I'm in the Ocean, and it's Okay

An interview with Patricia Grace King by Adam Grossi

Patricia reading from her chapbook The Death of Carrie Bradshaw at City Lit Books, May 29, 2015.

I didn’t know Patricia well before she disappeared. She had been regularly attending my Monday evening class at Tejas Yoga, and she seemed to be a kind person and an enthusiastic yoga practitioner. Then I didn’t see her for a while. This happens frequently, and as a yoga teacher, I don’t read into it too much. There are many reasons people come to yoga class, and there are as many reasons why they might stop doing so.

Several weeks later, I was at the studio on a different day, at a different time, and I saw Patricia enter the door. She was wearing a fine cloth wrapped over her head, and it looked like her hair was gone. I immediately thought of my sister, who had been suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer and then quickly entered chemotherapy. My sister lives in Ohio, and I wasn’t getting the chance to see her as often as I wanted to or to help out as much as I would have liked. I was startled by how emotional I felt just seeing Patricia walk in, and though we only exchanged normal pleasantries, her presence left me inspired.

This would happen at least once a week. I’d be at the studio working and Patricia would come in for class, and her resilience would lift me up. Her dedication to yoga practice would remind me of how powerful this discipline could be. Over time I saw Patricia’s hair growing back, and again the resurgence of her vitality mirrored my sister’s progress with the treatment.

Eventually it felt odd enough to me that Patricia didn’t know just how much I was benefiting from her presence at the studio, so I wrote her a card. At that point we began to really connect, and she shared with me the blog she had been keeping during treatment, which I was able to share with my sister. I learned about Patricia’s vivid life as an author and got at taste of the depth of her character and personality. Recently I asked Patricia if she’d mind being interviewed about her experience practicing yoga during cancer treatment, and she generously agreed. Here’s a transcript of the conversation we shared over coffee at the South Loop’s own Overflow Coffee Bar on April 27, 2015.

Adam:
Maybe I should have read a lot of your blog before this conversation… but then I was thinking this might have been disingenuous because I know you, and part of my interest in talking to you is seeing you over the course of this period of time during your treatment. And maybe if I read the blog, I would ask you things about what you wrote. Instead, this talk can be an opportunity for you to respond in a fresh way.

Patricia:
Yeah, I like it. It won’t be dictated by whatever I wrote six months ago, which feels like a long time ago now. I actually took the blog down.

Oh, you did?

[laughs] I did.

Oh, wow, ok. Why?

It was on my website, and my website is mainly about my writing, and I didn’t want this blog about cancer to be one of my identifying features. I’ll do something with it eventually, I think, but I didn’t want it to be…

The first thing people associate you with. I totally understand that.

The discipline of writing through treatment is interesting. Do you think it was more of a way of processing for you, rather than a way of communicating?

Well, I don’t know, those two things felt very interrelated. It was a different kind of writing than what I normally do, because it felt very directly communicative — like, I’m not trying to make art, I’m just trying to update my community, which is fairly far flung.

Yeah.

So it’s kind of like keeping a public journal. It was good for me to process, but I really liked doing the blog, I liked knowing that so many people read it, and responded to it, and I felt very connected to lots of people who weren’t physically here. I’m living pretty far from most of my roots. I’m from the east coast, North Carolina.

I remember you took my class somewhat regularly before you got sick.

Yes, the Monday night class.

And then you disappeared for a while.

Yes.

And then I saw you at the studio, taking other classes. And you looked a little different. And I thought Oh, maybe something’s going on. And I was connecting the dots between the changes I saw in you and what was going on in my sister’s process….

Which was almost concomitant, right? It’s so bizarre.

Yeah. Maybe what I want to know is, how long have you been practicing yoga?

Two and half years, almost exactly.

What brought you to yoga initially?

Well, that’s a good question. I want to say God.

You can totally say God.

[laughs] Maybe. I’m not super religious, but maybe. I was a very athletic young person: competitive swimmer, competitive runner, and… then I got older. And I still had a lot of those interests, and that competitive physical edge, but I hadn’t done as much with it for a while. I guess I didn’t have a great exercise routine, and I was thinking, What would I like to do now at this stage in my life? And I was sort of just aware of yoga, I don’t really know why. I guess it’s just in the zeitgeist. But it seemed to be something that I would probably like, even though I couldn’t quite tell why I would like it. Because it’s not like running or swimming.

