First, push yourself up from the ground, shoulders under wrists, sternum reaching forward, pelvis lifted, your willing-but-weak core that’s birthed 3 babies fully activated. Quiver with effort and swear under your breath as sweat drops to the mat.  Pretend it makes total sense when your yoga teacher tells you to “reach your coccyx towards the back wall.”  Extend your heels and realize in your suffering that this is who you are now.

Conflate the intensity of the moment to your entire identity. You are no longer someone who is holding plank.  You are now Plank, itself.   Forever stuck in this horrible position, 18 inches off the floor, reaching, lifting, sweating.

Feel a tiny bit sorry for yourself as you imagine how meals will be delivered on the floor in front of your face and to reach them, you will have to attempt a controlled chattarunga yoga push up. People will have to visit you by lying flat on their backs near your trembling shoulders. Somehow you will have to find a way to sleep.  Plank is All. All is Plank.

When the 15 seconds pass and the teacher tells you to come down, forget that for a stretch of time you lost all perspective, all verb tenses but the present.  Apply this technique to all major intense periods in your life (newborn baby days, work crises, deaths, sicknesses, relationship trouble, unemployment).  Basically, anytime the car goes screeching out of its lane and towards the guardrail, and the details of the present are brought into hyperfocus while the brain lasers in telescopically on each piece of asphalt gravel — would be an applicable situation to “hold plank.” File it away as your go-to pro forma.

Do not pull the lens back to catch the background or the foreground, don’t remember a time before nor imagine any time after the one you are living.  The one where you’ve become plank.

Reduce yourself through this process to your very essence, a pinpoint of energy, living so fully in the moment that you will always remember this time, but not expansive enough to remember you are three-dimensional person with a concept of the future. You are a dog at the table, a child with a fallen ice cream cone. Nothing else matters but the here and now.   Allow yourself a small smile of satisfaction at the purity of that.

Spread the fingers and press into the base of each knuckle.  If anyone approaches you with advice on how to get out of the pose, turn your head to look at them and observe how they are not holding plank.  They are nice humans, but they do not know what they are talking about.  If they ask you whether maybe a meditation practice might help, do not turn even turn your head.

In fact, make it a rule not to turn your head at all, for any reason.   Keep the shoulders externally rotated, the triceps gripping bone and the eyes staring intensely in front of your mat, two to three feet ahead – tops.

Do not look up, or out.  Do not risk distraction by catching another’s eyes, or notice how their shoulders are shaking with some great, internal effort of their own.  Do not glance out of the window and see the pine needles move against a patch of blue, suggesting an expanse of sky, a breadth of being, the constant flux and change and bigness of It All teeming around you, widening you like a crack across a bowl, threatening to break you open, shattering you, once again, into the millions of messy, gorgeous you’s that you actually are.