Tonight I went to yoga as I have done just about every week since the start of the pandemic. When I say I went to yoga, on some of the occasions this was literally true: I’d run to the studio and I’d jog back – four kilometres or so each way. Frequently, however, when the germ shut the studio, I joined the class by zoom. ‘I went’ consisted simply, of turning the lights down and moving to the Persian rug on the floor. The rug feels a bit rugged (is that the origin of the term?) but it’s tolerable. I don’t imagine the Yogis of old purchased their mats from Lulu Lemon. They probably lay themselves down on bare boards or on a rug of knotted yarn like mine.

I lay down tonight and tuned into zoom on my phone. (No, I don’t have an i-pad. I don’t suppose the ancient Yogis did either.) I felt a frisson of pleasure at the the hopeful thought that tonight’s class, conducted on the eve of freedom, would be the last of enforced separation

I paid attention to the teacher. She instructed me to attend to the breath. I breathed and I attended. I like this teacher. I feel I know her well. She teaches yoga in a variety of modes, but she and I both know Yin suits me best, with its long, slow poses, its gradual transitions. She speaks: ‘Some of you will have rushed from your day’s work to this class. You might be unready immediately for stillness, so we’ll move into stillness, we’ll arrive at the unmoving state by movement, by active movement that will slow; and as we slow we’ll have the opportunity to attend to the slowing breath.

The teacher models the pose and the class follows. I gaze at my little screen. I remove my reading glasses for a clearer view. The teacher has fair curling hair with curls at the end of curls. Her skin glows peaches against her black sweater. I enjoy the sight of her.

I adopt the pose and close my eyes. My eyes remain closed through most of the following 50 minutes or so, even as, every few minutes, I move into the next pose as instructed.

Lying thus, with the senses turned inward, only the sense of hearing, of vibration, operates within my awareness. I become aware of a rhythmic percussion, a soft, recurring ‘boom’. If it’s a sound, it’s a sound too soft to actually hear. I feel this sound: boom, boom, boom, coming to me through the floorboards, eighty booms to the minute by my rough-reckoning.

The sound, the experience bears a sense of the long-known, the familiar. Eventually my ears that have worn a stethoscope for almost sixty years, recognise the soft boom, boom, boom:It’s heartbeat that I hear. This is a puzzle that solves itself when I open my mind’s eye. The sight that I ‘see’ is of my teacher, herself reclining on a mat, on a floor. Next to her is her mic through which she gives instruction. The mic picks up vibration through her floorboards and transmits the sound of the beating of her heart. I know it’s not the sound of the beating of my own heart; mine beats at forty beats per minute.
I smile a smile of remembering. I remember that heartbeat. I used to listen to the beating of my daughter’s heart through the wall of her mother’s belly. I heard her heart before her mother did. Her heart beat in the womb at 120-160 beats per minute, twice the rate (in those days), of my own. It was the first way I knew her. It cued my love of her.
Yes, my yoga teacher is my daughter, she of the peachy face, she of the yellow curls. I’m allowed to enjoy looking at her.

Tonight, on the eve of freedom, I hear my child’s heart, the working of her living body agitating the molecules inside the semicircular canals of my inner ear. Her living body moves my senses and once again cues love.