Without a Doubt

I used to agonize over decisions.  I'd rather see one clear course of action than two possibilities that both looked good.  Never mind choosing between a rock and a hard place; I'd be stressed out if I had to choose between a water mattress and a feather bed.  Two great internship opportunities?  Two suitable apartments available on Craigslist?  Two careers to choose between?!  In that last example (which refers to grad school vs. yoga, by the way) it only took me two years to figure my shit out, and I worried about it the whole time.

Before I went to teacher training, I hadn't even decided what I would do with myself when I got my certificate.  I knew that I wanted to teach full-time, but when, where, and how?  Should I stay in Santa Barbara and try to make it work as a California yogi, driving up and down the coast to different studios, popping in to see Bikram on Saturday mornings, trying to convince other teachers in Santa Barbara that they really ought to have a look at that dialogue?  Should I go overseas?  Should I pull up roots and make a fresh start?  What should I do?

And then one day, I woke up and realized that I knew the answer.  Of course I was going to move.  I was going to find a studio owner who I trusted and move to wherever she happened to live.  Of course.  There was never a question.

Three months later, Baltimore.  Decide what to be, and go be it.

Since then, I haven't really had trouble making big decisions.

You know how, when you are trying to make a tough decision, people tell you that you should "sleep on it"?  That's pretty great advice.  When you sleep, your subconscious does its best thinking.  With your conscious mind out of the way, your brain pulls apart strands of information, rewires the data, and makes new connections.  If you ever take a look at the science of sleep and dreams, it's incredible how much activity your brain accomplishes when you are drooling onto your pillow.  Your subconscious is smart as hell and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you give it a chance.

But when I'm trying to make a decision these days, I don't sleep on it.  I practice on it.

This works.

Sometimes, the best way to find an answer just this: get in a hot room, listen to someone else's voice for 90 minutes, sweat your brains out, balance, stretch, and twist.  Do this until you've completely forgotten the question.  By the time you remember what your question was, you'll already know the answer.

In the yoga room, the right way is the hard way.  In life, not always.  I think that the "right way" is usually just the way that feels right.  The right decision is the one that makes you feel peaceful and happy.  When you can get your mind to settle down and step out of the way, it's simple to notice how you feel and figure out what that tells you.

It also helps to understand that there are no mistakes, not really.  Even if there are two roads diverging in a wood, who can say that they won't come back to the same place?  Maybe one of them is just the scenic route.

Or as it says in my beloved little Zen cookbook:

Everything is leading you, pushing you,

instructing you, bugging you to supreme,

perfect enlightenment.  This means

there are no mistakes.  You might do it

differently next time, but that's because

you did it this way this time.

I paraphrased from this in my yoga class this morning, because I really love it.  It reminds me of that bit in How Yoga Works when the girl teacher says that, in order to do a yoga pose right, you first have to do it a thousand times slightly wrong (though not if your teacher has already corrected you).  It's all part of - dare I say it? - the process.  Doubt has nothing to do with it.

You already know what to do.

Planet Bikram

Just in case you missed this...

I was reading the news online yesterday (at the crack of dawn while I was waiting for my 6am students to show up) and I saw an arresting article from the UK Telegraph.

It appears that astronomers have discovered a second planet that is in the right zone to support life.  (The first was discovered in 2007.)  It's in what they call the "Goldilocks zone" - not too hot and not too cold for the presence of liquid water, which is a prerequisite for life as we know it.

"But," the article says, "its hot sticky conditions mean it would be likely to feel like a steam bath and an uncomfortable place for humans."  The temperatures range from 85 - 120F and the air is humid.

Holy crap.

WE'VE DISCOVERED PLANET BIKRAM.

Forget about the 747 taking off - we need to commandeer a space ship and go colonize ourselves a planet!  Unfortunately it's 35 light years away, so it's gonna take us some time to get there, but at least yogis are patient.  Right?

The planet is also more massive than Earth, so any life forms would probably be "shorter and squatter."  Bikram is not a tall guy.  Insert your own joke here.

Yay for Planet Bikram.  I'm so delighted.

Full article is here.

Chance in a Million

Here is a strange but true story.

