maybe she was ready. She thought she was.

I also worried that she might be more in love with the image of the yoga teacher, with its stretchy couture and its eco-friendly accoutrements, than with the heavy responsibilities that come with taking people into areas of themselves they haven’t been in a long time, if ever. And I also knew that in order to guide others into these dark areas, she would have to go there herself.

When I did my training at age 51, I had been practicing yoga on my own fairly regularly for over 30 years. I didn’t go to the training because I wanted to teach, but because I had hit a wall in my practice. I kept feeling that there were all these important things going on beyond the postures that I just wasn’t getting. I felt that my teachers were “holding back” on me; that they knew “secrets,” that only teachers got to know. I wanted in on those secrets.

I drove myself to Kripalu for my month-long training in a cold rain. I felt giddy with excitement. Then I felt afraid. Then I felt nauseous. Then I felt sheer, gasping-for-breath, paralyzing panic. I clutched the steering wheel. What was I thinking? I couldn’t even do a headstand. Hell, I couldn’t even do a decent forward bend! I was 51 years old for chrissakes! What was I doing? Who did I think I was? What the hell was the matter with me? I pulled off the road and considered turning back. I sat for a while, cried, shifted the car back into drive and kept going. It continued to pour.

A month later, on the drive back to Mansfield, my clothes smelled like incense. I still had the red tilak paste bindi on my forehead from the graduation ceremony. When I stopped in Cooperstown for my first cup of coffee in a month, the cashier looked at me funny. In my strange mental state I thought he could probably tell that I now had “the secret of yoga,” but then I saw my face in the rearview mirror and knew that I just looked like a peculiar woman with a red dot on her forehead.

Yoga school had spiritually “rolfed” me. Rolfing is a hands-on manipulation of the body that hurts a lot, but releases, realigns and balances you. But instead of just rolfing my body, yoga teacher training had realigned and balanced my whole conception of myself. All those questions I had asked on the drive to Kripalu: What was I doing? Who did I think I was? What the hell was the matter with me? Had been answered.

I had gotten what I went there for: the “secret of yoga.” And it only took one explosive bonfire of anger, sixteen sleepless nights, a quart of ink spilled into three notebooks, eight pounds of tofu and two gallons of tears.

And now my daughter said she wanted this too. Or her version of it. And although part of me felt flattered and validated, another part recoiled at the thought of my baby going through such inevitable existential pain, alone, in a dorm room filled with twenty other souls suffering similar, sleepless hells.

So I sat her down and told her the secret of yoga. After all, why should she have to go through all that suffering if I already knew it and could just tell her? Wasn’t it the parent’s job to smooth the way for the progeny? And the “secret” wasn’t even a secret. We were never sworn to secrecy with blood or spit or ritual. So this is what I told her:

“The path of yoga is NOT like getting on Rte 80, taking the westbound ramp and ending up in Pittsburgh. On this path, you get on Rte 80 and your car immediately breaks down. You then spend the rest of your life trying to get it up and running again. And while you sit on the side of the road it rains a lot. And most of the time it’s dark. And then there’s fog. And it’s either too hot or too cold. And meanwhile everyone else seems to be zooming along just fine, having intense, amazing, mind-blowing experiences, whereas you are sitting, broken down, on the side of the road. And this is the path of yoga, your path if you really want to go this way. But what you will learn at yoga school is not just how it feels to face this broken-downness, but how to accept it, --and this is the kicker—and, how to be happy about it!”

I might as well have been trying to describe what blue looks like to a blind person. She tried to understand. She really did. She even tried to believe me, but I could tell she didn’t. Some things you have to find out for yourself, and this was one of them.

I drove her to Kripalu. I met her roommates, helped her unpack, and left. The next time I saw her, I knew she KNEW. She looked beat, she looked beautiful, and she took one look at me and started laughing and crying hysterically.

After her graduation ceremony we drove home together. This time she was the one who smelled of incense and sported the red dot in the middle of her forehead. She looked more tender and vulnerable than I had seen her since her days as a baby in a crib.

She never had that nervous breakdown, she said. Instead, her transformation came in the form of a total disarmament. During her training she was challenged to lay down all of her psychological defense strategies, all those ways of operating in the world and with other people that supposedly kept her “safe” and “unhurt” but also numb. She was asked to see if she could actually live like that, and to her amazement, she found she could. So instead of feeling “broken down” she now felt “broken open.” No more armor. The secret of yoga, for her, she said, was the art of being tender and broken-open all the time. Armor doesn’t know the difference between love and hate, she said. When you defend against pain, you also armor against love.

“So what this means for you, Mom,” she said, “is that it’s okay to sit happily broken down on the side of the road, but if somebody stops, it’s also perfectly all right to accept a tow.”

Ah.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com