DEEP DIVING INTO GOD:
Nammalvar
One of my favorite places in the universe is Moe’s Books on the Ave in Berkeley. If you’re there at just the right time and know what you’re looking for you can find some incredible books at bargain prices. Just the other day I ran across a book titled Hymns for Drowning by a Hindu poet-saint named Nammalvar, who lived (it’s believed) from 880 to 930 CE. I don’t suppose many people have heard of Nammalvar, a name that means “our own alvar” (he was also called Maran and Catokopan), or know that the title of this book is a play on alvar, a word that means “one who has dived deep into God,” in his case Vishnu. I’m not particularly interested in Hindu devotional poetry—my tastes run more to Dylan Thomas, Wislawa Szymborska, and Lewis Carroll—but I had to buy this book because of its distant connection to T. Krishnamacharya and modern Neo-Yoga. How’s that?
Once upon a time, perhaps a thousand or so years ago, a male child was born into a princely Indian family. He was, to say the least, a very strange baby, he wouldn’t eat or make a sound or respond to his parents’ words. Distressed, his parents did what any good parents would do with a seemingly deaf-mute child: they left him at the feet of the local Vishnu idol, hoping the god would intervene. The child then, abandoned, also behaved as we might expect: he got up and settled into the hollow of a nearby tamarind tree, and entered a state of deep meditation.
Maran probably would have spent the rest of his life meditating in that tree by himself, but he was discovered by a wandering pilgrim who got the boy to speak for the first time in his life. The poetry that was bottled up inside him all those years came pouring out, more than a thousand hymns to Vishnu, the last word of one hymn serving as the first word of the next, which thus made one continuous poem. Here’s an example:
The Paradigm
We here and that man, this man,
and that other in-between,
and that woman, this woman,
and that other, whoever,
those people, and these,
and these others in-between,
this thing, that thing,
and this other in-between, whichever,
all things dying, these things,
those things, those others in-between,
good things, bad things,
things that were, that will be,
being all of them,
he stands there.
We return to our story of Maran or Catokopan, who later was known as Nammalvar, and his odd connection to modern Hatha Yoga. The last time we heard from him, he’d just unleashed his considerable talent for poetry and apparently over the years produced a considerable body of beautiful work, something like a thousand hymns. It was so beautiful though that after his death some people feared it would replace traditional teaching, so they tossed it all it a river where, except for just 10 hymns, it was lost to the world.
Or so it seemed. Enter our next hero, Natha Muni, who one day heard a band of wandering singers recite the 10 surviving hymns of Nammalvar, and as we would say today, went completely bonkers. He asked one of the singers who the poet was, and was told it was Nammalvar. Then Natha Muni asked where he might find the rest of the poetry, and was advised to go to Nammalvar’s home town where he might possibly find someone who could give him more information. So off he went and once there found an old holy man who instructed Natha Muni to sit under Nammalvar’s tamarind tree and recite a prayer in praise of the poet 12,000 times. It’s hard to say how long this took Natha Muni to finish, probably anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.
But in the end Natha Muni had a vision of Nammalvar, who asked him, “Why are you chanting this prayer again and again?” Nathamuni answered, “I want to know all the hymns you wrote.” As a reward for his devotion Nammalvar taught him not only his own 1000 hymns, but the 3000 hymns written by the other Alvars that had also been lost. He also told Natha Muni that “A great acharya [i.e. teacher] will appear in your line.” After he returned to his own home, Natha Muni became a great teacher in his own right, and authored a book on Hatha Yoga, the Secret of Yoga (Yoga Rahasya), that like Nammalvar’s poetry was eventually lost.
Now jump ahead now nearly a thousand years, to 1888, and the promised birth of that “great teacher” in Natha Muni’s lineage. His name was T. Krishnamacharya, and as an adult he not only changed the course of Hatha Yoga forever, but was the guru to four of the greatest yoga instructors of modern times, BKS Iyengar, K Pattabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar, and Indra Devi.