I spent the end of August and beginning of September guest-teaching at the lovely new Ocean State Bikram Yoga in Providence, Rhode Island.  I taught plenty of classes, had a great visit with Diane up in Massachusetts, went to the Salisbury Reservation with Teri, went to the Horseneck Reservation by myself, and spent "hurricane day" watching three consecutive Harry Potter movies with a fellow yoga teacher.  It was a great visit.

I drove back to Baltimore on Tuesday and it rained.  The whole way.  (In fact, several days later it is still raining and there's some sort of "flood watch.")

It sucked.

But!  There was a bright spot in the middle of that shitty 9 hour drive.

As I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike (in a light drizzle, rather than a torrential downpour), in the middle lane, minding my own business, the car in the left hand lane started swerving into the center as if he was going to cut me off.  Thinking "this fucking idiot is trying to kill me," I beeped my horn several times to say "hey! I'm driving here, don't kill me."  The car keeps swerving over and I keep beeping my horn.  As the car pulls ahead to pass me, I look over to see the driver waving his hand in the air and grinning at me like a lunatic.

BALWAN?!?

It was somebody I knew.  A friend of mine from Los Angeles who works at the Bikram Yoga Headquarters and helps out with the teacher trainings.  His name is Balwan, and in addition to being an utter fucking lunatic, he is a good friend of mine.

Who - did I mention? - lives in LA, and therefore had NO business driving around the Jersey Turnpike in a car with Pennsylvania plates at 2pm on a Tuesday.

So anyway, Balwan passes me and pulls into the center lane.  I switch lanes and drive past HIM to make sure my eyes haven't deceived me.  Sure enough, I look over as I pass and there is Balwan.  Waving and grinning.  I grinned and waved back, and finished passing him.  Then he came by and passed me again.  (More waving.)  We repeated this duet several times.

Then I reached for my cell phone and called his number.  He picked up right away.

"What the fuck are you doing here?!"

"Juliana!!  We should stop for a second!"

"I thought you were some asshole who was trying to kill me!"

"Yes!  I had to get your attention!"

Sigh.  "What are you doing here??"

"Oh!  Ah - we should stop for a second!"

Okay, okay.  I wanted to stop at one of the service stations, but those are few and far between, and Balwan (having come to New Jersey from India by way of Beverly Hills) does not really understand about toll roads.  So we ended up exiting the turnpike, paying the toll, and driving to the nearest gas station we could find.

"Aaaaiiiieeeee!!!'

"Aaaahhhhhhh!!!"

We had a big hug in the rain and went into the gas station to talk for a second.  I couldn't really stay, since I had to teach a class at 5:00, but neither could he, since he had a flight out of Philly at 4:30.  (It was already like 2:00.)

Make long story short, Balwan was visiting a friend in Philadelphia for two days.  While he was on the east coast, he decided to go up to teach at class at the Bikram studio in New Haven, Connecticut.  Then he had to drive back down to catch his plane.  So while I was driving from Rhode Island to Maryland, he was driving from Connecticut to Pennsylvania.

I asked him if he had recognized me by my car (which is the same one that I drove in California) or by my bumper sticker (which says Bikram Yoga for You/ 26 + 2).

"Bumper sticker?  Oh!  No - mm - when I am driving, I will look to the side to see who is in the cars, and I looked and saw that it was you!"

"...."

"I could not believe.  I had to drive past several times to be sure."

"And then you tried to kill me."

"Yes!  Mm - I had to get your attention!"

"I can't believe you saw me."

"I cannot believe either!  You know, in India things like this would happen sometimes, but in United States, this never happened to me before."

Several traffic lights, one U-turn, and one tollbooth later, we were both back on the Turnpike and Balwan zipped past me at about 85 miles an hour so that he would catch his flight.  (Who taught him driving, Bikram?)  I can only assume that he made it, since this was the last that I heard of him.  I will have to ask him when I see him at the training in October.

The life of a yogi....

Wealth Management (Having Doesn't Mean Anything)

I spent a couple weeks this month house-sitting at a gorgeous house in a nice part of town.  A house with an outdoor Jacuzzi, a well-stocked fridge, a turret that you can climb up into, and two cute (though high-maintenance) dogs.  A house so great that I think of it in capital letters: The House.  Woe is me, life is so hard.  Seriously, I love my life.

