Tragedy on the Rocks by Sri Swami Bobo

Marissa Jones, my beloved student, was injured this past weekend and is currently in ICU at UCLA Medical with multiple face, leg and back lacerations following a fall from a boulder during a photo shoot for Conde Nast Traveller. Paul, her "partner" at the photo shoot, was inconsolable when I spoke with him over the phone, barely able to utter words through sobs of grief. After some coddling, Paul was able to eek out a convoluted description of the moments just before Marissa's tragic tumble.

Paul
It was a (sobs) beautiful day. We were both, um, I mean the sun, the sky, the waterfall, Oh, God Marissa…. I’m so sorry. We had just been lowered by helicopter onto the rocks. I had wanted to shoot inside the Yoga studio, but the director and Marissa thought an outdoor location was more yogic and Zen.

Marissa fearlessly found a grip on the slippery rocks and settled into her amazing Parsvakonasana. Everything was one with nature despite the precariousness of our perch. Marissa’s knee was in perfect alignment, her femur bone dead center, her back inner shin working, her ribs not poking and her gaze soft. If only we had been able to hold that moment!

I turned to admire Marissa’s form and to my horror noticed that her front foot had begun to turn in. She, as always, knew before I did what was wrong and went to adjust, However, she moved too quickly (the cameras pop-pop-pop distracting her), her back foot slid out from under her causing her leg to fly off the rocks, her perfect cheekbones crashing into the rock face. The force of the contact of beauty with hard cruel nature sent her summer salting into the air. Marissa, ever the trooper, tried to approximate the perfect drop back into the water, but the blood from her face laceration caused her to over arch her sacral region, bringing her not into the safety of liquid, but into the most horrid bhujangasana (she collapsed the space in her upper back) on a rocky out-cropping. Her pelvis landed with a hard thud (if only she had kept her organs pulled in) and she slid silently off the craggy ledge and into the murky watery abyss. I think I heard her say just before she vanished beneath the water’s surface: “Oh, but not for the momentary perfection of my asana destroyed by poor form.”