How did this happen? At the age of 16 Krishnmacharya made a pilgrimage to the very tamarind tree where Nammalvar recited his poetry and Natha Muni had his vision. There, he too had a vision, this time of his long dead ancestor Natha Muni, who recited to him the lost instruction from the Yoga Rahasya. This book, though not well known today, provided the “seed” for Krishnamacharya’s evolution as a yoga teacher, and though only published recently in English is truly one of the foundation texts of modern Hatha Yoga, along with Iyengar’s Light on Yoga. Want to see a copy of this book? You can order it from the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram at
http://www.kym.org/bookstore/productlisting.php?cid=2
I thought I’d finish the story of T Krishnamacharya (TK) and the Yoga Rahasaya (YR). You may remember that as a 16-year-old boy in 1904, TK embarked on an arduous pilgrimage to the same sacred tamarind tree where, a thousand years earlier, his ancestor, Natha Muni, had a visionary encounter with and recovered the lost hymns of the poet-sage Nammalvar. The teenager’s experience was remarkably similar in certain key features to Natha Muni’s: tired and hungry when he reached the temple grounds where the tree grew, TK fell into a swoon and had a “vision” of Natha Muni, who taught him the long lost text of the Yoga Rahasya, the “Secret of Yoga.”
I suspect for many people, the story seems fantastical, and the question immediately comes to mind: did TK really receive this book from Natha Muni? There are plenty of supporters who vigorously insist that he did. A Doctor Varadachari, writing in the YR’s Preface to the first English edition published in 1998, affirms “there is no reason to entertain uncertainty about its authorship,” that it was “God’s will that a descendent of Nathamuni alone should ... discover the work.” But eight years later David Hurwitz, in Yoga Beneath the Surface, a book of interviews he did with one of TK’s longtime students, Srivatsa Ramaswami, presents a different view (presumably with the approval of Mr Ramaswami): “The Yoga Rahasya of Nathamuni is a work by Krishnamacharya inspired by his devotion to the ninth-century yogi Nathamuni.” It seems fairly safe to say that, whatever the back story, ultimately TK authored the YR.
The next question is: if it’s true that TK wrote the YR, why did he go through all the trouble of concocting the story about Natha Muni? Let’s accept that as a teenager he did have a vision of his ancestor, and that the experience inspired him to eventually write this book. Why not just say so? My theory is that TK, like all dyed-in-the-wool yogis, had a great deal of respect for the yoga tradition. The result is, on the one hand, a mistrust of “newness” and innovation, and on the other, a belief that “age equals authority,” that is, the older some person or book or idea is, the more authority it supposedly has. Now the fact is that while it may have been inspired by the vision of the sage who wrote the original YR, TK’s version represented a radical break with tradition (for reasons I’ll get to later). In order then to invest this frankly innovative work with 10 centuries worth of “authority,” TK attributed the book entirely to Natha Muni. Actually this device of assigning a book to an older time and/or person to enhance its impact isn’t uncommon in history of Indian spiritual literature.
Now the third question is: if the YR isn’t a thousand years old but a product of the early 20th century, written not by the sage Natha Muni but by TK, why should we be interested in it at all? This question opens a rather large but fascinating can of worms—ergo my need for another installment—that involves TK’s role in the transformation of traditional Hatha Yoga into what I call neo-Hatha Yoga. I have my fingers crossed—first middle fingers over indexes, then indexes over middles for an equal length of time to make sure I don’t create any finger-crossing imbalances—that I’ll be able to finish this story next time.
We come now to the end—finally—of the tale of T Krishnamacharya and the Yoga Rahasya. One question remains from the second installment: if the YR isn’t a thousand years old but a product of the early twentieth century, written not by the sage Natha Muni but by TK, why should we be interested in it at all?
The story is a long one and rather complicated, but let’s just say that toward the end of the nineteenth century in India, the ancient and noble discipline of Hatha Yoga had fallen on hard times and was for all intents and purposes nearly extinct. In the early decades of the twentieth century several Indian yoga teachers, TK among them, decided to do something about the situation and set about reforming, revising and revitalizing Hatha Yoga. Their primary goal was to make HY more acceptable and accessible to a wider audience.
