Yof

Let me tell you the moment that Yof began for me, or more accurately, how I began in Yof. There are, of course, stories from before, stories of when my skin formed in a pouch that my mother carried inside of her cavernous membrane, skin that I’d give away only to wear again soon. There were even stories of that fateful summer, the summer of the electrostatic derma needle and the masterlift, the summer of the Rejuvederm rewards program and the lime green Bic lighter. In the memories of some, it was the best time that had ever been flung loose from this generation’s usual dreg of work and meaningless gyration. We were chipping away at new frontiers: flesh, cartilage, the FUPA (Fat Upper Pubic Area), colonic drift. But in the memories of others, it was a summer of eroding sensation. We were chasing the next cramp and wearing our intestines as hats or like tiny velvet purses, keeping them pink and translucent. We were watching the sting turn stale, feeling between our peeled away fingertips the ash lose its grit, the new intimacy of what used to feel like our furthest limit. 

Then, there it was, the Quietude Peace Studio in Brentwood. A jewel box of a place that was unlike any other: a white brick, boxy storefront with sans serif branding and Palo Santo incense flapping in the front window. It was a completely unique destination. The first floor was for your typical Yin yoga practice, where amateurs and Groupon users went to gently stretch the hamstrings and strengthen the upper core. The second floor, which was up a metal spiral staircase, that’s where the real yoga happened. 

I remember one of my earliest sessions at Quietude two years ago. I was still on that first floor in a basic fifty-minute Roll, Release, and Mobilize class. Over the waterfall ambient music mixed with occasional gong noises, I heard screeching from upstairs. Another Groupon user and I eyed one another as we sank into a lunge with our arms outstretched. 

“You heard that too right?” She asked, her blonde ponytail jerking as her eyes darted around the bright white studio. 

“I heard it too,” I said. I could have sworn the ceiling rumbled and some drywall fell around us. 

But before Blondie and I could investigate, the instructor bent down and said to us, “Ladies, you’re not paying to disrupt someone else’s nirvana are you?” And with a chunky, veneered smile, she returned to a perfect lotus pose at the front of the room. I figured the screeching upstairs must have been sneakers squeaking against the polished floors. In fact, I distinctly remember driving home and picturing a pair of HOKAs squeaking against the hardwood. I drove straight to Nordstrom and dropped my last paycheck on a pair. 

In between Quietude sessions, I worked at a second-hand baby clothing store, which was basically a field of wheat with the occasional grazer. There was no chase, no exhilaration, no razor’s edge. The pregnant women with their constant stretching, I envied them. I tried to create urgency of my own, raced to hang as many 18mo onesies before the clock hit the next prime number, held in my pee until it burned to sit. But the store was still a field of wheat, perhaps even a painting of one. I wanted a sting. 

I ascended to the second floor a year after starting at Quietude. By then, I’d been going four, sometimes six, times a week. I hardly had the funds to keep going, but something told me I’d never regret investing in an optimized lifestyle. That’s what the sign on the door says at Quietude. Find your optimized lifestyle. And that’s what I did. 

I flushed out all the toxic sludge in my body with IV drips, washing away the filth in my veins. I scraped my insides as clean as a jack-o-lantern with various detoxes that left me standing from the toilet seat feeling tons lighter and decades younger. And every Thursday, I sucked all the moisture from my body in bikram yoga to ensure I’d properly sweated out all the filth I’d accumulated throughout the week onto the warm, honey wood floors of Quietude. I perfected my compass pose, leaving all the Groupon bunglers in the dust. And I collected all the necessary artifacts to turn my apartment into a Quietude satellite house—designer zafus, expensive red light lamps, straps and beads and bells and grippy socks and jellies and cork wheels—all so I could practice yoga into the night. What it gave me was this perfect feeling, this surge of warmth in me, lightness, like my body was finally becoming the creature I wanted it to be. 

One morning, during a ninety-minute Spring Into Ayurveda class, my favorite instructor, Shelley, a sturdy woman with a nose piercing and Nick Cave tattoo on her upper back, gripped my waist as I was in kakasana (crow pose) and whispered in my ear, breath hot in my face, “Hey girl, let’s get you upstairs to the big guy.” 

“You really mean it?” I asked her and she wiped the tear that ran up my upside-down cheek. 

She smacked my ass. “Yes, girl.” 

***

It was customary for second-floor newcomers to do a one-on-one session with the designated second-floor advanced instructor, at least, that’s what Shelley told me as she posted my picture on the Quietude Platinum Ultimate Moksha Elite Second-Floor Member bulletin board by the front door. The first time I climbed that metal staircase to the second floor, Chris was alone in the studio waiting for me in astavakrasana. He wasn’t the first white guy with a grey man-bun and shredded scarf over his muscle tank I’d met in Brentwood, but he’d be the first I wouldn’t forget. 