Right.

For a while it was one of those things I kept thinking about and never did. And then, this random guy, who I think had a 200-hour teaching certificate, started offering classes in the building right across the street from me. Pay as you want, come as you want.

In Chicago?

Yes. And so I was like, “Here this thing has fallen in my lap — you can’t make it be any easier to get to or do than that.” So I just started going.

And when you say God, do you feel like it’s because of the way the circumstances played out?

Yes. I think by the time I got diagnosed, I was into yoga enough that it was already this habit in my life that ended up being so important. I can’t really imagine having gone through the chemo without having yoga. That seemed so important. And being at Tejas, in particular.

Yeah.

Because I worked with this guy in those first classes I took, which I recognize now were somewhat random, for about a year. And I know I was making progress, but it wasn’t nearly as holistic an approach to the practice. He didn’t do the meditating and the breathing very much. And there wasn’t a whole lot of attention even on how to set up poses. He liked to do the practice with you, so he wasn’t always coming around and adjusting. But it was my way in. And I got into it enough that I was practicing with him probably two or three times a week.

Right on.

Then he had to go on vacation and I asked him, “Well, where can I go?” and he said, “Tejas.” And the first class I went to was James’s Open class, and I was only six months into doing yoga then, and I remember going, “Whoa. This is a different level.” [laughing]

Something must have clicked, because I kept coming back, and after a while I was just going to Tejas all the time. Because I could see that I was being taught there, in a way that this other guy wasn’t teaching.

Yeah. Though there are some benefits to practicing with the group, right? Maybe it gets a little bit of the authority thing out of the way.

That’s true, I could see that. Although, of course, he was like 9,000 times better than we were at everything.

[laughs] “You can’t do this? Oh, you can’t do this either?”

Right. There was a little bit of that. He was a little bit of a cowboy, I think, in retrospect.

[Adam laughing]

But no real offense to him — he got me into it. He didn’t screw anything up. He just wasn’t as intentional about teaching as I think people are at Tejas. And the whole meditation and breathing aspect of it is a really important part, obviously, that I don’t think I had a very good understanding of before.

The timing felt really good. By the time I got diagnosed I was into yoga. It felt like a part of my life anyway, and it became even more so.

It’s a very generous approach to God, I think, to look back and say, you know, that this healing modality was given to you, rather than… I feel like a lot of people might be like, “Why did God give me cancer?”

Oh, well, yes, you could ask that.

[both laughing]

Yeah, that’s true. I don’t know… I just feel like everybody’s life has to suck at some time. It’s a quality of being human.

Yeah. And the “Godliness” is in the goodness?

That’s where I see it.

Yeah.

I mean, I don’t have any orthodox faith to attach this to.

Me neither. Which is partially why I’m interested in talking about it. I’m in a very secular space but also very interested in those kinds of questions and thoughts. Maybe even more interested in them outside of their traditional religious definitions.

I am too. I grew up in a traditional Christian faith and I’m kinda done with it. But I still experience God as good.

Yeah.

Yeah. Some force. That I address. [laughs]

Yeah. “Hey, thanks for the yoga.”

Right.

[both laughing]

So, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about when you were diagnosed, and the process of resuming your relationship with yoga after that.

Let’s see, I don’t think I’ve ever done the math. I started taking yoga in October 2013. And I got diagnosed in March 2014. So a year and a half, almost. But I’d only been at Tejas about a year.

A year before the diagnosis?

Yeah.

I imagine that receiving the diagnosis is a really traumatic, body-alienating thing…

Yes.

It’s like, oh, I thought this thing was collaborating with me. But now there’s an intruder in my system…

Yeah, very much so. That’s exactly right.

Even before you began the physical treatment of chemo, do you feel like the diagnosis affected your yoga practice?

Yeah, probably. Let’s see. How can I talk about this? It’s not emotionally hard to talk about, just hard to get words for it…

Yeah.

For the first couple weeks, I definitely felt like my body was not my body. It actually was a relief to start chemo — that’s how I felt — like Oh my God, let’s just start doing something.

Why, do you think? Why was it a relief?