For a thousand years HY had been the province of a small, secretive band of ascetics, mostly males, who lived outside the pale of mainstream society. Their practices often offended the members of what we in the 1960s called the “straight world”: roaming the countryside naked, smeared in ashes, and haunting graveyards to meditate on corpses—the original Shava Asana—were purposely designed to mark these men off as “different” and insure their excommunication from the straight world. Also many of their practices were dangerous: khechari mudra, for example, the “space-walking seal,” involved slowly cutting the frenum, the narrow band of muscle that anchors your tongue to the floor of your mouth, and then gradually “milking” or elongating the tongue to, well, you’ll have to read what happens next in the Gheranda Samhita, a seventeenth century text. There were also, ahem, sexual practices that, like khechari, would certainly be problematic in a public class. These practices and others like them had to be excised, and so they were, replaced with a plethora of physical exercises—brand new “asanas,” gussied up with Sanskrit names—borrowed from Indian martial arts, gymnastics, wrestling, and dance. The old books usually listed 10 to 30 asanas, mostly sitting poses that prepared the yogi for breathing and meditation. Suddenly in the YR we have almost 70 asanas, most of which—like all standing poses—have no precedent in the HY tradition.
Then to make HY more acceptable to a Western audience it was transformed into a “science,” its breathing and meditation practices tested and measured for their physical and psychological benefits. Large sections of the YR are dedicated to what we know today as “yoga therapy,” including one specifically aimed at pregnant women.
So why is the YR important? Here we have the seeds of modern or neo-Hatha Yoga, with its emphasis on asana and the practical, therapeutic benefits of the practice. We should also remember that it was one of TK’s students—his first woman student in fact, Indra Devi—who pioneered HY in the United States. If you want to read more about all this, I recommend The History of Modern Yoga, by Elizabeth de Michelis, for starters. Next we can look forward to the publication, I believe this coming February, of Yoga Body, by Mark Singleton, an instructor at St John’s College in Santa Fe.
This is the time of year most yoga teachers look forward to with great, hand-rubbing anticipation. That’s because many lists of New Year’s resolutions include a solemn vow to finally “get into” (or “get back into”) yoga after months, even years, of justifiable procrastination, there being myriad reasons why class attendance has been difficult or downright impossible given all the extenuating circumstances of what we optimistically call “life.” But here at this seemingly critical juncture in our planet’s annual circumambulation around its companion star, the time feels ripe to turn over a new leaf, even though there are any number of old leaves that’ve been begging for our attention for who knows how long. We can’t however ignore the writing on the wall any longer: those extra pounds, that nagging back, the job-related stress, all cry out for just one thing: Yoga. Since hope, as the English poet wrote, does spring eternal in the human breast, the hope here is that the newly turned leaf will somehow make all the old unturned leaves disappear, even though we have ample evidence to the contrary.
Yes, yoga is now considered by many to be that leaf, good for whatever ails you whether physical, mental, or spiritual. So we teachers usually see a significant spike in our class attendance in January. Here we might draw an analogy between this sudden influx of students and a wave, the teacher then in this scenario is a surfer riding the crest of this wave, ten toes hanging precipitously over the edge of his or her board, drawing on every ounce of his or her “skill in action” to maintain what the Bhagavad Gita aptly names samatva, “sameness-and-indifference.” This is a most necessary stance in the face of this flood of students and its concomitant sharp increase in income, the danger being that the teacher will forget, in the words of the wise King Solomon, that “This too shall pass ...” and that one day, in the not too distant future, this ride like all rides must, will come to an end.
To be sure, our student wave will like its watery counterpart gradually lose force and momentum, and eventually, come late May or early June, when the kids are temporarily paroled from those inhuman lock-ups known as schools, and adult students strike out en masse on those generous 2-week summer vacations, the teacher will find him or herself standing forlorn on an empty beach, or more precisely, in an empty classroom. Now comes the winter, or rather summer of our discontent, when attendance plummets and along with it, income. Once riding high, now brought to earth with a thud, our teacherly mettle is sorely tested: will he or she stay the course through the famine days of August, or instead crumble ignominiously under the pressure and go find a real job?
If we can survive until September, far out on the sea, we’ll spy a promising swell, and soon, sometime after Labor Day, the second wave will hit, and though welcome it’s usually smaller than the first and lasts only about 10 weeks, until Thanksgiving marks the end of relative normalcy and everyone once again abandons ship to deal as best they can with “The Holidays.” Thus if we graph the ups and downs of attendance for a typical yoga class in a typical year we get something that looks like a sine wave, or perhaps an old-fashioned roller coaster, the teacher in this analogy riding unharnessed in the lead car, arms swinging wildly above his or her head, on the verge either of ecstasy or nausea.
