Top Left: The prayer
pavilion at Six Senses
Thimphu, Palace in
the Sky.
Top Right: A roadside
vendor in the village of
Gangtey.Bottom Left:
Students from Ugyen
Dorji Higher Second-
ary School in Bhutan’s
Haa Valley.
Bottom Right: Momo
dumplings filled with
cheese, served at the
Six Senses Paro.The ear is a finger. Through
words and music, they managed
to relax me into an hour and a
half of elbows and fists, oil and
unknotting bliss, that I would
otherwise have resisted.
The next morning, Tracy
and I met Dr. Tamhane, our
Six Senses yogi and wellness
consultant, in the prayer
pavilion for yoga. Pavilion is
misleading. It makes me think
of trade shows. Rather, we
had approached what Tracy
described as a room of windows
floating in a pond. The idea is
to immerse you from above and
below in light and sky.
Doing yoga when you’re
blind is like learning origami
from an audiobook. A lot of
directions, a lot of confusion.
My wife is a yogi. I am the op-
posite. Only once did Tracy try
to teach me. We didn’t get past
sitting. She said I even breathe
ironically. This time, I prom-
ised myself, I would be sincere.
“And now, moving into Cow
Face Pose,” the good doctor
said. “Breathe and reach.”
Everything I am, body and
mind, kept getting in the way.
I was stiff and jokey, not relaxed
and open like a cow’s mouth.
Sometimes, as I tried to touch
the mat with my fingertips, the
doctor would give me glimpses
of my wife for comparison.
“Good, Tracy,” he said at one
point. “And now all the way,
that’s right, nose to the mat.”
Jesus, these people. I can’t
even sit cross-legged, but
Tracy was folded like a napkin
and chilling with her face on
the ground. If that was Cow’s
Mouth Pose, mine would be
better called Toothless, Closed-
mouthed Big Mac in Waiting.
“And finally, Wheel Pose,
press up and arch your back,”
the good doctor suggested,
bringing our session to a close.
My back arched like a yardstick.
Yoga did not make me feel better. If anything, it confirmed for
me that my body is a bag of paste and crowbars. The thought almost
caused me to laugh. And for that, and so many other jokes, I felt toxic.
Here I was, learning yoga amid ancient monasteries and dzongs (for-
tresses), but I couldn’t stop cracking wise. In meditation and silence,
all I could hear was the shooting gallery of chatter in my head.
Then again, is that so bad? Irony is a muscle I have stretched and
trained for my health, if not my survival. A laugh is the only cure for blind-
ness I have known. The world as I bump through it just can’t hurt as much.
We met Dr. Tamhane again that afternoon. He affixed sensors to
my forehead and chest and feet, wiring me into a laptop that would
produce a diagnostic portrait of my biochemistry and organ health.
But as the computer processed my data, I was confronted by the most
obvious downside of tinkering with one’s wellness: What if he told me
I wasn’t fine? Don’t ask what you don’t want to know. As we waited for
my numbers, the worry tightened my chest, which made me worry
that my anxiety about the results was tanking my data, live. I was
caught in my own feedback loop. Finally the laptop spat out my score
and, as he read it, Dr. Tamhane sighed, “Oh, wow.” From what I could
hear, I would be dead in five minutes.
What I didn’t see was his smile. My cholesterol, blood pressure, oxy-
gen levels, liver and kidney function, all of it generated an overall physi-
cal wellness score of 91 percent. He’d rarely seen one that high. He’d
meant the good kind of wow. To this day, I feel like a 68, but, science.
Tracy and I strolled to dinner that evening under innumerable stars.
She stopped and pointed into the darkness, puzzled.
“There’s a dog sleeping in a tree.”
That sounds like a pose I could do, I thought.T
he four-hour road trip from Thimphu to Punakha takes
you from the capital’s public square, where they hold Druk
Super Star, a singing competition, to the north, past ar-
chery fields and the occasional nomadic yak herder, up, up
winding cliff roads, ever higher, and finally, at 10,000 feet,
across the Dochula Pass. The prospect of death is always with you.
Driving, you will see countless prayer flags tied to bridges and rail-
ings, each a gesture to honor the deceased or a wish for safe passage.
Yountin, our guide, helped Tracy and me tie our own prayer flags to a
bridge as the snow fell on the pass. Given the heights, we prayed not
to fall, too. You will also spot many stupas, the small Buddhist shrines
that hold hundreds of tiny sculptures made by monks from a mixture
of clay and the ashes of the dead, fashioning them together into some-
thing that resembles a child’s spinning top.
Everywhere you turn in Bhutan, it seems, something is there to
remind you that luck, good and bad, is a force. You’d best take the
proper precautions. Later in the week, we stopped at an incense
factory where men rolled large coils of what felt like damp spaghetti.
We dried a length on the dashboard heater in our car for days, and
later burned it as an offering for good fortune. Incense is everywhere,
the smell scrubbing the country of bad spirits. Prayer wheels abound
equally, always whirring in the distance.100 AFAR SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019