A Feeling Called Neutral

It was the last day of my trip to Bali. The flight back to Korea departed close to midnight. After checking out around noon and leaving my luggage at the accommodation, I headed straight to the yoga studio across the street. It was a Breathwork class — focused on breathing.

I sat down on the unrolled mat, hoping to settle my busy mind and body. Or rather, I think I sat down on the mat wishing to settle them. The teacher then lowered himself and sat down in front of me. He introduced his name, greeted me, and asked how I was feeling today and whether there was anything about my body he should know. To the question about how I was feeling, I said good out of habit — and immediately thought it wasn't an honest answer — and told him there was nothing particular about my body to be careful about. He smiled, said hello, and stood up.

He mentioned he had taught physical education at a school for a long time. Hearing that, I thought someone who had taught students for so many years must have a more generous heart than most. He also seemed to have spent a long time learning and teaching in the field of Breathwork. After introducing himself briefly yet gently, the guidance on breathing techniques began. When he said we could settle into a comfortable position, people began lying down one by one, and I quietly followed them, settling onto a bolster and lying down.

The teacher would first demonstrate a breathing technique, and then we would practice it together a few times in rhythm with the small drum he held. We learned one technique, then another — and it was around the third one. This time, it was a breath where you inhale sharply and quickly in one motion, then slowly exhale through the mouth. He began the exhale timing with the words letting go, followed immediately by two, three, four, guiding the pace and timing of the breath. His letting go carried a particular rhythm and melody, almost as if he were singing, and I thought it suited those words remarkably well. Following that soft tone, I let my breath flow out — as if releasing the many emotions, experiences, and thoughts I had carried through the trip.

After class, we gathered in a circle. The teacher asked each person to share, in a single word, whatever feeling was coming up for them in that moment. Having sat just to the left of the teacher, I found myself going first — but fortunately, I had a word already held in my heart: letting-go. I said it with relief. (Strictly speaking, it's two words — but connected with a hyphen, I quietly thought to myself, it could be considered one.) The words that followed were calm, peaceful, relax. Then came someone whose turn it was — she shrugged her shoulders slightly, pursed her lips a little, and said, "I don't know." The teacher picked up from there. He mentioned that sometimes we can't help but say something just to appear as though we know, and shared a similar experience of his own, naturally and graciously honoring her answer. Courage, and the respect given to that courage. I sat beside this and could only quietly marvel. There are moments when silence is better than an answer made for the sake of answering, words said for the sake of saying them. And the times I feel that most acutely are when I've already let those words spill out and only regret it afterward.

The class closed within the circle. The teacher said that if anyone had questions, or something from today's experience or feeling they'd like to share, they were welcome to come find him after class. Throughout the past week in Bali, I had taken a yoga class nearly every day, and at the end of each one, I had heard something similar. Questions, sure — but to say that if there was something you felt and wanted to share, please do: it was a strange thing to me. Stranger still was that there were always people who did go and talk with the teacher afterward. Most of them were Westerners, and what I always did was watch this unfamiliar scene from a distance — then briefly wonder whether the difference between them and me was race, or temperament, or the environment we'd grown up in, before leaving the studio.

The word last sometimes conjures courage where there was none. I hadn't yet quite thought of something I wanted to share with the teacher, but the desire to ask a question had slowly begun to well up. From the moment of that fast inhale followed by the long exhale, my arms had been tingling steadily. Something I would ordinarily have let pass without a second thought — I held onto that curiosity, and held onto the courage that comes with lasts, and went to find the teacher. I asked, in sentences that weren't quite smooth, that I wasn't sure if it was because of the breathing earlier, but since then my arms had been tingling, and I was wondering why.

"Is that so? And what does that feel like to you — is it negative? Or neutral? Or something else?"

The word neutral lodged itself in my heart. Having heard negative first, in that brief moment between, I must have automatically expected the next word to be positive. Hearing something I hadn't anticipated at all, I called out neutral as though it were the right answer. What stayed with me afterward — more than what he went on to explain about my symptoms — was, in fact, that word. I'm happy, I'm irritated, I'm glad, I'm tired — emotions seem varied enough, but most of the time they seem to come down to one of two things. Back in Korea, I found myself turning that word over again: the word for being in between.

Is this where the sense of freedom that sometimes comes after traveling comes from. Watching someone say I don't know in a moment when everyone is expected to answer one by one, doing something slightly unlike my usual self in the middle of it all, and the experience of a new option being permitted in an unfamiliar language.