The second floor was entirely white with blank white canvases hung on the wall framed in white-painted frames and white curtains hanging down from the towering vaulted ceilings. The sound of clanking wood beads echoed around the warehouse, the noise surrounding me from all angles, like a flock of birds around spilt crackers. I turned to see Chris kneading a beaded bracelet in his hands, which he dropped in my palm. 

“For you,” he said. “Welcome to the second floor.” His smile stretched in a way that appeared painful. The beads were sweaty and not wood or natural fiber as I’d suspected but metal. They were metal balls beaded on a metal cord. I gave them back. And as he returned them to his boney wrist, they hung heavy, digging into his skin, as if anchoring him. 

Chris led me to the center of the second floor studio. “I guess I’m a little early,” I said. “You’re right on time. I like to do one-on-one sessions with any new second floor students.” He threw his scarf to the side and snapped his fingers. “Crow pose.” I hoisted my body up on my palms and elbows. Looking up, I wanted to know if he was impressed. 

“Scorpion.” 

I immediately moved my body upside down, resting on my forearms, dangling my legs over my head.

“Stay,” he said, and I stayed. He kneeled by my head. “See how you feel blood rushing to your head, draining from your legs? You’ve reached human physical excellence, sure, but if you stayed this way, you’d pass out, wouldn’t you?” 

“I’d try not to,” I said. 

“You’d pass out wouldn’t you?” This time more sternly. 

All the hours I’d spent practicing Scorpion at home, I’d never bothered to stay for longer than a minute after achieving the pose. Chris stayed kneeling by my head, with nothing but the look of waiting on his face. I felt determined to stay. But he walked away. 

“Have you ever felt like yoga could take you past your highest form?” I dropped to my knees, dizzy. “That you were struggling against an inadequate skin? You keep reaching capacity, one limit after another. It’s impressive, beautiful even, to break those limits, but you keep finding new ones, and they keep getting harder to break. And then all you can do is struggle.”

“I’ve shown no issue with breaking past my bodily limits.” 

“Yes, but don’t you struggle?” 

I felt the sting of skipping breakfast in my stomach and tightened my inner obliques to make up for it. 

“I don't think my struggle gets in the way of my dedication to yoga here.”

“Struggle is a good thing. If you’re not struggling, you’re not growing. And if you’re not growing, you’re out the door. That’s how we take care of you at a place like this.” Chris set up a yoga mat in the middle of the room. It smacked the honey oak floors as he shook it open. I hadn’t noticed that I was practicing directly on the hard wood floors this whole time. I looked at my arms and saw bruises. 

“Bruises,” he said. “You didn’t even notice. That’s incredible. That’s just incredible.” 

Chris pointed to the yoga mat. I lied down, looking up at him, feeling suddenly vulnerable. 

He kneaded my shoulders and arms, looking out the huge windows of the studio at the hills and highways in the distance. “We’re lucky here, very lucky.” 

“This is great real estate,” I said. “Don’t see many two-story yoga studios around here.” I wondered what the rent was like. 

“What?” 

“The location. It’s hard real estate in LA.” 

“No, I’m talking about something actually deep. Our place in this universe, our purpose.” “Oh, sorry.” 

“There are people out there struggling.” 

I thought about all the struggles out there. Homelessness, redlining, war, genocide. Of course the next level to this incredible practice required us to look beyond ourselves and at the greater system of inequality and suffering. I made a note to say fewer selfish things in front of Chris. 

Chris pushed his head between his hands. “The suffering is here!” 

I felt relieved. 

“Brentwood is in crisis! It’s a crisis of the soul. People don’t know what to do with their struggles. They want their struggles to go away.” 

“And Quietude helps them do that,” I said, finally understanding. 

“Wrong again.” He dragged his palms down his face. “Your struggle is what defines your pleasure. All of my mentors, great men, taught me that. My struggle came to define me, as it does you.” His voice drifted off as he became lost in the view. “You will be rewarded for your struggle.” He hovered just above my face, studying me from above. I noticed his man bun had fallen lopsided. “So much struggle. You have struggled the best out of everyone here. Congratulations.” 

And there it was again, that warm, stinging feeling. 

“Stay still.” He unzipped my Quietude™ warm-up jacket and rolled it off my shoulders. “Don’t be afraid.” 

I had been training all this time to ignore certain cues. Hot, cold, ticklish, queasy, hungry. And when Chris’s finger grazed my arm, I watched the skin ripple and sink as his finger passed through. Yet I felt nothing, no touch at all. 

“You’re tense all over.” 

“Oh, I didn’t realize.” 

“It’s normal,” he said, moving my hair from my neck. “Listen.” 

