The zen of Conscious Embodiment

DEVIN DIDN’T WATCH TV, use social media or eat processed food. Mostly he floated around like a limber forest animal, dropping into low squats at will or bending into spontaneous handsprings. His hair was curly and golden and his skin was also golden and he reminded Leda of a beautiful well-muscled gazelle. 

“Push your knees out,” he’d tell her, as she tiger-crawled, crab-walked, frog-hopped down the length of the gym and back. “Load your hamstrings. Engage your glutes.” 

She tried. Focused on her gluts, tried to use them to align her knees properly, to pull a magic invisible thread from her buttocks to her thighs. Whatever he told her to do, she tried as hard as she could to do it. She knew if she got this right, all the other parts of her life would also become right.  

The whole thing was so unlikely. 

First off, it was unlikely for Leda to be going to a gym in the first place. She was more of a yoga person, or maybe a person who meant to go to yoga but ended up taking a nice walk, or if it was rainy, maybe just staying in and doing a few stretches while she watched TV shows online. And then of course it was even more unlikely, a little suspiciously unlikely, for her to be going to the gym five times a week, which was the new number she was up to. 

It had started out one shitty Saturday when Leda had just been dumped—in the morning—by the Matt she was dating or maybe just hooking up with. She was always hooking up with guys named Matt. This was the fourth one if you counted high school. You’d think she would have learned her lesson by the third one, but evidently not, and of course there was an endless supply of guys named Matt to try again with. 

“This is hard for me to say,” he had said, lacing up his shoes like he had places to be, and she didn’t even listen to the rest. She’d heard this speech from every guy she’d ever dated, and it had been a soul-crushing blow every single time. 

They were supposed to spend the day together, get breakfast, go to the farmer’s market, make dinner and watch a movie. Instead, she walked up and down the streets, sharing sad smiles with babies and dogs, kicking empty water bottles down the sidewalk, staring into store windows but not going in. She had a strong feeling of wanting something—a feeling that there was something she could buy, get, do, that would fix her queasy stomach, the defeated limpness in her arms and shoulders, the feeling that her flip-flops were made of concrete. The pain that had been gnawing for weeks in the small of her back, flaring now like a fire in her hip. 

Devin was standing on the sidewalk in front of the gym. 

“Free session,” he said, handing her a flyer. “Strength and mobility training.” 

She studied his tawny face. It was like competence made into a person. Still, confident, calm and able. 

“When?” she asked. 

“How about now.”

“I don’t have gym clothes.” Leda looked down at her jeans and sandals to make the point. 

“It doesn’t matter.” He winked without smiling. “Your body’s all you need.” 

She checked his face to see if this was some kind of flirtation. It definitely wasn’t. 

“So,” he said, his gaze clinical near her waist, “How long has your back been hurting?” 

Three months later it was like Devin was her best friend who she didn’t know at all. She saw him five days a week, sometimes six, early mornings or late evenings.

“Straighten your back,” he’d say, watching her swing a kettlebell through one squinched eye, crouched on the ground like he was about to jump up into a sprint.  “Less up, more forward.”

She memorized every instruction, each detail of each correction, recited them before she fell asleep at night. Shoulders back, hips forward, back straight, knees aligned. Abs engaged, gluts active. Face calm, neck relaxed. Breathing deep and even, in through the nose, out through the mouth. She did push-ups in her cubical at work, one-legged squats in the laundry room of  her apartment building, put her phone on speaker and kicked up into handstands while her actual best friend Alisha told a long story about how her boss was an asshole, murmured her mm-hms upside down.

Leda bought training sessions in ten-packs to save ten percent, then in twenty-packs to save twenty percent. She was sore every morning, so tired that she fantasized about sleep all day long, even when she’d gotten eight hours, dreamed about sleep as she slept. But the way she moved felt like a gazelle. Her muscles were springy, her joints well-greased, her body ready for movement. Her spine was a slinky, her mind coiled like a snake.

