The Parisian Yoga Witch Who Healed My Back

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I was 31 and had been living with chronic back pain for half a decade. In my twenties, working as a professional modern dancer, I had herniated two discs in my lower back at an audition—and then, as dancers are wont to do, danced and practiced yoga on the injury for years.

At 30, I'd had surgery to correct the problem, but when I returned to the hospital six months after the operation, in more pain than I'd felt before going under the knife, my surgeon said, "You're the patient I wake up at 3am and worry about. Unfortunately, there's always one."

As a yoga teacher, I had exhausted every possible means of healing my body before agreeing to surgery: physical therapy, massage, Chinese herbs, an anti-inflammatory diet, restorative yoga, acupuncture, cortisone injections, fistfuls of Advil, narcotics, weeks and weeks on my couch on ice. By the time I turned 30, I had taken my clothes off for more healers than lovers, which, as a single New Yorker, was nothing short of depressing. I did, however, discover one perk of undressing in an office rather than in a bedroom: you were happy when the examiner told you what was wrong with your body.

I took a four-month leave from dancing, which turned into a year, which turned into the end of my career. Even without dancing or yoga, my sciatic nerve—a thick, ropy band that runs along the back of the leg, from spine to foot—burned relentlessly. My toes were almost always numb. I could barely carry groceries or laundry up to my apartment, couldn't sit through more than a quick dinner. Forget about high heels or flimsy ballet flats or anything, really, that needed to be paired with a skirt.

When an email from a college acquaintance appeared in my inbox, I was desperate, depleted and unemployed. Alison had suffered the way I was suffering, but she had recovered. "Go to Paris," she urged me. "It sounds crazy, but a woman there fixed my back. I promise: she will fix yours, too."

Noëlle, Alison explained, was 84 and had been B.K.S. Iyengar's first Western yoga student. She taught Aplomb—an offshoot of Iyengar yoga that did away with all the fancy poses I'd spent years sweating through on my mat and focused on the bare essentials of posture.

I'd get out of pain by relearning to stand. What on earth did I have to lose?

But before getting on a plane, I apparently needed a refurbished wardrobe. "You absolutely cannot wear those," Alison said, pointing to my jeans: perfectly faded, bell-bottomed Sevens. The jeans I wore until they unceremoniously split up the ass.

"I know," I answered, my forearms deep in a rack of dresses. "I was going to wear yoga pants."

"Oh, God, no! This," Alison said, showing me the orange tunic. It was stunning—delicate embroidery adored a deep V-neckline and black stitching bordered the hem—but it looked like something you'd wear to a cocktail party in the Hamptons. "This is what you should wear to your first class with Noëlle. With leggings. And makeup."

"To yoga?"

Paris may be the fashion capital of the world, but I was going there to get out of pain. Why did my clothing matter?

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Given Alison's stern warning, I pictured Noëlle as the paragon of Parisian style and sophistication, an elderly Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot. So rather than worry about whether she'd heal me, I obsessed about what to wear to our first meeting: The silk number Alison had insisted I buy? A wrap dress I'd unearthed from my closet? I settled on an American Apparel tunic, cinched with a belt, thinking this could vaguely be considered yoga wear, in case I actually have to move.

In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, heart battering in my chest, I climbed the winding staircase to Noëlle's apartment, a cowbell leading the way.

The stench hit me as soon as I stepped inside: It smelled like a subway car peopled with the homeless. The one-room flat was so full of furniture—dilapidated loveseats, paintings propped against every surface, plants weaving their way around bookshelves, a desk equipped with a carpentry shop and a typewriter, multiple TVs on a high shelf all playing silently, a half-dozen cheap alarm clocks—there was only a tiny square of filthy rug in which to cram her three students.

Noëlle and I looked each other up and down. Her hair was thin and grey, pulled back into a tight chignon at the bottom of her neck. Her Indian-print wrap skirt and button-down collared shirt were yellowing, and she wore three multi-colored beaded necklaces across her voluminous chest. She was barefoot. Both feet had protruding bunions, and her nails hadn't been cut, let alone manicured, in an eternity. When she smiled broadly, I noticed that her two bottom teeth were gone. In their place were tiny brown stumps.

But her posture: It was impeccable.