One of my favorite places in the universe is Moe’s Books on the Ave in Berkeley. If you’re there at just the right time and know what you’re looking for you can find some incredible books at bargain prices. Just the other day I ran across a book titled Hymns for Drowning by a Hindu poet-saint named Nammalvar, who lived (it’s believed) from 880 to 930 CE. I don’t suppose many people have heard of Nammalvar, a name that means “our own alvar” (he was also called Maran and Catokopan), or know that the title of this book is a play on alvar, a word that means “one who has dived deep into God,” in his case Vishnu. I’m not particularly interested in Hindu devotional poetry—my tastes run more to Dylan Thomas, Wislawa Szymborska, and Lewis Carroll—but I had to buy this book because of its distant connection to T. Krishnamacharya and modern Neo-Yoga. How’s that?
Once upon a time, perhaps a thousand or so years ago, a male child was born into a princely Indian family. He was, to say the least, a very strange baby, he wouldn’t eat or make a sound or respond to his parents’ words. Distressed, his parents did what any good parents would do with a seemingly deaf-mute child: they left him at the feet of the local Vishnu idol, hoping the god would intervene. The child then, abandoned, also behaved as we might expect: he got up and settled into the hollow of a nearby tamarind tree, and entered a state of deep meditation.
Maran probably would have spent the rest of his life meditating in that tree by himself, but he was discovered by a wandering pilgrim who got the boy to speak for the first time in his life. The poetry that was bottled up inside him all those years came pouring out, more than a thousand hymns to Vishnu, the last word of one hymn serving as the first word of the next, which thus made one continuous poem. Here’s an example:
The Paradigm
We here and that man, this man,
and that other in-between,
and that woman, this woman,
and that other, whoever,
those people, and these,
and these others in-between,
this thing, that thing,
and this other in-between, whichever,
all things dying, these things,
those things, those others in-between,
good things, bad things,
things that were, that will be,
being all of them,
he stands there.
We return to our story of Maran or Catokopan, who later was known as Nammalvar, and his odd connection to modern Hatha Yoga. The last time we heard from him, he’d just unleashed his considerable talent for poetry and apparently over the years produced a considerable body of beautiful work, something like a thousand hymns. It was so beautiful though that after his death some people feared it would replace traditional teaching, so they tossed it all it a river where, except for just 10 hymns, it was lost to the world.
Or so it seemed. Enter our next hero, Natha Muni, who one day heard a band of wandering singers recite the 10 surviving hymns of Nammalvar, and as we would say today, went completely bonkers. He asked one of the singers who the poet was, and was told it was Nammalvar. Then Natha Muni asked where he might find the rest of the poetry, and was advised to go to Nammalvar’s home town where he might possibly find someone who could give him more information. So off he went and once there found an old holy man who instructed Natha Muni to sit under Nammalvar’s tamarind tree and recite a prayer in praise of the poet 12,000 times. It’s hard to say how long this took Natha Muni to finish, probably anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.
But in the end Natha Muni had a vision of Nammalvar, who asked him, “Why are you chanting this prayer again and again?” Nathamuni answered, “I want to know all the hymns you wrote.” As a reward for his devotion Nammalvar taught him not only his own 1000 hymns, but the 3000 hymns written by the other Alvars that had also been lost. He also told Natha Muni that “A great acharya [i.e. teacher] will appear in your line.” After he returned to his own home, Natha Muni became a great teacher in his own right, and authored a book on Hatha Yoga, the Secret of Yoga (Yoga Rahasya), that like Nammalvar’s poetry was eventually lost.
Now jump ahead now nearly a thousand years, to 1888, and the promised birth of that “great teacher” in Natha Muni’s lineage. His name was T. Krishnamacharya, and as an adult he not only changed the course of Hatha Yoga forever, but was the guru to four of the greatest yoga instructors of modern times, BKS Iyengar, K Pattabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar, and Indra Devi.
