The Isthmian | covering the panama isthmus

Arriving at the Yoga Divina studio (“take off your shoes, please”), I find Rachel Divine on top of many things. Workmen are being instructed on how and how not to proceed with laying floors and electrical systems. Casandra, the housekeeper, brings cold water and drinks. Two phones ring incessantly and a MacBook pumps out Buddha Bar tunes. I’ve come to find out about Rachel Divine and yoga, but within five minutes we’re discussing the pros and cons of heat exchange pumps which is something she knows about too. Then the heat pumps are interrupted because she needs to read me poetry. And, oh wait! Listen to this music! And so on.

Conversations with Rachel Divine are, I have since learned, seldom linear. They meander around, going back and forth, sometimes touching again on the original theme. To the interviewer who is not prepared for it this is at first exhausting, but once you just let go – remember that term – it’s actually fun. She cuts her own sentences short because she just remembers something that absolutely must be told first and which you’ll find out much later had something to do, vaguely, with what you were originally discussing. Then there’s loud laughter and a sometimes wacky way of doing things. I wouldn’t know anyone who, being invited to come over for a glass of champagne at my office, brings her own strawberries, for example.

So who is Rachel Divine? First: It’s her real name. Some readers don’t believe it, but I checked. She was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Los Angeles (“Like I’m a valley girl, duh…”), from a Puerto Rican mother and a Czechoslovakian father. Her parents divorced early. Her mother describes her young daughter as a “tornado”. She herself describes her childhood as relatively happy, but these days she doesn’t see her family much and has no contact at all with her father. From LA, she moved to New York and married. Traveled all over the world. Divorced seven years later and moved to Houston, to Barcelona (Spain), then back to New York, then to Costa Rica where she lived in Nosara on the Pacific coast.

“I taught yoga and had a small tourist shop. One day I realized that if you needed a set of spare keys you had to drive for hours to have copies made, so I bought the machine and offered key duplicates as well, which was good business”.

Plans to start a yoga retreat stranded when some of her business partners pursued other projects. Divine had already bought the land for the boutique resort. Things took a turn for the worse when a crooked lawyer and some accomplices set out to steal that property from her; a legal fight that continues up to this day. Disillusioned, Rachel moved first to Escazu, also in Costa Rica, and finally decided for Panama.

“There are a ton of foreigners moving to Panama so I believe that there is a lot of opportunity for yoga therapy”, she explained. But she isn’t just thinking about baby boomer expats who can afford the John Hopkins in Punta Pacifica. “I’d love to do some different things as well, like teach yoga in the women’s prison”, she tells me. Then there are plans for a yoga center in Panama City to give classes and train future yoga teachers. Meanwhile Rachel works by appointment as a yoga therapist, specializing in the healing side of yoga which includes stretching, preventative therapy and wellness. It’s a form of yoga that she has been certified and specialized in for more than 7 years.

“You wanna see my balls?” she asks in one of these conversational twists she owns the patent on. The balls turn out to be a sort of skippy balls. You can sit on them or lie on them and do all kind of weird things with them and that is called “yoga” and it’s good for you.

Test Drive

So I decided to take this yoga thing for a test. An old ski accident and too much time at the keyboard had left me with a frozen shoulder and numb fingers and yoga, or so I had read on the internets, would be able to cure those ills once and for all.

It was not my first attempt to fight physical discomfort with the ancient Eastern practice. Many years ago, in Holland, I went to have dinner with a friend who announced that a lady friend of his would join our table as well. After about 20 minutes a well known porn starlet entered the restaurant wearing a track suit and, answering my surprised look, she said that she had arrived straight from yoga class. Yoga, she explained, made her relax after the trials of another day of hard work and she went to class twice a week. I nodded understandingly. Working in the audiovisual industry can be a drag on the body.

“I often have back pain after a day of shooting, do you think yoga would help?” I asked her.

“Yes, of course. If you want I can take you to a class”, she replied.

That point scored, we ordered wine and appetizers and my friend, a bit worried about where this was going, retook control of the conversation and steered it towards safer subjects that wouldn’t invoke uncontrolled visits to stretch sessions. But later on I asked again, “Would you know of any exercises I could already do in anticipation of yoga classes?”