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Aplomb is predicated on the idea that our bones—our bodies' scaffolding—are built to hold us up with minimal muscular effort. We all have a natural alignment that should allow us to exist with comfort and mobility throughout our lives. Noëlle came to this discovery after studying communities around the world—fishermen in Portugal, farmers in France—who work with their bodies well into old age and live without pain.

But—and here's where Aplomb differs from most contemporary yoga instruction—the pelvis must be tilted forward. In other words: the tailbone should not be tucked under. From this stable base, the spine can grow freely up toward the skull. Any pain caused by compression—a herniated disc, for example—is naturally alleviated with this newfound space between the vertebrae.

The difficult part is finding this alignment.

To teach Aplomb, Noëlle used a very French method: She yelled. She shamed. She ridiculed. Or worst of all: she ignored you, deeming you a lost cause. For weeks I walked through her door holding my breath and praying—for clarity, to be out of pain, to not be scolded, to not burst into tears. But nothing she said—or didn't say, for she communicated mostly with her hands or sounds of exasperation—made sense. As a dancer, I'd been following physical directions my whole life, and these were simple enough—bend the knees, pour weight into the heels, relax the pelvis, lift up through the back—but impossible to execute. "Do it gently!" she'd bellow into my ear in French. "Not with your muscles! With your attention!"

And now I will grow a tail with my attention.

With her fingers on either side of my pelvis like a harpist at the ready, I worked to draw some space between my vertebrae, but it was like separating bricks.

"Up! Up! UP!"

I planted my feet, elongated my spine through the crown of my head.

"NON! Listen to my hands!"

Her touch was so subtle I couldn't feel a thing.

"I'm trying," I whispered.

She picked up her index finger to wag it at me. "Mr. Iyengar would say, Don't try. DO IT."

Alison had been right about one thing: I definitely didn't need yoga pants for this.

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While I might have been failing miserably to grasp the technique—weeks went by without any pain letup—I quickly gathered that Noëlle wasn't simply interested in the anatomical effects of realigning my spine. She had a metaphorical goal as well: She was trying to transform me into a woman whose inner balance and stability were mirrored in her outer presentation. Every time she gave me the Miranda Priestley once-over in her foyer, she wasn't just assessing my posture: she was evaluating the progress I was making on my appearance, as though these were fundamentally linked. Was I getting the message about what une vraie femme française looked like? Did I really respect all her teachings?

Utterly desperate for this to work, I was listening—although why I thought someone who showed no signs of caring for herself could teach me how to be a real Parisian woman will tell you how far gone I was. I convinced myself—or she had me convinced—that pouring my faith into this technique also meant pouring myself wholesale into her wacky philosophy.

Of course, it wasn't as though I had no interest in clothing. It had simply been dulled by years of enslavement to sneakers and little stamina to shop. I had once let the pain pin me to my bed, but now, duly spurred on, I wandered in and out of boutiques in the Marais, fingering silk dresses and slipping into billowy blouses I imagined coupling with soft cotton leggings and rust-colored leather boots.

Although I spotted loads of Parisian women in jeans—always, always paired with heels—Noëlle banned them: Denim was too tight around the hips. It didn't allow the pelvis to rotate freely, and without this rotation in the pelvis, the spine had no chance of lengthening. Getting out of pain would thus be impossible.

Instead I bought dresses, charging them to a credit card I didn't have the money to pay off. A forest green sleeveless number from Comptoirs des Cotonniers; a slate, pocketed tunic from Kookaï. Would Noëlle approve? Would this dress prove my devotion? Endear me to her enough to prevent an outburst?  I looked at myself in the mirror through her eyes. I was unrecognizable—but then again, I hadn't felt like myself in years. Hadn't I come to Paris to be completely transformed?

Alison had scared me out of packing my Adidas, so I'd borrowed a pair of orthopedic sandals from my mother. But Noëlle scoffed at my fear of high heels—what else would you wear, she asked? One day, she actually demanded I place my heels up on a stack of books to prove how easy it was to rotate my pelvis forward with a three-inch boost.

