‘Praning’ over prana
Since my wife started doing yoga, we’ve been eating more vegetables at home and practically no meat except fish. She’s determined to become a pesco-ovo-lacto-vegetarian (someone who eats only fish, eggs, dairy and veggies), an experiment that I predict will not last four months (I failed in my own experiment with meatlessness once).
Still, I totally agree that a vegan diet is one of the best ways to prevent cancer, an ailment that, given all the stress and toxicity of today’s urban living, is almost certain to happen to most of us. It’s just—sorry for being morbidly pessimistic—a matter of time.
On the brighter side, a pseudo vegan is bound to enjoy occasional binges with lechon and other dreaded meat dishes for much longer.
Vegetarianism is like an ideal we strive to achieve even if we know that the hedonist within us is still bound to win over whatever aspirations we may have for a more elevated, healthy, guilt-free but also ascetic lifestyle.
“It helps improve prana,” my wife says about the vegan diet, after coming home from yoga practice with another new Indian word. I don’t really know about this prana, which in Sanskrit can mean life and breath at the same time, but I know I’ll go praning (crazy in Filipino) under a strict vegan diet.
Besides, tofu can taste like wet paper when steamed, which is the healthiest way to cook it. So I cheat occasionally to dig my protein from some delicious animal carcass.
Once, for example, after days of eating raw vegetables, a little fish, and tofu, I couldn’t resist the sight of jeepney drivers feasting over hot bowls of balbacua and lansiao at a roadside eatery in Tintay, Talamban. I had to park my bicycle beside the makeshift tables and ordered my own bowl of jelly-like pork skin in thick saucy goo and a plate of mais or corn grits.
It was sweet indulgence that resulted in an evening of flatulence. Prana.
But my wife is trying so hard to learn how to squeeze prana out of her body in more reverent ways, through yogic postures that twist the human figure like pretzels. As I watch her perform yoga at home, it makes me a bit worried that she might break her back. She has mild scoliosis, a hereditary condition that we’re afraid our daughter might have too.
So, when she came home once saying that she has finally learned how to do the headstand, I protested. But she assured me that yoga, in fact, is the best way to straighten a curved spine. “There’s a lot of websites to prove that,” she said. My pessimism works again at the mention of websites.
She wants me to join her at the yoga school. She has successfully recruited some of my own friends to enroll there, including my French artist friend Remy and his young wife. Remy is a former gymnast in Paris who now delights at how yoga has slowly revived his youthful flexibility.
With the girls in yoga school, Remy even tried exercising with the hula hoop, a special kind with small colored LCD lights that blinks when used. In the dark, they swirl like planets with bright colorful rings. Or it must be the lights captured in slow shutter speed as I just saw them on a picture in Facebook.
Despite my wife’s efforts to bring my friends to the yoga center, I’m still not really inclined to try yoga with my wife anytime soon. I just can’t picture myself trying to bend or stretch my body to mimic the alphabets while being watched by others.
Instead I would prefer something like tai chi, which I guess is another great way of improving prana. Doing those fighting moves in slow motion in the middle of a park, it feels like you become one with the wind, your own prana becomes one with the cosmic breath.
My American friend Paul, whose Swiss wife used to teach yoga in New York (she now teaches in another yoga center here in Cebu), told me about a “restorative” yoga that he had tried and really liked. Blinded with an eye pillow in a room with cushions and soft music, you are just made to recline in a very comfortable position until you doze off and feel totally recharged when you wake up.
Now that’s the kind of yoga I’m looking for.
