By Angela Jamison
Santa Monica in 2001 felt like the crux of Kali Yuga. The dark age of the spirit. That's where I got in to yoga.
I went to UCLA for a Sociology PhD. I would train in what C. Wright Mills called seeing the familiar in the strange, and the strange in the familiar. Statistics, archival research, and ethnography. Science.
The second month of graduate school, a car got in the way of that plan. It hit and nearly killed me in a crosswalk just off Santa Monica Boulevard. When I came to, an EMT was inserting a needle into my forearm, and-shell shocked-I began to fight. She told me that my neck was broken, and that if I didn't stop struggling, I'd be paralyzed. Voila. This well-timed suggestion took my body offline from the neck down until early the following morning.
For 24 years I had identified as the weakest, most physically awkward, least flexible kid in the class: my body had been a problem whose cravings and failings delayed my intellectual
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