![]() ![]() But Dederer and her memoir are both troubled by the meditator’s worst enemy, the monkey mind. She discovers the balance and power of crow pose and headstand. ![]() She learns –- and tells us - about meditation, breathing, and drishti –- the point on which you focus your gaze to help you concentrate in a challenging pose. ![]() Along the way, she frets about her young daughter, grows distant from her husband, turns an overachiever friend on to yoga with alienating results, has another baby, relocates from Seattle to Colorado with her husband and daughter and comes back again, and always ruminates, with simmering anger and periodic bemusement, on the repercussions that her shape-shifting, pot-scented childhood has on her identity as a woman and as a mother.ĭederer knows that a yoga pose is called an asana. Poser is really about motherhood those who are good at it and those less good, about striving for the good life, and, as Dederer reminds her pregnant belly, that “mommies are protagonists, too.”ĭederer’s memoir recounts her tentative approach to yoga, first with a videotape at home (not a good idea, she learns) then at an austere studio peopled with the ultra-fit, and finally, among newcomers at an unpretentious storefront manned by a fellow with a dorky hairdo. Poser is only partially about yoga, although Dederer, an essayist and book reviewer, writes well about the physical challenges of a consistent yoga practice. In Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses she writes that yoga “was an attempt to fix something…wrong with me.” And it’s that quest for perfection - along with a bad back and a nervous tremor - that drives Dederer to take up yoga. She buys organic meat, mills the baby food by hand, lives in a leafy and eco-friendly neighborhood, and shuns chemical household cleansers in favor of vinegar. She is that daughter who becomes a woman determined to do everything right by her husband and daughter. As you grow up, marry, and become a mom yourself, you feel inflexible about what’s right and what’s wrong in your life. You grow up safely nestled inside an earnest triangle, with Mom and tugboat captain Larry making two sides of the triangle, and Dad the third, but Mom’s lifestyle choice flummoxes you. Through the lens of years, some of these places you’ve lived gather a kind of macramé and alfalfa sprout charm. You, the daughter, and your adored brother travel with mom from residence to residence. Imagine that you’re the daughter of a ’70s suburban mom who leaves her husband for a hippie tugboat captain, but chooses to never officially divorce her husband. ![]()
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