Because it felt like doing something proactive.

Because the rest of what you were doing was not affecting the problem?

Well, there was this month, early March to early April, where I was getting diagnosed. And I knew something wasn’t quite right because they kept calling me back. And that kept getting scarier and scarier. And then I was diagnosed over the phone. A nurse was just reading it off a card. That was the 19th of March, and I didn’t know any more about it until we drove in on the 25th to talk to the doctors. And then after that there was another week of diagnosing stuff before they could start actually doing chemo. During that time, during that week I probably wasn’t doing much yoga. So I just wanted to start addressing the problem as fast as I could.

Gotcha.

That whole first month was weird… I was still going to yoga, though. And I remember, I dunno, everybody says this I’m sure, but there’s something about yoga that just takes you out of your head and makes you be in your body in a way that nothing else really does.

Yeah. Because when you were diagnosed, it’s not like there was pain…

No.

So, it’s just the knowledge of the illness…

Yeah, and the mental anguish.

Yeah.

So it was just good to keep going to yoga classes; it was something I could do everyday, and just feel like, I’m still doing this.

Yeah. At least, during the period of the class, there’s some reprieve from the mental spinning?

Yes.

I’ve never been through chemo. I saw my sister go through it, and it seems like it really saps your vitality, right? You just lose energy. Do you feel like that’s its primary side effect?

Yes, aside from having all your hair fall out, which traumatizes pretty much everybody. I think I was sort of lucky in that because I have a pretty strong constitution, I handled chemo better than most people do.

I did six different sessions of chemo with three weeks of treatment in between sessions. The first three sessions weren’t really that bad. I mean, my hair fell out, and I’d feel kind of woozy, a little foggy-headed for a couple days after. Every three weeks when you got a new dose you’d feel kind of like “ugh,” but then you’d slowly start to feel normal again.

Can you talk a little more about the way you would curate your yoga practice based on your response to chemo?

I think I did go to class just about every day. Because it’s good to just feel like there was something I could do. Even while this was happening to me. So I went to a lot of Gentle classes. I don’t really like Restorative classes very much, I guess I shouldn’t say that…

No, it’s 100% ok to say that.

I just find it too…. boring [laughing].

Sure.

And then about half way through each round of treatment, after day 10, I’d start going to Foundational classes. And it just felt so good to be able to do that. Just so reaffirming that my body was still able to do that.

The asana practice as a way of reaffirming strength.

Yeah. And also, one of the things I was reading about is how meditation is considered helpful when you’re stressed. So I thought, Oh, I should work on this a little more deliberately. I started using some of the breathing on my own outside of class after that. And I learned to appreciate that aspect even more.

How would you do that? What techniques would you use?

Some mornings, especially early on when I was still pretty stressed, I would sit for 15 or 20 minutes, and just breathe, in and out, and just look out the window. And a lot of times, when I would wake up in the middle of the night all worked up, I would just breathe… breathe… breathe. Just like that. So, it was pretty basic.

Can you describe this in a little more nerdy detail? You’re doing this movement with your hand… Are you visualizing something when you do the breathing?

Yes. Light and energy coming in and going all the way down into the diaphragm… and then all the things I don’t need being pushed back out. I sort of pictured it pushing out of the top of my head. Pulling good in and pushing bad out.

Yeah. And what do you think about that stuff? Do you think there’s a subtle scientific basis in it? Do you think it’s helpful because… Well, yeah, why do you think it’s helpful?

I don’t really know.

I don’t either!

I should probably read about it. Well, I do have this uncle–he’s a very close uncle, almost more like my cousin; we’re close in age–and he’s an oncologist. He talked to me early on, when I was so depressed, and he was really helpful. He’s a medical person, very grounded in the hard science world. But he said, “I believe in anything that helps people feel emotionally and mentally better when they’re going through this.” Whatever makes people feel more positive. I think there is documented proof that the more positive you are, the more likely you’ll heal quickly or have a better outcome. So, I believe that. That’s partially what the breathing exercises did for me. And that’s part of why I relied on yoga. I just feel that yoga is so… affirming.

Oh, and I also talked to my body every night, too, and thanked it for its resilience. I would picture a bright light coming out of my heart center. That sounds kind of hokey, but I feel like it worked.