And when he put his lips close to my ear, he didn’t say words, but a series of low-pitched clicking noises that erupted from deep in his sinewy chest. The sounds, of which there are no known phonetic transcriptions, were similar to a whale call. It echoed through my entire body like a growling stomach, as if my entire being was hungry, my skin, my bones, my eyes. “What was that?” I sat up. 

“The Song of Yof,” he said, redoing his man-bun. He made the clicking noises again. “Yof?” 

“Yes, Yof.” 

“What is it?” 

“I should ask you the same. What does it feel like for you?” 

“Like my entire body is hungry, not just my stomach.”

“Hm. Interesting. Good,” he said. “You are experiencing a state of complete optimization. Feels nice, right?” 

“I think so.” 

“You told me earlier you kept hitting a limit?” 

“Something like that.” 

“Well Yof empowers every cell of your body to operate at a level just beyond its individual limit towards peak efficiency. It manifests as a mild state of discomfort multiplied by hundreds of millions of cells. But the result is beautiful. You become incredibly hot and gorgeous and tight, glowing even, which is tragically impossible for so many people.” I remembered the hunger in my skull, my brain growling. 

“All Yof asks in return is that you endure it, which you have shown tremendous ability to do.” 

“Really?” 

“Really. I mean you’ve got something special here that no one else has. You find your furthest limit, that point of physical and mental and emotional exhaustion and you just charge through.” 

“I think I need to get a lot better at pushing past that urge to give up,” I told him. “Especially when I’m frustrated.” 

“Don’t do that. Don’t disquiet yourself. You have pushed past it. You have.” “Really?” I asked, that warm skin feeling intensifying. 

“Yes. Really. Own it.” 

“You’re right. You’re totally right. I’m honored to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ve watched you almost give up just as many times as you’ve prevailed. That’s an incredible ratio. And the look on your face every time you think, Fuck it, I’m gonna leave my body behind in this and go total mind over matter.” 

“Wait a minute–” 

“You have such a disconnection with your body. It’s honestly impressive–” “I’m sorry, did you say you’ve been watching me?” 

He paused. “Did I say that?” 

“Yes, you said you’ve watched me a bunch of times.” 

“Is that a weird thing to say to someone?” 

“Uh, yes.” 

He winced and shrugged. “But is it?” 

“Yeah it would be creepy and invasive.” 

He placed his metal bead bracelet on the coffee table and massaged some lotion into his hands before responding. “Hm.” 

In the corner of the studio there was a makeshift office consisting of a rug, one floor cushion, a coffee table, and a filing cabinet. Chris sat on the cushion, offering me a seat across from him. He opened his computer and played a song. ‘Cause I am barely breathing, and I can’t find the air / Don’t know who I’m kidding, imagining you care. 

“It’s some of the most breathtaking songwriting I’ve ever witnessed,” he said. “The most breathtaking human expression I’ve ever witnessed even.” 

“It’s definitely moving,” I said. The man on the cover of the album wore a bowling hat and goatee, and he posed against a dirty brick wall with his shirt unbuttoned to his hairless belly, exposing a chest covered in necklaces and cords and beads. “I’m feeling super moved.”

He wasn’t convinced. “You can go now.” 

“What?” 

“It’s one thirty-five,” he said, scratching his neck. “This session is only supposed to be thirty minutes. I need time to realign my spirit.” 

“Is there anything else you want to ask me? To see if I’m ready for the Second Floor?” “No.” 

“So I’m in?” 

“I haven’t decided yet.” He began to light some incense that smelled like pennies. “Come back tomorrow.” 

***

The next day, Chris gave me a massage, rubbing my back with both hands, working the knots in my back and shoulders. And all the while, his chest clicked the Song of Yof. “I like you,” Chris said. 

“Yes,” I told him. “I’m really excited to get started on this Yof thing.” 

“Seems like we’ve reached the point where we should take our clothes off.” “What.” 

“Kidding.” He pushed his hair all the way back. “I was just kidding.” Then he got up, rubbing his arms quickly as if he were very cold, and grabbed a water bottle from his bag. “Sip this.” 

“What for?” 

“It’s water.” 

I didn’t exactly believe him, but figuring that whatever it was, I could always make myself vomit—which believe me, I’d done—I drank anyway. 

He was right. It was just water. It tasted like pennies but I chugged it down anyway. When I looked up, Chris was reaching over his head to a spot just under his man bun. He zipped down his entire front side until his human suit lay split in half in a pile on the floor and what was left standing was a creature made entirely of light. I squinted and saw the faint outline of a man, his arms floating as if he were underwater. 

“God?” 

“No, silly.” His voice boomed. “Yof.” 

“Yof,” I whispered, kneeling. 

