“The Art Of Defying Death”

October 14, 2009, 9:25 pm

The Art of Defying Death
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
On a misty spring night in 2005, I approached my apartment, on a tony block on the Upper West Side facing the Hudson. I felt relaxed and calm. Earlier that day I had attended a yoga workshop with a guru from India, then completed a writing assignment for a health and spirituality magazine about, as it happened, instinct — or antar-jñana, inner knowledge. I opened the outer door to my vestibule, then crossed through its inner door and into my lobby, leaving my back to the entrance. I got a prickly feeling, I don’t know why. I turned. There I saw, pushing open the inner door, an ink-black, gloved hand, exaggeratedly large, controlled and deliberate. It charged toward me. It was trailed by a body, the picture of death.

It is difficult for me to render the horror of the image of that man entering my building lobby that night, so great is the disparity between its emotional charge for me now and the stereotypical, almost comical picture he presented. He was a figment from a nightmare. I guessed his height and weight at 6’3” and 230 pounds, with the physicality of a boxer. The cops later told me that was right. His clothes were dark and innocuous — clean black jeans, black sneakers, a midnight-blue hoodie — as if chosen to leave no

When I was attacked, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga.
impression whatsoever. In contrast, on his face was a neoprene thermal ski mask, the type that tents in front to create a ridge and thus evokes to most anyone who’s heard of him Darth Vader. I later discovered while searching on Google that this type of mask is favored by shoppers also enamored of vigilante-style military clothing and toy AK-47s — in other words it is meant to provoke a reaction. Of the figure’s actual face I saw only slit-shaped, yellowed eyes and a broad, acned, coal-black forehead.

This image seared in my mind, and somehow, thinking without thinking, I reminded myself to keep hold of it. Yoga’s mental training, it is said, enables the yogi to “act at once… not stopping to think.” I felt superhuman, unburdened by the back-and-forth of everyday deliberation, in possession of ekagra — single-pointed — concentration.

In a half-second, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga. I remembered the feeling of command — of flexibility and control. I remembered the words of a writer on instinct I’d cited in the article I’d just written, Malcolm Gladwell: “Take charge of the first two seconds.” And I remembered a women’s self-defense course I took in college 20 years before, and practice we’d done screaming with every bit of might in our bodies. This was a physical scream, performed with the same degree of exertion that, as it happened, we held our yoga poses.

But in truth, unfortunately, I was not so formidable as I’d have liked. The man’s weight was more than twice mine. My heightened awareness, my attuned and trained amanaskata — intellectual clarity — was sufficiently developed to give me merely the certainty that this man could, and would, kill me. Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.

Then, that palm became a fist, and met my face. I heard a loud crack. I was unconscious.

I came to consciousness on the ground. The man was lunging toward me with fists. None of my knowledge left me. He intended to kill me. I remembered a dream I’d had once in which I’d been in an elevator that was plunging to the ground, its cable severed. In the dream, I held my breath and clenched everywhere, and then stared, hard, at the ceiling. I willed the elevator to stop plummeting, and it did. The dream felt mystical, more like a vision — a premonition, perhaps. Now, I created the same sensation in my body as when I stopped the elevator. And I executed the scream.

What happened to me next in that lobby seemed no less numinous an experience than the single pointed mind-state described by the adepts as Samadhi. This is sometimes characterized as “pure awareness.” The thrill of it is said to be a manifestation of spiritual, mental and physical harmony — which may be why the medievals called yoga “the art of defying death.” Tennyson described Samadhi as “the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.” I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.

I was bloodied, my cheekbone was broken, and I was in a state of shock. Eventually the cops, and a friend, came, and I learned that an attacker by this same description had sent another woman for an extended hospital stay, with multiple broken ribs and other injuries. She’d taken longer before she screamed, they said. The cops not-so-helpfully also explained that the man was “an animal,” his motive violence. He’d been stalking women of a certain physical type.

They never caught him. I moved out from that apartment, and moved on, but suffered significant emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.

I do believe that yoga, and other things, gave me the mental clarity that saved my life in that moment. And I also believe that my training helped me survive in other ways, in the aftermath.