It doesn’t sound hokey to me.

I feel like it all worked. I was able to maintain a pretty upbeat attitude throughout the whole thing, all the way through, once I got over the initial shock. And it went as well as I think it could have. So, maybe that’s just dumb luck, but it feels like I was helping the process.

I love the idea of closing the day by thanking the body for its resilience. That seems like a good practice for anybody.

Yeah. I should probably keep doing that!

I wanna start doing that!

I’m gonna try to start doing that again. But during the treatment process, I did it every night.

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. Where was your writing during all of this? Obviously, a lot of your writing energy was going into the blog.

Mainly. The writing took a partial hiatus, at least what I think of as more creative writing. I don’t think my brain was quite as sharp most of the time, you know? I could write the blog because it was just chatting. But somebody asked me to do a book review, and I was excited, thinking it would make me feel better to do it. And they sent back what I’d written and said, “We can’t take this.” [laughs]

I think that was a good moment for me to realize that that’s not the kind of writing I’m going to do right now. Because I remember writing that book review and feeling a little spacey and pushing through it, but not really having the self-criticism or self-awareness that I would normally have. It’s weird. I was pretty functional, but I don’t think I was quite as sharp.

Gotcha. You also teach writing?

Yes.

Were you teaching throughout this whole thing?

Yeah. But it was spring when my treatment started, so that was helpful. I was only teaching for the first half of chemo.

There’s something about chemo, when you’re going through that there’s no hiding it, really. You almost can’t keep the fact that you’re going through treatment to yourself.

You almost can’t. Well, what are you getting at?

Well, at the time you started receiving treatment, I feel like I didn’t know you well enough to talk to you about it.

Right.

I guess I could have started a conversation…

But I wasn’t taking your classes much during that time.

Yeah. But just seeing you, I wanted to ask you, “Oh, what’s going on?” Which is such a clumsy, awkward thing. It’s interesting that one of the obvious side effects is the loss of hair.

Yeah, it sort of brands you.

Exactly. Maybe there are other medical procedures that also cause that, but I’m not aware of them.

You associate someone who’s completely hairless, no hair, no eyebrows, as sick.

Yeah.

You don’t know this, and no one at Tejas would have any reason to know this, but I had a bright pink wig.

Oh! Awesome.

When I wore it, I put on makeup, and you couldn’t tell it was a wig. So a lot of times, when I went out in public, people did not know I was sick. And I kind of liked that.

Oh, okay. You were wearing a kind of wrap at Tejas, right?

Occasionally, or I would wear a little hat to walk there, but I’d take it off during practice. I got used to being bald in class. Tejas just seemed like a place where you wanna let it hang out. [laughs]

Can I tell you one more thing?

Please.

When I got diagnosed, I said to one of my doctors, “I take yoga, should I keep doing that?” And she said, “Yes, absolutely. But you probably want to tell your teachers, or somebody there, that you’re going through this so they can help you modify.”

And so, I went and told James the next time I saw him. He was so great! He was so calm, and not at all like Oh my God! He said, “We’ve had a lot of people do this–people on chemo who come through and take yoga. So you should definitely keep doing it. But you should also give yourself some room to adjust as you need to. If you ever need to go into child’s pose, no matter what, just go into child’s pose. No matter what anybody else is doing. You can tell your teachers and they won’t mind.” James also said he had a student once who was going through chemo who paid for classes, but she didn’t actually take the classes; she just liked to sit on a cushion in the back of the room. She’d come regularly and just sit, and just feel the energy of the people in the class. And that, for her, was really healing.

Wow. That’s beautiful.

I thought so. I think I’m too Type A to do that.

[both laugh]

I wanna do something! But I love that there’s space for that. Yeah, James was just so peaceful about the whole thing, I loved it. Then I just told all my teachers, and they were all fine. It was great. It was so life affirming.

I feel like your practice has changed a lot.

Well, I’ve probably gotten better at it.

Yeah.

Because I can remember where I was when I first started taking your class.

Yeah, maybe it’s just that. Experience. Maybe it’s as simple as that. It could also be that, once we started talking, and having a little bit of a relationship outside of just seeing you in the practice room, maybe you’re just more comfortable.