“That’s right,” Chris said, his voice echoed as if he was calling to me from the bottom of a drained swimming pool. “Do you want to see how it feels?” He asked. 

He grabbed my hand with his hand, which was a collection of vaporized mass in the shape of someone’s hand. I felt no warmth, no fingertips, no skin. Just pure light, like he was a projection, like he was the last exhalation of whoever he was before, like he had shed his last winter coat. 

I had covered my eyes completely to shield them from the brightness when he put my hand to his chest. I felt around but there was nothing to feel. Nothing to grab. Nothing to hold. I hadn’t realized something like this could be real, that someone could become nothing at all. “I can’t feel you,” I told him. 

“I know,” he said. “I treated my body right and dedicated my life to striking that balance deep in my soul. I’ve mastered my body and my mind. I’ve reached Yof.” His light pulsed. “Are you the only one?” 

“Hardly. We’re scattered around the world, even Asia. And you can be here with me. Listen,” he grabbed my hands, though they passed right through his. “I see in you real potential. You could become Yof too. Here with me.” 

“Me? Yof?” 

“Yes, you. Yof.” 

“How?” 

“It happened one night after I overdosed on Erewhon buckwheat shots. I thought I had passed out, detoxed successfully. But I woke up like this.” 

“How many buckwheat shots?” 

“Hundreds of buckwheat shots, like so many…” 

“That’s it? Buckwheat shots?” 

“So far, that’s the only way I’ve been able to induce Yof.” 

I was shocked. Years of sanding down my will in the name of self discipline only for there to be a simple $16 solution all this time. The simplicity of it all began to make sense. “Sounds pretty easy.” 

“And you must renounce your human cravings.” 

In just a year at Quietude, I’d begun to imagine growing grey within those white brick walls, grey and so goddamn tight. But looking around at the empty second-floor studio, bathed in Chris’s delicious and eternal light, the only thing I could focus on as I weighed his proposition was this ugly thing crumpled up on the floor. His old skin bag. The folds of his face drooped onto the floor like melting jowls. His man bun sat limp and flat, connected to a hairline that looked far more expansive than it did when wrapped around his head. The skin of his arms and legs were folded over themselves like hairy, skin-colored phone chargers tangled in a drawer. I looked down at my own skin bag and began to feel the same revulsion. 

He screeched the Song of Yof again. 

“What better reminder of your self discipline than the constant growl of your soul working at its highest level at all times? The constant hum of optimization? You can be completely free of hunger, suffering,” he said. “Acid reflux.” 

I couldn’t think of anything better. I couldn’t think of anything else at all. Chris returned to the ground and slid back into his pale skin suit. “I don’t want to pressure you. I know this is a lot. Go home. Think about it. If you want to walk away, there’s no shame in walking away. Some people are only cut out for ordinariness.” 

He walked to a nearby rack where a dozen white Quietude™ T-shirts hung. He removed them from their rack, flung them against a corner of the wall, and sat on the pile, settling in. It was his Yof nest. “Call me if you have any questions.” 

***

Here’s the deal: your skin is just skin. You don’t have to care for it at all. You can be impossible and boundless without it. It is a thing you created and can thus mold or destroy. If I am a human being at all—if I had been a human being at all—I would have agonized over the thought of shedding my body, letting it pool around my ankles like silk before sex. And I did, just not in that white brick studio. 

I could tell you how the fridge in the back office of the second-floor studio was large and ancient and emanated a low chorus of Yofs of old calling to me to do exactly what I did, take them.

I could tell you that the buckwheat shots were glass and cold with cork caps, that they fizzled when I shook them and threw them back. 

And Chris said, “You could be completely yourself. You without the hassle of Body.” But Yof entered my life long before the hundredth buckwheat shot entered my system, and I detoxed all over the bathroom floor. 

I think it happened when I was a young girl, when I caught a glance of the meat beneath my chin in the fractured reflection of a medicine cabinet mirror pointed at another mirror. It was the music I heard in my mother’s womb from the mind of a composer wasting away from consumption in his bathtub until he was a wet, soapy skeleton, the swelling of an orchestra from a man eroding in his boots. At some point, whenever it was, I told myself, You’ve got all this stuff all over you. Extra stuff. You’re awake now. You’ll always be awake to this from now on. There’s a you somewhere in there, but it’s covered in all this extra stuff. That’s the moment Yof began for me. 

Yof is eternal; you have to know that. There are no backsies. Yof won’t deliver you to beauty, a frivolous thing, temporary in every strain. Instead, you can become vapor, constantly dissipating into the air, and that can be your unreachable limit, your endless sting, your forever detox. It would be like pricking your finger and getting to feel the blood leaving you endlessly. What an incredible feeling to promise yourself to! 

What a thing to believe, to deserve.