“Yes, you should try this and this” – and she started an explanation of weird movements I should make to make the back pain disappear.

“Can’t you just show me?” I asked. And there I was, lying on the floor of the restaurant with the acclaimed adult movie star on top of me pushing and pulling my arms and legs and what not. My friend watched it in disbelief and despair. The owner of the establishment brought another bottle of wine, quietly shaking his head.

So you see, I am an expert at yoga.

At least, that’s what I thought. Because none of this frivolousness characterizes the yoga classes given by Rachel Divine, I quickly found out. First my clothes were wrong: “Wear something loose next time instead of jeans”, she ordered me. So I bought myself some pajama style pants at Machetazo and prayed nobody would ever see me wear them.

Then there are the classes themselves. No wine drenched late night exercises on restaurant floors here, but hard work, and Rachel accepts no yammering about little pains and other such misery. “Are you dying? Does it feel as if someone is stabbing you with a knife? No? Then I don’t care”, is the consistent reply when I yell “Ouch!” trying to lift up my arm further than I’ve done in decades. All sorts of tools are brought out by Divine to work with, from foam blocks to cushions to belts which I then have to use to tie up my own legs or something like that.

I’m telling you this, dear reader, because many of us believe that yoga is just something fluffy, an esthetically pleasing form of feel-good gymnastics practiced in clouds of incense, at the end of which the participants hurry home on their flying carpets to have lotus flower salads with tofu. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Divine’s yoga classes are a lot of fun yet no-nonsense. She’ll push and pull you until the right muscle stretches or the right joint says “plop”. The other thing one has to appreciate is that you learn that a lot of physical problems are actually resolved by training to exercise proper control over the body part in question.

An example. I couldn’t move my left arm back very far or it would hurt in my shoulder. So one day Rachel takes my arm, starts chatting with me, meanwhile moving it up and down and back and forth. Then suddenly, “You said you couldn’t move your arm backwards?” I look, my arm is almost a 90 degrees up and I didn’t even feel her do it. “You see? It’s all between the ears”, Divine says triumphantly and lets my arm go. It’s one of the most important lessons I learn during my test drive of Yoga Divina; that by taking exact control of relaxing muscles or indeed using them, pain and physical blockades disappear.

Often it is a matter – I told you to remember that term – of just letting go. One morning Divine made me do some stretching exercise and I was terrified and absolutely convinced it was gonna hurt. A lot. Tears sprung in my eyes, but when I relaxed my shoulder all I heard was “click” and then there was no pain, just free and unobstructed movement. It helped enormously when I, not satisfied with dealing with just old injuries, got myself in a fresh scooter accident and turned to Rachel for help: In little over a week most of the chest pain – which, I was sure, announced imminent and painful death – had in fact disappeared.

Another prejudice against yoga is that it’s for wimps. Also not true. I’ve seen Rachel treat everything from housewives to former marines to two young ladies who had brought their grandfather along for the ride. A great time was had by all.

Months after we first met, I invited Rachel to join me for a trip to the Caribbean Costa Ariba. I had to do some reporting there and she hadn’t seen much of the country yet. In Palenque, a tiny village near Nombre de Dios, we lunched in a small restaurant at the beach. Then I set off to interview the mayor. Walking down the street, I looked over my shoulder and thought, “Oh no…” I saw Rachel approaching the spectacularly overweight owner of the establishment and worried she’d make him do handstands or something. Or maybe we’d get chased out of the village by residents who are not prepared for this kind of modern big city nonsense. Upon return, my fears proved to be unfounded however as it turned out that the restaurant owner has diabetes and was very happy to receive some good advice from the “gringa”. The yoga therapist herself, meanwhile, was peacefully asleep – on top of a table. And I understood at that moment that Panama needs her.

=.=.=

Yoga Divina has its website at yogadivina.com. Rachel Divine can be contacted by sending an email to yogadivina@gmail.com or call at 6554-4744.

Tags: panama, rachel divine, yoga, yoga divina