Maybe. Yeah, I’m more comfortable in the studio now, than I initially was. For sure. I feel more like part of a community than I did for the first couple months.

Yeah.

I think going through chemo at Tejas really made me feel at home there. Monica, for example, would tell me she was doing meditations for me while I was in chemo. It’s stuff like that, you know? I come from this really religious background, and I don’t go to church anymore, but I started thinking that this studio feels like church, in the best sense. This is what church is supposed to do. People really caring about you, and checking in with you, and thinking about you, and holding you in their thoughts. It’s just amazing.

Yeah.

And you too, you know? Giving me that card.

I remember you being in the room before all this. I don’t know if I was more nervous around you, or if that you were a less experienced practitioner…

I definitely was. Funny things have happened over time. Like, I never used to be able to do crow. And I started doing crow when I was in chemo.

[Adam laughing]

You know? I was like, “I can’t believe it!” So I have pictures of me bald doing crow.

That’s badass.

Yes! And you need to feel badass when you feel like your body is being assaulted in so many other ways. It’s just so empowering.

You’re like, “I’m strong.”

Yeah. It’s an assertion that I’m going to be okay.

After I bought the year-long membership to Tejas, it allowed me to be there every day. Somebody told me that after a while, your body can just do poses because it’s been attempting that shape so many times. Some weird shapes, if you keep trying them every day, eventually something happens… A deeper memory starts to figure it out.

Yeah, I think part of it is that there are so many layers of musculature. At first when you try a posture, there’s a lot of superficial effort, literally: surface layers of muscle trying to do the work. But I think to access deeper mobility is an interesting process, where different layers of muscle become more coordinated. And when you first start trying postures, there’s a lot of effort. And over time, it becomes much less forceful.

Right.

To the point where something that might have felt really vigorous starts to feel very easy.

Yes, I relate to that.

That’s a nice process.

P. It’s a wonderful process.

[both laughing]

I think a lot of times, when I’m teaching, I see that people feel like they need to “build” something, like they need to build strength. And in some cases that is true. But I think, more often, the case is that you have to learn something.

Right.

It’s not that you don’t have the muscle, or necessarily the flexibility, but the body has to learn what this posture requires.

Yeah, and to just get used to it. I think going upside down, not shoulder stand, but in handstand or headstand, the first time you try your heart rate is pounding, you worry about falling over. But you do it often enough, and you get calmer, and you think, Well, what’s the worst that could happen?

But shoulder stand feels totally different for you?

Oh, I’ve always liked shoulder stand.

There’s this other element of this, too. I feel like I was processing emotions just through seeing you.

Oh, sure, because of your sister.

Yeah. It makes me think about the boundaries between teacher and practitioner. Because I often feel like I try to err on the side of space. Maybe part of that is just my personality. But, I try not to get up in people’s business. And I assume that if they want to talk to me about something, they’ll start talking to me.

Right.

But, you know, I think I needed to write that card to you because I just became aware of how important it was for me to just see you. And I didn’t even really know you.

Oh, I love that. That’s great. Thank you. It was very nice to receive that.

I’ve been slowly learning that it’s okay to have a space of intimacy with people that take your class. I don’t necessarily have to be withdrawn.

Right. You don’t have to sit in a higher chair.

[both laughing]

It’s true, I think about that when I teach college students. It’s sort of the same thing. You see them for an hour three times a week, and you don’t necessarily have to have a relationship with them at all. I kinda go back and forth on how intimate to be. But I’ve noticed since the chemo, when I had to tell the class what was going on, that doing so brought some barriers down. I found myself talking to students about personal stuff more than I would have previously. And it’s nice. Whether I’ll do that all my life or not, I don’t know.

Do you feel like this experience will circle around into your creative work?

I think it will, but I don’t know how yet. Right after I had my surgery and got the really good news that everything is fine (that was in August), I was still in this nonfiction blogging mode and I thought, maybe I should do something more formal, and write some essays about this. So I just started trying that. But, again, when I’d show them to people they’d be like, “This is not working.” [laughing]

Wow. Good, honest friends.

Yes, trusted friends. They wondered if maybe I was too close to the experience to write about it yet. But meanwhile, in larger sense, not just in regard to writing, I feel like this experience has opened up some new creative space.