How did this happen? At the age of 16 Krishnmacharya made a pilgrimage to the very tamarind tree where Nammalvar recited his poetry and Natha Muni had his vision. There, he too had a vision, this time of his long dead ancestor Natha Muni, who recited to him the lost instruction from the Yoga Rahasya. This book, though not well known today, provided the “seed” for Krishnamacharya’s evolution as a yoga teacher, and though only published recently in English is truly one of the foundation texts of modern Hatha Yoga, along with Iyengar’s Light on Yoga. Want to see a copy of this book? You can order it from the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram at
http://www.kym.org/bookstore/productlisting.php?cid=2
I thought I’d finish the story of T Krishnamacharya (TK) and the Yoga Rahasaya (YR). You may remember that as a 16-year-old boy in 1904, TK embarked on an arduous pilgrimage to the same sacred tamarind tree where, a thousand years earlier, his ancestor, Natha Muni, had a visionary encounter with and recovered the lost hymns of the poet-sage Nammalvar. The teenager’s experience was remarkably similar in certain key features to Natha Muni’s: tired and hungry when he reached the temple grounds where the tree grew, TK fell into a swoon and had a “vision” of Natha Muni, who taught him the long lost text of the Yoga Rahasya, the “Secret of Yoga.”
I suspect for many people, the story seems fantastical, and the question immediately comes to mind: did TK really receive this book from Natha Muni? There are plenty of supporters who vigorously insist that he did. A Doctor Varadachari, writing in the YR’s Preface to the first English edition published in 1998, affirms “there is no reason to entertain uncertainty about its authorship,” that it was “God’s will that a descendent of Nathamuni alone should ... discover the work.” But eight years later David Hurwitz, in Yoga Beneath the Surface, a book of interviews he did with one of TK’s longtime students, Srivatsa Ramaswami, presents a different view (presumably with the approval of Mr Ramaswami): “The Yoga Rahasya of Nathamuni is a work by Krishnamacharya inspired by his devotion to the ninth-century yogi Nathamuni.” It seems fairly safe to say that, whatever the back story, ultimately TK authored the YR.
The next question is: if it’s true that TK wrote the YR, why did he go through all the trouble of concocting the story about Natha Muni? Let’s accept that as a teenager he did have a vision of his ancestor, and that the experience inspired him to eventually write this book. Why not just say so? My theory is that TK, like all dyed-in-the-wool yogis, had a great deal of respect for the yoga tradition. The result is, on the one hand, a mistrust of “newness” and innovation, and on the other, a belief that “age equals authority,” that is, the older some person or book or idea is, the more authority it supposedly has. Now the fact is that while it may have been inspired by the vision of the sage who wrote the original YR, TK’s version represented a radical break with tradition (for reasons I’ll get to later). In order then to invest this frankly innovative work with 10 centuries worth of “authority,” TK attributed the book entirely to Natha Muni. Actually this device of assigning a book to an older time and/or person to enhance its impact isn’t uncommon in history of Indian spiritual literature.
Now the third question is: if the YR isn’t a thousand years old but a product of the early 20th century, written not by the sage Natha Muni but by TK, why should we be interested in it at all? This question opens a rather large but fascinating can of worms—ergo my need for another installment—that involves TK’s role in the transformation of traditional Hatha Yoga into what I call neo-Hatha Yoga. I have my fingers crossed—first middle fingers over indexes, then indexes over middles for an equal length of time to make sure I don’t create any finger-crossing imbalances—that I’ll be able to finish this story next time.
We come now to the end—finally—of the tale of T Krishnamacharya and the Yoga Rahasya. One question remains from the second installment: if the YR isn’t a thousand years old but a product of the early twentieth century, written not by the sage Natha Muni but by TK, why should we be interested in it at all?
The story is a long one and rather complicated, but let’s just say that toward the end of the nineteenth century in India, the ancient and noble discipline of Hatha Yoga had fallen on hard times and was for all intents and purposes nearly extinct. In the early decades of the twentieth century several Indian yoga teachers, TK among them, decided to do something about the situation and set about reforming, revising and revitalizing Hatha Yoga. Their primary goal was to make HY more acceptable and accessible to a wider audience.
