Could Yoga Have Led Me to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

First published September 18, 2008

Yoga, I have always thought, saved me from the law.

I became a lawyer, in the narrative I have set up of my life, because I was blind to my heart.  It was the path my mind led me down, the safe, manageable world of knowledge and surface communication and clear organizing principles.

Sure, I told myself I went to law school to change the world.  Certainly not because my parents were begging me to do it.  But I also fully acknowledged, at the ripe old age of 24, that I would end up going to law school eventually, so why not do it while I was young?

I did, to my credit, fight the good fight.  Much of my first year was spent in tears as I tussled over the meaning of justice with other students who were plainly in the game to make six figures a year.  (We're talking the pre-dot-com '90's, when you had to actually work your way up to a six-figure salary at a big law firm.)  I sought refuge in the nascent Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, reasoning that an organization run on consensus must be a warm and welcoming haven, even if we were, as it turns out, publishing articles about law by people who practiced and taught law.  I jumped at the chance to work in the Fair Housing Clinic during my third year and ended up feeling alienated and discouraged at the thought that once someone needs to consult a lawyer, there's nothing much the lawyer can do to correct the harm she's already suffered.

In other words, the law broke my heart over and over again.

But I didn't know how to do anything else.  When I tried to think of something, I came up blank.  I had, after all, spent three years of my life and a great deal of my parents' money getting a law degree.  I couldn't imagine any other job for which I was fit. I knew from a mercifully brief but unfortunate college experience that I am not the least bit suited to waiting tables, which surely meant I couldn't take any chances on a creative-type lifestyle.

So I pursued the public interest dream.  I graduated from law school jobless.  I volunteered with some public interest organizations as I studied for the California Bar while living in my parents' home. ("You should reach for the stars," my mother would say, her eyes shining with passion, as we crossed paths in the kitchen. "Work for a law firm!"  Plainly, her universe is a lot smaller than mine.) And I stumbled into a clerkship in DC, buying myself some time and some legal street cred.

Then the clerkship was over and I was back in the dispiriting search for public interest work. Even at the time, I knew my heart wasn't in it. But I couldn't see my way to anything else. And when time was running out on my gainful employment and one of my co-clerks told me the law firm in which he had spent a summer was looking for associates, I dumped my resume in the mail and tried to forget about it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not work every weekend for the 22 months I lasted at the firm; in fact, I think I worked a grand total of three of them. I billed exactly as many hours as were expected of me, took my vacation and holidays, and was lucky enough to work with some good partners on some good issues. But I walked around much as I had in law school, with a big lump of tears crouching in my throat just underneath my smile. Because I just did not know the person in the suit (even if it was tangerine orange with a skirt that fell a good six inches above my knee).

The only way I knew how to get out was to go to graduate school. Because I know how to go to school, and I know it is a safe place, predictable, patterned.  I was in the American Studies program, but I was teaching a writing course at—you guessed it—the law school. Before long my little brain started sussing out my options. Law school teaching: better salary than college teaching, shorter tenure track, less onerous requirements, lighter teaching loads . . .

Next thing I knew, I was an associate professor at St. Louis University Law School. And, for a brief year or so, I was pretty sure I was happy.

Then I discovered yoga. I discovered my heart. I learned how to follow it instead of my head.  I began to see why, even when things were good, even when I was surrounded by friends, I was still deeply unhappy. I quit my job to write. I met my husband. I started a life with him in which the occasional legal project is nothing more than a means of contributing to the mortgage, certainly not a part of who I am or how I would define myself. And, of course, I discovered the joy of being a mother that led me to YogaMamaMe.

Then, today, I read an article about a piece of legislation passed yesterday by Congress. It reversed a truly evil Supreme Court decision that had gutted the Americans with Disabilities Act and rendered hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities powerless to fight against discrimination. And as I read about it I started to cry.

The Heart of Law

The Supreme Court's decision—issued in 1999, just as the ADA was starting to have any real positive effect on the lives of people with disabilities—stated, to put it simply, that if you can mitigate your disability, you don't really have a disability.

In other words, say you have epilepsy. Because some people are scared of epilepsy, you have trouble keeping a job and, consequently, have no health insurance with which to buy medication that will control your seizures. Congress passes the ADA. Now, when you apply for a job, the employer can't say, "Epilepsy! What if you have a seizure and scare off all my customers? No way I'm hiring you!" That would be discrimination against a person with a disability.

So say the employer hires you. You get health insurance. You start taking medication that controls your seizures. You don't have them any more. You're living the American Dream. 

One day, you mention to your supervisor that you have epilepsy, controlled by medication.  "Epilepsy!" she cries. "What if you have a seizure and scare off all the customers? No way you can keep working here! You're fired!"

According to the Supreme Court, that's not disability discrimination.