For example, you know I’m moving to England this summer, but you don’t know how that happened, right?

No.

Shortly after all the treatment, and after the surgery was over and after I got the excellent prognosis, I just felt so strongly like, What’s next?!? Not in a hard way, but in an open, amazed way. Like, Oh my god! Let’s do something else! Life!

Yeah.

This is kind of cheesy, but after I got the good news, this song kept running through my head. It’s an old Nanci Griffith song, the song goes something like

As you’re leaving the harbor
Do you cry out for the shore?
Or do you bless the waves of the ocean?
Do you call your vessel home?

I used to listen to that song all the time in my twenties. And I always thought, Oh, I cry out for the shore. Because I’m very focused on home, and what is safe, you know?

But the moment that song came back into my head, I hadn’t listened to it for like ten years. When it came back to me I thought Look at that. I’m in the ocean, and it’s okay. It’s a whole different sense of things now. Before cancer, I always worried, What if bad things happen and I’m far away from my community? But bad things did happen, and the people around me here were amazing. Goodness came at me from everywhere.

And I just thought, Well, I don’t need to be in any little magic corner of the world. So my husband and I started talking about it and he was like, “Do you want to just quit our jobs and move to Africa?” And I said, “Yes. Yes I do.”

[Adam laughing]

That was seriously how I felt. So we just started applying for everything that we saw for the next couple months that we were interested in. We’ve never been like this. He’s very much into routine, much more than I am, but he was freed, too, I think, by this experience. So we just started applying for all kinds of stuff, and this job came up in Durham, England, and he was like, “Should I apply for it?” and I said “Yes! Apply for it. Who knows?”

I don’t think we ever would have done that previously. I don’t know anything about Durham, I don’t know anyone over there. But I feel like it’s fine, you know what I mean? So that feels like a creative space that’s opened up.

You’ve dealt with a real challenge to your survival, and that seems to make it’s made you a lot more, I mean it’s not just resilience, but you are…

…less scared.

Less scared. Yeah.

We’ll see. But yeah, that’s how my move came about.

Awesome.

I feel like there’s some possibility, if this is online, that someone who is searching for “chemotherapy” and “yoga” might find it. If that were the case, is there anything you would want to say, straight up pragmatically, to someone who might be going through a similar process?

I think it’s about finding the place where you’re being kind to your body but also not being afraid of your body, if you can get there, because of course the whole process is scary. Try to be kind to your body, but not overly careful or scared. And yoga just seems like this great place to do that, because you’re taking care of your body, but at the same time you’re saying to it, “What can you do?”

You’re pushing it.

Yeah. And that is just the perfect combination.

And taking you out of your head, that’s a big part of it also. This is maybe unrelated to the question, but like I said, I come from this very religious background. And I’m not very religious anymore. But there was something about yoga that felt like going to church in a really healthy way. It’s this place you go where you focus, and you’re with other people who are focusing, and it’s good energy. People who want to do good things for themselves and for the world are in this room together. The best religious experience is the one that takes you out of your body, anyway. I used to feel that sometimes when I would sing with people in church. But now sometimes I feel that way doing yoga. Not just transcending your body, but a communal kind of transcendence.

Why does it feel transcendent of the body, since so much of it is body based work?

Maybe it’s like a runner’s high, or something. I really like physical activity, I really like sweating. That really makes me feel happy. But I think it’s also, most of the time in yoga I’m having to focus so hard on things like is my foot where it should be, is my leg turned the right way, is my shoulder where it should be… you know?

[laughing] Yeah.

But it’s not like thinking thinking. It’s not mental thinking. It’s physical thinking. If that makes any sense.

Yeah.

Singing was the aspect of religious practice I used to love. Four part harmonies. It’s very physical, you have to really listen to what other people are doing, you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. That’s sort of how yoga is. Intense listening.

It sounds more like you’re transcending the mind than the body.

Oh, maybe that’s it. I said taking myself out of my body, but it’s probably that I’m taking myself out of my mind. [laughs] That is probably what I mean.

But the shift is radical, and it almost seems like an out of body experience.

Yes! That’s what I mean. It feels out of body, but at the same time it’s very physical.

Like singing is. It’s very in body, but very out of body too.

Learn more about Patricia at her website: www.patriciagraceking.com