Remembering What I Worked Hard to Forget by Joelle Tamraz
Remembering What I Worked Hard to Forget
by Joelle Tamraz
I was twenty-two when I met him, and our love was going to last forever. I was so sure of it. More sure than I’d been of anything.
But there was so much I didn’t know when I set off to India. I couldn’t imagine that my spiritual ideals would be turned against me and that the world of yoga and meditation would become the means of my control. Back in the nineties, the terms grooming and psychological abuse weren’t in my vocabulary. Nothing in my experience prepared me for what I would face, and it would take years for the veil cast over my mind to lift. Eighteen, to be precise.
When I divorced my ex-husband ten years ago, I knew I would someday tell the story. Author Melanie Brooks speaks in Writing Hard Stories of “the unrelenting pull I’ve felt to bring my story to the page.” The call of memoir spoke clearly to me, too—the conviction as strong as the path ahead would be arduous.
To make sense of what had happened—how I had been deceived and manipulated for so long—I had to commit my experiences to paper. To see them on the page: moment by moment, word by word.
I worked on my story for three years (with a critique group, then on my own) before I was ready to share it with beta readers. After reading it, they had questions. How did a young, educated woman fall for a much older spiritual master? What was I feeling throughout the experience? What do I believe now?
I returned to the writing with a renewed mission. I would need to dig deeper to reach the gut of the story. Now in my late forties, I had to conjure up the past. To rediscover my twenty-two-year-old self and fall in love again with a man I now saw in a completely different light. I lit sandalwood incense and read journals from the time, and I tried to remember.
The most powerful stimulus for my memory turned out to be music: popular Urdu love songs by Jagjeet Singh that my ex-husband played when we met. The melodies and lyrics—even though I don’t understand the words—took me back to a place of attraction and potential. A time when he became the destination I didn’t know I was seeking; the answer that closed off all other questions. I felt the heady trepidation of being young and alone in India—the undefined future stretching out before me. Unfiltered memories seeped into my writing.
Through the writing process, with its twists and turns, I willingly re-entered a place I had fought hard to leave. Crossing through a traumatic experience on my own terms loosened its hold. Five years since I started writing, my memoir is now published, and I feel free in a way I haven’t before. And when others read it and get something from it, or when they say, “I couldn’t put it down,” I know my mission is accomplished.
Author Bio
Joelle Tamraz has been putting pen to paper ever since she learned about journaling in her eighth-grade English class. She earned an Honors BA in social studies from Harvard and an MBA from INSEAD. She held leadership roles in large technology companies for two decades and owned a yoga studio for ten years. After living in the US and in France, she now resides in the UK with her husband and two dogs. The Secret Practice is her debut memoir.
THE SECRET PRACTICE: Eighteen Years on the Dark Side of Yoga
His yoga focused on control and manipulation. Until she broke the sequence.
For fans of Netflix’s Bikram, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Megan Phelps-Roper’s Unfollow
“The word yoga comes from the same root as the word yoke—to tie together.”
Joelle Tamraz was barely past twenty when she traveled to India in search of spiritual wisdom. In Rishikesh, the home of yoga, she met an alluring older man who offered to teach her a secret practice. This encounter would realign her next twenty years.
Despite signs there was more to her Arun than his winning smile, she persisted in seeing him as her spiritual master, soul mate, and key to her destiny. Until one day she dared to open her eyes and change her pose to one of strength and harmony.
From darkness to light, from dependency to self-awareness, from psychological need to genuine love, The Secret Practice is at once an exposé of a master manipulator, the exploration of a marriage, and the exhaustion of a disciple’s faith.
“an intense and suspenseful memoir serving both as a cautionary tale and a dramatic depiction of masterful mind-control practiced on a vulnerable party”—Kirkus Reviews
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Practice-Eighteen-Years-Dark/dp/1739377702/
https://books2read.com/joelletamraz
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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