It was weird to know so little about Devin, this body who was never more than three feet away from her, lying on the floor to get a better angle on her deadlift or standing high on one foot as they threw a weighted ball back and forth. Watching him jump on and off a platform, Leda couldn’t help think: where does he live? As he somersaulted onto the hard gym floor, rolling over one shoulder and onto the opposite hip and back to standing, she wondered: does he have parents? Does he watch movies? What does he look like when he sleeps? 

She looked for clues. Studied his diet, his incessant snacking between clients. The moment Leda’s session was over, he was shoving large handfuls of thin-sliced sandwich turkey into his mouth, no matter whether it was six in the morning or four in the afternoon. He brought the turkey to the gym in a full Tupperware, left with an empty one. If he had a longer break, he would sit on the rowing machine and eat sweet potatoes that he microwaved in the gym’s back office. 

“You really love turkey,” Leda said one day, as she packed up her water bottle and put on her jacket to leave. 

“Actually no,” Devin said, his mouth full of turkey. He washed it down with a long swig of water from a metal bottle. “I can’t stand it.” 

“But you eat it all day long,” Leda said. 

“For cellular repair and muscle gains,” Devin said. “Not because I like it. Hey, check this out.” 

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a book. The Zen of Conscious Embodiment. 

“You can borrow it,” he said. “Read the chapter on nutrition. Actually,” he bit his lip, scanned the table of contents. “You should read the whole thing.” 

The book said: Meat and vegetables are the proper foods to nourish your body. Pasta can be eaten half an hour before or after a workout. Sugar is poison, and bread is also poison but less delicious.

Leda ran into Matt on her way to the gym. He looked her up and down, his gaze resting on her shoulders, her thighs. 

“You look different.” His smile was approving, flirtatious. “I mean, you look good. Are you doing something?” 

She did it back to him: looked him over, from the top of his hair to the bottom of his sneakers. He looked the same as when they were hanging out: cute, boyish, jeans hanging loose on his skinny hips. 

She used to find this look adorable. Now it seemed boring and predictable, a normal body clothed in fleeting signifiers. For all his youthfulness, there was a lack of mobility in the ankles and knees. A slumped posture. A forward rotation in the shoulders that was going to lead to injuries in not too much time. 

“Does your back hurt?” she asked. 

A wrinkle of puzzlement formed between his eyebrows. “Yeah, all the time. How did you know?” 

Devin chastised her when she ate the wrong things. He could always tell, just from how her body moved. He’d scan her jawline, the range of motion in her ankles, the bounciness of her stride. 

“Was it sugar?” he asked. “Sugar is poison.” 

Leda started carrying around Tupperwares with steamed broccoli and chicken breasts poached in bone broth. She cooked them when she got home from the gym, right after she meditated for twenty minutes and did stretches. She forgot to do things like call her mom or message Alisha to hang out on the weekend.

The book said: Never mistake devotion to your coach for physical, mental or spiritual progress. Your coach can teach you many important lessons, but he cannot do the work in your place. Once your practice is truly your own, you can do it alone or in a group, in quiet or noise, at home or abroad, with your coach or without him. 

Leda tried to run through a full workout at the park, without Devin. Stair crawls, push-ups, platform jumps onto a stone wall. It was okay, but hard to keep focus. No one cared if she was doing the moves right or wrong, if she did ten or twenty, if her knees were properly aligned or collapsing inward in a way that could lead to nothing but certain doom.

Where are you? Alisha texted. Are you even okay? 

They met up for lunch at the place in Berkeley with the giant salads. Leda ordered her salad with no dressing, with extra hard boiled eggs on the side. When she asked for no bread, Alisha interrupted: “I’ll take her bread.” 

Now Alisha was holding a fork in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. “So, like, what’s this whole thing about?” She used the bread to gesture at Leda’s shoulder muscles.

“Oh, yeah.” The explanation was embarrassing, Leda realized. It sounded so banal. “I’ve been working with a strength and mobility trainer.” 

“That’s cool,” Alisha said. “Is he telling you what to eat?” 

“Not exactly,” Leda said. “But it affects my performance.” 

Alisha frowned and took a big bite of bread. 

“Sounds like a cult,” she said. 

“No,” Leda said. “I mean, he’s a little controlling. But actually he’s really nice.” 