Really. You can look it up. Sutton v. United Air Lines (1999). Kind of deflates that whole myth of lawyers and judges having the training and intellect so few who skipped law school can claim, doesn't it?

It took Congress nine years, but yesterday they passed a bill telling the Supreme Court what an incredibly stupid decision that was. W. still has a chance to veto it, but he'll probably want to do something he thinks makes him look like a good guy in the waning days of the debacle that has been his administration, so I'm guessing he'll sign it. Plus, his father signed the ADA into law, so you know preventing discrimination against people with disabilities is sort of a nonpartisan no-brainer.

The reason I cried as I read about this isn't that I consider myself a person with a disability. I cried because what happened is so unfair to people who do. It's the same way I cry when I read about the Civil Rights Movement or California recognizing gay and lesbian marriages. It just speaks to my heart.

In this sense, I see—in a wobbly, uncertain, almost fearful way—that the law does have heart in it. In yoga, the same principle that informs civil rights law is called ahimsa, or nonharming. I've written about it in the context of giving yourself a break, treating yourself well, not giving in to the drive we all have to push ourselves too far and too cruelly.

But ahimsa also means practicing nonharming toward others. It becomes possible through its own practice—the more care you take not to harm others through your words and actions the easier it becomes.  And it automatically happens whenever you practice yoga. Because every time you practice yoga—whether in an asana practice or by meditating or simply by buying local, all-natural foods and humanely raised meats—you open your heart.  And when you open your heart, you share your own peace with the world.

Just think what would happen if we all were trusting enough to open our hearts and offer a prayer of peace to the world. Those politicians and Supreme Court justices would have nothing on us.

Okay. So law and yoga are compatible, right? Isn't that what I'm saying? That there is heart in the law, as long as you don't let all the head-y stuff obscure it? That my life's path hasn't been one of correcting 35 years spent wandering alone in an intellectual vacuum? That it's all of a piece, those utterly miserable three years at Columbia Law School and these joyful times of expanding motherhood and family?

Actually, I'm not saying any of that. Because something in me resists it, as if admitting it will spin me back into the awkward, fearful, uncertain person pretending to be—you know, fun and pretty and smart and....  I don't even know what it was I wanted to be back then. Maybe that's what scares me.

Honoring Your Past Instead of Running from It

We all have regrets. That six-year relationship we stuck with just to prove we could do it. That time we drank way too much at a party to impress a cute guy only to find when he finally did lean in for the kiss that closing our eyes gave us unbearable spins.  The decision in tenth grade to take Spanish 3 instead of drama.

The trick is letting go of the regret. Which is, of course, not easy. I think about going to law school and I feel—literally, viscerally feel—what it was like to walk the halls:  the sense of not moving fully; the out-of-body sensation of someone watching me act like an awkward version of me; the tense, edgy wariness of being prepared for an argument at any moment. Because, in my experience, lots of law students think confrontation is fun.

So those feelings overtake me and I just can not embrace law school.  I try to think about the good people I met. My clinic partner and our client, a beautiful black woman with an even more beautiful laugh whose landlord did things like leaving pictures of nooses on her door. My contracts professor who was also a jazz musician and had a worn old armchair in his office where I could sit anytime I felt like I needed to belong. The friend with whom I sang Indigo Girls songs about changing the world before he dropped out at the end of our first year.

But all those thoughts end in sadness. I don't know any of those people any longer. I'd be hard pressed to name a single person from my law school days with whom I am in any sort of contact at all. Because, I suppose, I have run fast and far from the person I was toward the person my heart always knew was there.

So I'm not there yet—not to the place where I can honor my past rather than run from it. But—you know what I'm going to say—that's the beauty of yoga. It's about practice, not about being perfect. There is always somewhere to go, something to learn. There is always the possibility of forgiving yourself for not being there yet.

And there is always—always has been, always will be—a place in which I can, for those brief, tearful moments when I read that the law has done something good for people who deserve it, find the place in my heart that once called me to it.

Chandranamaskar—Moon Salutes:  Letting Yourself Revolve Around Your Heart

Chandranamaskar—what a beautiful name. What a beautiful flow. And yet we so seldom practice it. In our culture of movement and heat and focus, sun salutes are so much more common than moon salutes.

As a teacher, I take great care to include them in classes on days of the full moon, as a tribute to the ebb and flow and motion of the Universe. I also believe in practicing them instead of sun salutes in the evening, after the sun has gone down. They generate a different kind of heat in the body, a cooling heat, if that makes any sense.

For the purposes of honoring our past as well as the future that lies ahead of us, chandranamasakar also brings us into a rhythm that revolves around our hearts. The flow is a reminder of the beauty of moving in circles, the ebb and flow of life, the many different perspectives we acquire as we age that make the same act—say, going to law school—look so different, depending on where we stand.

So give yourself a little time to play with this sequence. You can do it repeatedly, moving with your breath, or just once, savoring each piece (and peace) of the flow.