In June of 2016 I learned she was battling cancer (again!) and privately messaged her. She never got to read my message till March 2019 when she messaged me, apologizing for the delay in her response. There was no need, really. She was undergoing treatment and I fully understood, having been in a similar situation with a family member around that same time too.

One of her most beautiful pieces, written almost a year ago, was Why I Fight, where Twink deftly merged and compared her experience with cancer drugs to the current leadership. Her body was weakening but her spirit and training as a journalist was stronger than ever.

Twink had also written an article on yoga entitled “The Practice”. She had emailed it to me in 2012 as a Word document. I read it. And laughed. It contained so much humor and made me remember all the thoughts running through my mind when I was a newbie yogini doing Vinyasa.

I tried to find her piece online so I could share it but it’s nowhere to be found. I’m reposting it below for you to enjoy Twink’s humor and wit. Twink, I hope you do not mind, because many yogis will get a kick out of reading your thoughts about your yoga practice.

Screengrab of Twink in a News 5 interview with Luchi Cruz-Valdes, 2016

Our last conversation was in November 2019. Twink was looking for a meditation coach who did home visits. I tried to help but she eventually was able to find one. I was happy knowing that even if yoga became physically impossible for her to continue, she was still doing meditation. After all, yoga isn’t all about physical poses alone. But that’s for another time.

Here’s Twink’s article, The Practice, sent to me March 2012.

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THE PRACTICE
by Twink Macaraig

Inhale….Cobra….Exhale….Downward-Facing- Dog….Inhale….Child’s Pose.

The woman who looks like Will Smith’s wife before hair rebonding uses a melodic and soothing voice; the opposite of a Drill Sergeant’s but as effective at eliciting compliance.

I am now into yoga. When I first became aware of it in the 70s, I thought it something only hippies did. For decades I would still dismiss it as New Age chorvah before I realized that there must be something truly mystical about yoga for it to stay relevant and new, even now, in my old age.

A Time Magazine article identified meditation as one of the things that help stave off the effects of Alzheimer’s. That, plus a predisposition to osteoporosis by virtue of early onset menopause, my desire to resurrect a barely worn 80s-era unitard, and a month-long, unlimited sessions promo in a nearby ashram convinced me to give yoga a try.

With neighbours Loy and Jed, we formed something of a Support Circle. Mainly, to make sure that we’re all awake at the break of dawn (when the classes are held) and for carpool duties. Later, genuine bonds of solidarity were formed as we flashed sympathetic grimaces at each other while our instructors forced us to tie ourselves up in knots.

I remember our first day.

Yoga Master Maan asks us if we’d ever practiced yoga before. Panicked, I thought, “Practice as in rehearse? You mean I should have been doing this secretly before unleashing myself upon an unsuspecting public?”

She goes on to explain that anyone – from a first-timer to a Cirque de Soleil contortionist – who so much as joins his toes together while regulating his breathing is practicing yoga. There’s no Opening Night. Practice does not make perfect because there is no perfect in yoga. Just a series of poses and ever-heightening levels of consciousness with the ultimate objective of cheating death. (Ok. Journalistic shorthand here, but I swear that that’s the drift).

Maan impresses upon us that yoga breathing or pranayama is the foundation of everything. One type, called the Ujayi breath, is as simple as inhaling through your nose, then exhaling thru your mouth while constricting the base of your throat. It produces an extended kkkkhhhhhh sound, much like the snores I emit that my hubby’s earplugs fail to shut out. (How great that he can now attribute his sleep-deprived state to “my wife was practicing yoga all night!”)

Maan uses language that makes it easy for me to pretend that I’m keeping up. She doesn’t just tell us to stretch; she asks us to be the tallest version of our selves. She doesn’t just tell us to gently roll on our back, she asks us to picture our spine as a long necklace, each vertebra being lowered pearl by pearl. My head obliged by playing languorous strip tease music, interrupted only by the sound of flesh being slapped onto a butcher’s block as I flopped onto the mat. Plak! (Is this where the word plakda comes from? I thought)

No one minds the interruption of my reflexive araykupo! We’re all wrapped up in the illusion that we’re performing tasks that aren’t actually humanly possible: wrapping our hipbones around an imaginary pole or ball….lying on an egg without breaking it…pointing our collarbones to opposite ends of the room.

I’m someone of no great imagination but I gamely bend my body to simulate a starfish, a sphinx and some strange hybrid creature called a cowcat.

Of course I am the kulelat of the group – barely going halfway toward each desired end result. But Maan keeps cooing Great at me, never breaking the rhythm of her incantations. Take a Vinyasa, she says, as casually as if she were offering me a bonbon. Keep an honest distance between your right heel and left arch, she instructs (since when is honest a quantity?) No one calls attention to the fact that my brand new foam mat has failed to absorb the puddle of sweat that’s collected just under the crack of my butt (Though I notice Maan shrouds her hand in a towel before nudging my greasy neck just a little lower).

We do twists. Maan announces “Now, don’t be dyahe to move your stomach out of the way with your hands, ok?” Wouldn’t you know it, when I threw all caution to the wind and pushed two fistfuls of flab aside, I found myself close to par with the rest of the people in the room. I was threading a needle and dissolving into gelatin with the best of them!

We’re relaxed and limber enough to try more complex poses. With our legs spread wide apart and our arms folded behind our backs like we’re in a reverse huff, Maan then commands, “bring your hairline at the floor,” Loi and I take advantage of our unfettered bangs to bridge the distance. Jed, who is totally bald, yells “Are you kidding me?!”

It’s just about past an hour and we’re seated Indian-style, spacing out our heartbeats, focusing on our breathing and – Maan says – halting the aging process (Jed sucks up all the room’s oxygen at this point and expands like puffer fish). Maan wraps up in the quiet monotone of a hypnotist: Shut your eyes. Exhale…khhhhh…..tune out the noise in the room…Inhale…hear the birds singing outside…Exhale…khhhh….eject those negative energies….Inhale…. feel peace permeating your being…. exhale….khhhhh….stop worrying that you didn’t succeed….these are just yoga poses,….you are still a good person…khhhhh.

At that, I could have sworn I felt tears mingling with the perspiration dripping down my face. So moved was I by this patently silly affirmation. When I blinked my eyes to clear my vision, Maan was bowing with palms joined, chirping, “Good morning. I’ll see you all Wednesday!”

On the ride home, Jed was making lame jokes about me. “Twink’s a Barbie Doll pala” he said. I knew he wasn’t referring to anything related to pulchritude but to the inability of my limbs to bend within a normal living person’s range of motion.

I had no riposte because I was visualizing the ultimate comeback -myself, 50 years from now, honed by daily 3 hour yoga practices to look like Tilda Swinton, standing tall over Jed’s shrivelled body on his ICU bed while a respirator does his Ujayi breathing for him. I then lean over and whisper in his ear, “Sorry, Jed. Practice does make purrrfehhkhhhht,” just before the line on his heart monitor goes flat.#

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