Although I was steadfastly skeptical—it's not like Iyengar or her Portuguese fishermen wore heels—I became fixated on a pair of yellow Camper sandals, trying them on upwards of a dozen times over the course of a few weeks, causing one particular employee to actually recognize me and roll her eyes when I walked into the store. They became a symbol for all the things I had denied myself—or been denied—in the last few years: a sense of freedom and choice in my physical life, and the balls to be a little risky with my body. They pointed to the fact that I felt damaged and preternaturally old. If I could wear these shoes, I would be young again, free. I could get everything I wanted—hot sex, unpredictable adventures, the man of my dreams—even if my feet hurt.

Most of this, I knew, was ludicrous. When I reported any of it—the smelly apartment, the toothless witch, the clothing requirements—to my friends over Skype, I was met with blank stares. But what does this have to do with your back?

I couldn't quite answer them.

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And yet, under Noëlle's concentrated tutelage, I began to experience microscopic improvements. Her touch didn't seem so arbitrary, her instructions so nonsensical; my pelvis did want to relax and rotate forward. My spine did want to go where it was being led, clear off my pelvis, up, up, up, the discs buoyant, freed from years of compression. My chest did want to open, resting atop my ribcage weightlessly—in fact, the buttons on my shirts popped open from the new width across my chest.

And I was learning how to play my teacher's game. Showing up at her door put together was simply a sign of respect, like bowing to a shrine. Even though her own look rarely varied, my appearance, it turned out, reflected on her. It proved that she could not only realign my spine but, as she'd once declared, "make you beautiful."

Perhaps this was a product of my brainwashed state, but it did make a kind of perverse sense. What was the use of learning to stand properly if I was going to mess up it up in too-tight jeans? Why wear a gorgeous dress if I wasn't on my axis? It was imperative that once I acclimated to the posture, I'd have something beautiful to hang on it—that I'd showcase her work in all its glory. That I'd see myself anew, reborn. The hope was that I'd feel that way, too.

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Close to the end of my two-month stay, I came to class in a navy Butter wrap dress and red lipstick; thin silver hoops dangled on either side of my cheeks. Dressing like this had become second nature—a process my husband would later witness and call "Preparing for your date with Noëlle."

I set my pelvis correctly—after weeks of practice, this was becoming more natural—and I listened. I placed my attention in her old, experienced hands as they traveled up my spine. I let myself be guided as if by the wind.

The injured side of my back relaxed. My spine seemed to be supporting itself, a wisp of smoke, billowing out from my pelvis.

"Oui! Oui!"

I felt as if I could stay there forever, completely effortlessly, easily. Full of Aplomb. The word—all of it, everything she'd said—finally made sense to me. Poised. At ease.

"Now you look beautiful," she said, obviously pleased with herself. She traced the neckline of my dress, touched my dangling hoops gently. Her kindness and warmth—her big-hearted generosity, her genius—were on full display, and I beamed, bursting with love and gratitude. This old, unlikely guru had given me back my life, and I felt every bit as glorious as she claimed I looked.

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It turned out, of course, that I had been wrong about Noëlle's lack of interest in her own appearance. On the few occasions I saw her out of her apartment, she did put on her face, a clean collared shirt, and a skirt (although always of the same ilk). She was actually tremendously vain—photographs of her from half a century ago reveal something of une vraie femme française, scarves and all—but life had taken its inevitable toll.

While her work might be revolutionary, it hasn't garnered her the praise or recognition—or financial stability—someone with a less cantankerous personality might have earned. And although she'd never sought fame, she was marked by an unquestionable bitterness, the kind that might prompt you on most days to simply let yourself go—but still never, ever allow someone else, someone with her whole magnificent life ahead of her, to do so.

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The burn down my leg receded as I continued to practice Noëlle's teachings back in New York. It felt nothing short of miraculous. And on the days when the pain returned, for it did in fits and starts, I finally knew what to do: put on leggings so that my pelvis could fall into proper position, slip into a favorite dress and shoes with a hint of a heel, and stand well on my own two feet. Even if I wanted to spend the day sulking in bed, I knew that if I made myself look young and beautiful and healthy, I'd eventually feel better, too.

Abigail Rasminsky has written for The New York Times; The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine; and Marie Claire, among other publications. She is a graduate of Columbia's MFA Writing Program and lives in Vienna, Austria. More at abigailrasminsky.com and @AbbyRasminsky.