Body High 29: Sweet spot in the rear view

This installment of Body High is hecka long. At the end there’s a lengthy anecdote about an early 2010s Portland-to-Haight Ashbury ride that features profoundly dirty hippies. There’s nothing particularly Body High about the story, except that I may have been stoned throughout that extraordinary ride.

The anecdote lives behind a paywall. Do what you want with this information.

Barring fantastical scientific developments, 2019 will have been when I was the most physically attractive. Doing voluminous yoga and smoking unlimited cannabis, my body was shockingly strong, my aura coming into gravitas on very light feet.

Twenty-nineteen was the last year I made a decent income, but being a physically striking 53 year old didn’t cost a thing. Whenever I run through my list of Critical Satisfactions—non-monetary glories the MAGA-Musk mindset can never buy—at the top of it is attracting the aroused, confused gaze of someone fully half my age while wearing thrift-store clothes.

Boffing them has been fine, but I was phasing out of that. Mostly. Not for reasons especially moral, but because my head’s too far up my butt to to mentor outside of the bedroom. Rather, the entire hobby consisted of 10-to-90 ego-affirming seconds. The fun was in watching the wheels turn: How old is this guy?

Or, Why am I feeling this way?

My sense of pride in San Francisco—the favorite of my homes away from home—is so great that I went full tour guide mode, offering facts and anecdotes to these incredibly stinky White people who had been hoofing it from Eugene.

That 2019 game goes in my pre-pandemic Hall of Fame for this American life. When I clean up good in 2025, younger LA women still play. Librarians. Drug-store clerks. An actress last fall. Now though? I assume that some pervy geezer touched them unnaturally when they were young. That’s how rough the past five year have been, how much the game done changed.

The road back to Kundalini yoga began with testing the knee that I damaged on a walk last month. If you remember, the injury scared me into panicky reflection and doom-filled prognostication on how my body would respond.

Perhaps you recall the protracted state of physical revelation while struggling with stairs while using a cane.

Oscars Sunday seemed time to test the recovering right knee with one of my patented long walks. Nothing nutso, just that regular-ass trip to the grocery store: a mile and a half each way, with one major hill over the last quarter mile. Only last October I’d been putting in 7-mile days, sometimes back to back.

About a third of the way in, it became clear that completing the food run would be a great way to hurt myself. The knee ligament was cool, but my lower back was spicier than usual. My groin and hips stung. My core strength was deserting me. I turned back around, moseyed over to grab some Walgreen’s sustenance, then snatched a seat on a parking lot garden frame and contemplated the hill.

I was contemplating a life that’s loaded with pain. Or, perhaps worse, one in which I am not especially mobile.

Can you guess when I stopped having fitness built into my work life and began to spend my days hunkered down over a screenplay?

In case you’ve not followed the Body High journey, it began in the 24-Hour Fitness gym on Sunset, at around this time last year. I built lots of core muscle strength, but my body was screaming for mercy. Some articles about the actual amount of recovery that a body the age of mine needs made their way to me, and I discovered the glories of low-impact exercise. Of course last fall I did a gig that had me questing into LA proper five days a week and chasing around children.

Moving up drugstore-walk hill, a new sense of unsteadiness set in. Every 20 or 30 yards or so I’d place my back up against a wall, position myself on one right-angled leg, with the other one bent across my knee. Then I’d lean forward, bringing instant, fleeting relief to my lower back. The story of my state was growing clear: I’d let my core go to the extent that my left knee couldn’t handle the lack of midsection support or the extra tonnage that came with my decline. The bum knee then let me get gooier still, as even light cardio became less of an option.

I need to start swimming.

My body’s decline was shocking. At the top of the hill I resolved to dig for non-aquatic answers. The walk said to open the bookmarked film On Meditation—via the Kanopy app—and watch it before the Oscar fuss began.

The video sat for a full week before I actually watched it. But On Meditation is indeed where I found a great answer, although not to the specific question that I had been asking.

In the documentary’s first 15 minutes, a Kundalini yoga practitioner named Gabrielle Bernstein explained how the practice influenced her way of living.

“The Kundalini energy sits at the base of our spine, and through the practice of Kundalini, we can can raise that energy up so we can have stronger intuition,” Bernstein said. “It’s all about really raising our vitality and opening our heart in a major way.”

Yes, the energy in my spine.

Kundalini was my first serious and sustained foray into practicing, at a pre-scandal Yoga West 30 years ago. And I am roughly one week out from finishing the first draft of my script. Bernstein reminding me of something that elevated my life more than three decades ago has had remarkable effect. Specifically, a 20-minute online practice found its way to me, and Kundalini is all over again revealing itself as a partner in fortifying myself against the challenges ahead.

If my aging body is not meant to be strong again, let me learn to live with that. Practically speaking though? It just seems like I need to finish writing this movie and get up off my increasingly soft ass.