Becca Faith Yoga

Last night at around 8:30, I found myself walking home from the first OM Yoga Knit n’ Sit of the 2009-10 winter season. I live in a mildly liminal ‘nabe: south of the retail & restaurant district, north of the purely residential part of town, west of the industrial complexes and east of the swanky Prospect Park brownstones. Still, it’s an okay part of town where stroller-pushers and hipsters make room for one another on the sidewalk. Neat.

So it’s 8:30 and I’m hobbling home under the weight of a huginormous purse, an oversized canvas bag filled with scrap yarn, and a wool pea-coat that’s making feel claustrophobic. I’m chatting with a friend on my headphones because I’m newly terrified of iPhone-induced brain cancer. I’m feeling good.

I notice a Bro’ walking toward me. You know a Bro’ when you see him: co-dependence on his BroBerry, striped oxford shirt, dark washed (but distressed!) jeans and a jaunty swagger. It’s okay to have aversion to a Bro’ — we all understand.

This particular Bro’ seemed to be walking in a diagonal line toward me instead of maintaining our parallel paths on the sidewalk, which made me raise my eyebrows but I figured he was just trying to avoid some Bro’-repellent, like a child or a committed relationship or work outside of the financial sector.

And then, before my Bro’-dar alarms could finish peeling a warning blast, he gets THISCLOSE to my face and plants an air-kiss somewhere in the vicinity of my very very VERY personal space. He made contact with the entire left side of my body. I could smell him.

I would like to say that things like this don’t get to me. I’d like to tell you that when someone flashed me on the street four years ago, I didn’t contemplate jumping into traffic to get away from him; or that when a man decided to start pleasuring himself while staring at me on the M train two summers ago, I didn’t cry for days. I’d like to tell you that because I’ve taken over 100 hours of self-defense training — including an entire course on how to utilize and neutralize common weapons — that I never felt afraid or victimized. I would really like to say (and mean) all of those things.

What I can say with certainty is that d-bags like the Bro’ get their rocks off by instigating a single instant of intimacy in which they have all the control. The rules for coping with this kind of animal are simple: obliterate his sense of privacy by drawing attention to what he’s just done and shaming him so thoroughly his skeevy erection crawls back into his body, withers, and dies.

I said some very non-Buddhist things. I won’t repeat them here, but suffice it to say I used a series of colorful expletives, suggested a timely suicide, called his mother a whore, and questioned the masculinity of someone too weak to turn around and let ME violate HIS space.

I got home and cried about it. Here’s the kicker: I felt guilty for yelling at him. I told myself I should have more self-control, less violence in my heart. Then I told myself to shut the eff up and practice the cultivation of ninja-like reflexes so that next time, I can reach his jugular (or at least his BroBerry) before he has time to scurry back underground where he belongs.

My question to all of you is this: How in the world do you find the Middle Way when the road is littered with Bros?