For a thousand years HY had been the province of a small, secretive band of ascetics, mostly males, who lived outside the pale of mainstream society. Their practices often offended the members of what we in the 1960s called the “straight world”: roaming the countryside naked, smeared in ashes, and haunting graveyards to meditate on corpses—the original Shava Asana—were purposely designed to mark these men off as “different” and insure their excommunication from the straight world. Also many of their practices were dangerous: khechari mudra, for example, the “space-walking seal,” involved slowly cutting the frenum, the narrow band of muscle that anchors your tongue to the floor of your mouth, and then gradually “milking” or elongating the tongue to, well, you’ll have to read what happens next in the Gheranda Samhita, a seventeenth century text. There were also, ahem, sexual practices that, like khechari, would certainly be problematic in a public class. These practices and others like them had to be excised, and so they were, replaced with a plethora of physical exercises—brand new “asanas,” gussied up with Sanskrit names—borrowed from Indian martial arts, gymnastics, wrestling, and dance. The old books usually listed 10 to 30 asanas, mostly sitting poses that prepared the yogi for breathing and meditation. Suddenly in the YR we have almost 70 asanas, most of which—like all standing poses—have no precedent in the HY tradition.
Then to make HY more acceptable to a Western audience it was transformed into a “science,” its breathing and meditation practices tested and measured for their physical and psychological benefits. Large sections of the YR are dedicated to what we know today as “yoga therapy,” including one specifically aimed at pregnant women.
So why is the YR important? Here we have the seeds of modern or neo-Hatha Yoga, with its emphasis on asana and the practical, therapeutic benefits of the practice. We should also remember that it was one of TK’s students—his first woman student in fact, Indra Devi—who pioneered HY in the United States. If you want to read more about all this, I recommend The History of Modern Yoga, by Elizabeth de Michelis, for starters. Next we can look forward to the publication, I believe this coming February, of Yoga Body, by Mark Singleton, an instructor at St John’s College in Santa Fe.
This is the time of year most yoga teachers look forward to with great, hand-rubbing anticipation. That’s because many lists of New Year’s resolutions include a solemn vow to finally “get into” (or “get back into”) yoga after months, even years, of justifiable procrastination, there being myriad reasons why class attendance has been difficult or downright impossible given all the extenuating circumstances of what we optimistically call “life.” But here at this seemingly critical juncture in our planet’s annual circumambulation around its companion star, the time feels ripe to turn over a new leaf, even though there are any number of old leaves that’ve been begging for our attention for who knows how long. We can’t however ignore the writing on the wall any longer: those extra pounds, that nagging back, the job-related stress, all cry out for just one thing: Yoga. Since hope, as the English poet wrote, does spring eternal in the human breast, the hope here is that the newly turned leaf will somehow make all the old unturned leaves disappear, even though we have ample evidence to the contrary.
Yes, yoga is now considered by many to be that leaf, good for whatever ails you whether physical, mental, or spiritual. So we teachers usually see a significant spike in our class attendance in January. Here we might draw an analogy between this sudden influx of students and a wave, the teacher then in this scenario is a surfer riding the crest of this wave, ten toes hanging precipitously over the edge of his or her board, drawing on every ounce of his or her “skill in action” to maintain what the Bhagavad Gita aptly names samatva, “sameness-and-indifference.” This is a most necessary stance in the face of this flood of students and its concomitant sharp increase in income, the danger being that the teacher will forget, in the words of the wise King Solomon, that “This too shall pass ...” and that one day, in the not too distant future, this ride like all rides must, will come to an end.
To be sure, our student wave will like its watery counterpart gradually lose force and momentum, and eventually, come late May or early June, when the kids are temporarily paroled from those inhuman lock-ups known as schools, and adult students strike out en masse on those generous 2-week summer vacations, the teacher will find him or herself standing forlorn on an empty beach, or more precisely, in an empty classroom. Now comes the winter, or rather summer of our discontent, when attendance plummets and along with it, income. Once riding high, now brought to earth with a thud, our teacherly mettle is sorely tested: will he or she stay the course through the famine days of August, or instead crumble ignominiously under the pressure and go find a real job?
If we can survive until September, far out on the sea, we’ll spy a promising swell, and soon, sometime after Labor Day, the second wave will hit, and though welcome it’s usually smaller than the first and lasts only about 10 weeks, until Thanksgiving marks the end of relative normalcy and everyone once again abandons ship to deal as best they can with “The Holidays.” Thus if we graph the ups and downs of attendance for a typical yoga class in a typical year we get something that looks like a sine wave, or perhaps an old-fashioned roller coaster, the teacher in this analogy riding unharnessed in the lead car, arms swinging wildly above his or her head, on the verge either of ecstasy or nausea.
