“I… I’m just walking normally.”

“Normally?”

“That’s how I walk.”

“No, that is not how you walk. That is how you walk when you are being watched. Can we see that?” He looked at us and our silence was tacit agreement. “Are you aware of what your shoulders were doing when you walked, just now?” Maya shook her head. “Your shoulders were swaying like Beyoncé strutting onto the stage. You think you’re pretty hot shit, don’t you? Well, that’s what your shoulders were saying to me. I want you to re-enter the room, and this time I want you to walk without acting with your shoulders.”

Leaky had Maya re-enter the room over and over for the rest of the class, deconstructing every aspect of her movement and person until she was on the verge of tears. But she didn’t break. Not that day. She re-entered so many times I lost count. Well over forty. She made it to the chair only once, and perhaps because of her relief or her nerves, she immediately began acting once she sat down. I could see it immediately. And I could feel the rest of the class see it as well. She exhaled, looked around. She was performing “waiting.” Leaky let her sit there for the full minute to illustrate his point. It was excruciating. At the end of the minute he turned to the class to ask us if we believed her sitting. Like a Pavlovian chorus we all intoned “no” in unison.

I was finally called up on the Friday of that first week. By that point Leaky was averaging about three students a class. I was the third one of the day. I knew he was going to call my name before he said it, but something still somersaulted inside me when he did. As I stood up and crossed the room to the door, I felt the class turn into a firing squad. Over the past four days, Leaky had made us vicious, until we had begun to will failure on one another. He had managed to instill in us a pleasure in watching our classmates stripped bare. By now we all knew what to look for, and we could immediately spot the difference between the performance of neutrality and the genuine state of being present. I knew what it looked like, but the question was whether I could embody it.