That night, I finally got to bed around 5 a.m., my friend bunkered on my sofa. I survived, I thought, over and over, lying in bed. But when I closed my eyes, I saw three things in succession that drove home to me how nearly I hadn’t: the ink-black hand on the door, the neoprene ski mask, and my face in the mirror bruised, cut and bloodied. I opened my eyes and watched the sky turn rosy pink. I closed them, and saw the same three images.

This pattern continued, with lessening frequency, for month upon month. They were a natural, limbic response, I learned later: flashbacks. Flashbacks, like the Samadhi described by Tennyson, exist outside the realm of language and cognition. This, say trauma therapists, explains why survivors often manifest unresolved memories of trauma in non-verbal ways — for instance as inexplicable pains in the body or through a dissociative escape reflex. Samadhi is mimicked in “moments of spiritual or material emergency,” wrote Geraldine Coster, an influential British yogi and psychotherapist, in 1944. Contemporary therapists have noted a tendency for survivors to enter that state of “pure awareness” so celebrated by the yogis during, and then repeatedly after, a trauma. This, they say, can become a bad habit. I learned this when, eventually, I did go in for counseling for P.T.S.D.

This paradox has been acknowledged elsewhere. A “survivor who used dissociation to cope with terror” may eventually learn to use a “trance capability” towards otherwise enriching ends, allows Judith Herman, a pioneer psychologist in the study of trauma, in her seminal book “Trauma and Recovery.”

Before I sought the wisdom of the professionals, though, I did jury-rig my own program for managing those flashbacks, using techniques of “mental mastery,” as it were, that I’d learned in yoga. For instance, I tried to recast the images playing in my head, sometimes imagining they were moving around physically to different parts of my brain. I also inserted into the sequence of flashbacks the image of the man’s miraculous turning and fleeing, and my mystical feeling of omnipotence in that moment.

My therapist later gave these methods a stamp of approval. Being able to re-conceive the meaning of an assault to one of empowerment versus self-blame proves a deciding factor in overcoming trauma. “You didn’t almost get yourself killed,” she said to me. “You saved your life.” Recreating a narrative also helps a survivor overcome a fragmenting of memory that is typical in trauma. “It is difficult to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time,” writes Herman, “to retain all the pieces and to fit them together.” The sufferer struggles to reconnect disjointed visceral and rational memories of the trauma. Healing, writes Herman, “involves the active exercise of imagination and fantasy.” The psychologist Mary Harvey includes in her seven-point checklist for the resolution of trauma simply to gain “authority” over the memories.

Perhaps every survivor overcomes trauma differently, and at a different speed. My flashbacks continued. Nightmares catapulting me directly back to that horrific episode lasted for years. The dreams were often a feeling, of prickly dread, or they were more literal, about being trailed on a dark street or ambushed in an enclosed space.

I charted my recovery through the evolution of those dreams. Eventually that feeling of palpable terror subsided. Once, around the time it did, the black figure appeared as a comical-looking, blob-like character in a black body-costume; he was like one of those actors dressed as a piece of licorice in a movie trailer. I told him he could remain in my dream as long as he stayed in the background and didn’t hurt me. He agreed.

In a dream several months later, the man with the mask was sitting in my hallway waiting for me to come home, holding the mask in his hand. At first when I saw him, I was scared, but when I saw his face I also saw that he was human. He told me he was struggling with guilt over having hurt someone. I tried to imagine if I could forgive him.

The author of this article, used a dramatic tone throughout his article, “Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.” We can see how he uses tone, to make the story so interesting. It is a story full of suspense and emotions. As I read it I even got goose bumps, I was truly dragged in the story, and felt like if I was living it.

The author’s purpose is to tell a story about a girl who saved her own life, with the use of yoga. You may ask yourself how can yoga save someone’s life? Yet it did, “I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.” Through her control of mental power she was her own savoir. When she talks about a dream, it was basically the same situation of saving her own life, yet in a dream. The elevator was falling straight towards the ground, for the cords loosened, and with her metal power she stopped it from falling. It sounds too magical to but true, yet there is no fiction to it, it happened to her in a dream and then in real life.

I do believe in metal power, and am aware that very few people can attain this level of superiority. I admire them for that. She used this powerful tool for something positive, which saved her own life, “You didn’t almost get yourself killed, she said to me. You saved your life.”