“You know what’s really nice?” Alisha asked. “Bread.” 

“Land on the platform with your knees aligned,” Devin said. He was playing with his phone, trying to get an app to work. “When you do it right, I’ll click.”

The platform was a metal box, higher than the one she usually jumped onto, almost up to her waist. She wasn’t sure she could land on it at all, never mind paying attention to the angles of her knees while she did it.

“What do you mean, click?”

“Operant conditioning,” Devin said. “I learned it at a seminar last weekend. Instead of telling you that you did it right, I’ll just press this button to make a clicking sound.”

He tapped his phone screen. It made a noise that reminded Leda of the annoying guy at work who fidgeted with his pen all through meetings.

“That’s the click,” Devin said. “When you hear that, you’ll know your knees were in the right position.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“I could.” He smiled like he’d been hoping she’d ask. “But then you will be conditioned to desire approval from your coach. Instead of being conditioned to keep your knees aligned.”

What’s the difference, Leda wanted to ask, but she didn’t. She knew the answer, at least in theory.

Instead, she faced the platform, measured the height with her gaze, determined how high she’d need to lift her legs to get on top of it. She hadn’t messed up one of these yet, but she’d seen it happen to a guy at the gym, his shins bruised and bloody as his trainer brought bandages and ice.  

She swung her arms behind her, bent at the knees and waist, and jumped.

Metal brushed the front of her foot. Her breath caught, waiting for the scrape, the crash.

She was on top of the platform.

She looked around the gym, triumphant and shocked. Listened to her own heart pounding, waiting for someone to say something: nice jump, or that’s a high platform, or even, that was a close one.

Devin was looking his phone.

“Did you see that?” she asked. “That’s was my highest one ever.”

“No click,” Devin said, pointing at her knees. “Do it again.”

Leda had her own copy of The Zen of Conscious Embodiment, now, rush-delivered from Amazon so she could start marking important passages. She had drawn three stars next to the paragraph that said: If your training does not increase your happiness, why do you continue? Every athlete must decide for themselves: are the sacrifices worth the rewards?   

Leda asked Devin if they could talk after her training session. 

“This is hard for me to say,” she started. 

Devin’s eyes met hers. They were tawny like the rest of him, a golden hazel. Leda felt like they were looking right through her physical body and into her soul. He knew, she realized. He’d known all day—maybe this whole time, from the beginning—how this would end. Maybe it was part of the training.

“Well, go on,” Devin said. 

“It’s just.” Leda hoped he would cut her off, to spare her. “I’ve really enjoyed working out with you.” 

She looked at him. He looked back, his face patient and blank. 

“And I’ve learned a lot.” 

He looked like he could wait all day. She reminded herself that he meditated twenty-five minutes, three times a day. 

“I think I’ll need to stop after today,” she said. 

He spread his lips into something a little straighter than a smile. 

“This lifestyle isn’t for everyone,” he said. “You’ll be missed.”

Leda opened her mouth to say that she would always value the lessons he had taught her, that she would make sure to continue her training, her diet, her meditation practice. But Devin had already sprung up and away. She watched the golden curls bounce on the back of his head as he approached the platform to begin his jumps. 

Just like that. Like he didn’t even care that she was leaving. No parting words, no hug. No anger or disappointment. 

She wondered if she was making a mistake. 

You’ll be missed, he had said. 

Did that mean he would miss her? 

Looking back, Leda was pretty sure she’d made the right decision. 

“Definitely the right decision,” Alisha told her, as they shoveled down their salads with extra bread. “That guy was such a creep.” 

“I guess so,” Leda said.

She had managed to do some of the exercises on her own, at least a few of them. Not every day, but usually once a week, for half an hour or so. Her pushups were decent, her jumping not completely deteriorated. And yet, it was undeniable: her body and mind had been better during those six months when she was a disciple of Devin. There would be no way to regain that weightlessness, that feeling in her muscles of stored kinetic potential filled to bursting.

For dessert, she shared a cookie with Alisha, savored the sweet tanginess of the pink icing that dripped over the sides, and tried to ignore the growing tightness in her lower back.

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