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water would
    soon become unaffordable luxuries.
    Now that I was lucid again, one thing was brutally clear: teach-
    ing yoga was the most rewarding way to go broke on the planet.
    Yoga was a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry, so someone out
    there was obviously making money. Maybe the millionaires all op-
    erated those mega “hot box” yoga studios popping up everywhere.
    Or perhaps the riches were found in producing DVDs and selling
    designer yoga duds. Yoga’s megarich certainly weren’t getting that way running small neighborhood studios.
    Fortunately, I had a full schedule of private clients the rest of the week. If none of them canceled and I timed things perfectly, I 33
    might not have to raid my personal savings account again. Alicia
    arrived right on time, as usual.
    “Hey, Alicia. It’s great to see you.”
    My words were true, for multiple reasons. Alicia was one of my
    favorite students, and I always enjoyed spending time with her.
    But more relevant to my current predicament, Alicia was also the
    studio’s landlord.
    Landlord or not, broke tenant or not, I hesitated. Today wasn’t
    one of Alicia’s good days. She looked pale, tired, and significantly older than her true age of thirty-three, and her normally perfectly tailored clothes hung on her frame like hand-me-downs from a
    heavier sister. I gritted my teeth and plunged ahead anyway. “I hate to ask this, but money’s a little tight this month. Can I give you the rent check a few days late?”
    I expected at least token resistance, especially since this was the second time I’d asked in four months. But Alicia smiled and said,
    “Sure. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to my bookkeeper and let him know. And I’ll make sure he waives the late fee again.”
    I sighed in relief. “Thank you. I’ll get the check to you as soon as I can. I hope I’m not causing you any problems.”
    “Don’t be silly,” she said as she rolled out her mat. “Waiting a
    week or two for your rent money is the least of my concerns. I’m
    happy to help.”
    She was right. About money being the least of her concerns,
    that is. Calling Alicia rich would have been an understatement.
    But as Dad used to say, money can’t buy everything. In her case,
    money couldn’t buy time—at least not enough of it.
    Alicia was diagnosed with stage IV malignant melanoma last
    February. She celebrated her thirty-third birthday hooked up to
    an intravenous cocktail of immunosuppressing, hair-destroying
    34
    experimental drugs at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
    Center. Chemo or not, the survival rate for her condition was so
    low that her doctors didn’t even talk about it, except in hushed
    tones when they thought she couldn’t overhear.
    I looked at those statistics myself. In most cases, Alicia’s doctors were probably right. In her case, however, those highly schooled, super experienced medical professionals might just be mistaken.
    Alicia was determined to fight. And I’d seen too many miracles to completely discount her.
    She used to love strong yoga practices, and I envied her ability
    to do complex balance poses with seeming grace and ease. Now
    she practiced yoga in an attempt to find that same grace and ease in the balance of her daily living. From what I’d seen, her inner strength put her former physical capabilities to shame.
    I led her through a gentle restorative sequence designed to sup-
    port her struggling immune system. We began with a few cycles of
    Nadi Sodhana—a breath practice also known as Alternate Nostril
    Breathing—to balance Alicia’s energy system and focus her mind.
    After a few minutes, we added some simple, gentle movements.
    Our first pose was Cakravakasana, loosely translated as Sunbird
    Pose.
    Alicia had done this posture dozens of times in the past, but I
    verbally coached each repetition anyway, hoping my voice would
    drown out any worries that might be echoing through her mind.
    “Please come to hands and knees.” She