Near the end of first week, one of the occupants of this house popped back in for a couple of days (to do some work), and we ended up having a series of intriguing conversations.

This guy - I'll call him "B" just in case he doesn't feel like appearing in a yoga blog - works as a wealth management consultant.  I'm not sure that I've got the title correct, but I got the gist of what he does: he works with people who are super-wealthy (a very technical term referring to people with so much money that you use at least 8 digits to describe their wealth) and he helps them figure out how to manage these frankly ridiculous amounts of money.  (This explains The House.)  B is a sweet, thoughtful guy, and although his wife (a regular student of mine) has not yet persuaded him to make an appearance in the hot room, he is curious about the whole concept of yoga and Bikram yoga and What Do You Do To My Wife In There.

So B and I poured some wine and got to talking.  He told me - in very general terms, of course, no confidentiality breached - about some of the clients who he's been working with.  One client recently inherited an 8-figure sum of money.  Wow, right?  Well, B was visiting with this guy in the hospital after he had pretty significant, life-threatening heart problems.  The client is only in his 50's, he's got more money than most people even dream of in their lifetimes, and he's lying in a hospital bed.  And B is convinced that the money is what put the client in that hospital bed - the stress of it!

Now let's think about this, seriously.  Beyond, "Oh, boohoo, cry me a river."  What's really wrong with this picture?

B told me that some of his clients are well adjusted and handle their wealth beautifully - giving to charities, doing good works, raising happy families - but many are not.  They are so overwhelmed by their financial wealth that it starts to overshadow everything else.  He said that when he first meets with a client, he makes sure to ask them some simple questions: What are you doing to take care of yourself?  (Are you eating properly?  Are your kids happy?  How are your grandkids?  How's your stress?)  Are you healthy and happy?

He says that these questions will stump the new clients every single time.  They haven't thought about it. "Or maybe they just never expected me to ask them those questions."

Wealth management!  What does it mean, really?  What is wealth?

These are such great questions that are so easy to overlook.

Here's the yoga perspective.  First, let's just suggest that "stress is the root cause of all diseases, even communicable ones."  I believe that's from Bikram's guru, Bishnu Ghosh.  Very old idea, definitely relevant to the questions.

Second - and I know you've heard this one before, but that won't stop me - "Having doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to use it."  That's from Bikram.  All Bikram teachers - and many Bikram students - have heard that line so many times that sometimes it almost loses its meaning, going all singsong like a nursery rhyme.  Boss calls out, "Having doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to...?" and every teacher trainee still awake shouts out "Use it!" with varying degrees of enthusiasm, depending on how many hours she slept that night and how many times Bikram has already asked the same question that week.  (Yes, of course this is primitive brainwashing.  "I wash your brain!  It is filthy!")  End result: we can all repeat those words in our sleep.

And still, that statement is probably one of the truest things ever said.  We have everything - food, clothing, shelter, water, possibly $15,000,000 - and still we're stressed and unhappy.  In other parts of the world, the people have almost nothing, and many of them still manage to be happy.  What are we missing?  We have everything we need, but we don't know how to use it, so we still see problems everywhere.  I told all of this to B, local neighborhood wealth manager, and he was nodding his head in absolute agreement.  He'd never heard it before - all news to him! - and he thought it was spot on.  From what he'd seen with all his clients, all these lost souls with incredible bank account balances, he had pretty much figured out the same thing.

What's the answer?  If you want to learn to use everything you have, what should you do?

Well, that's easy: yoga.

I am a yoga teacher, what did you expect.

But seriously.  It doesn't have to be yoga, but you have to do something to take care of yourself.  That's first and foremost.  If you're not taking good care of yourself, then you'll be no use to anyone else.  Forget about self-sacrifice and just be good to yourself.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that your problems will all be solved if you can just get something else - some more money, a different job, a new relationship, a new apartment.  Yes, some of those things are great.  (I got a new job and it changed my life.  I'm moving to a new apartment and I'm very happy about it.)  But you can't keep waiting to be happy tomorrow, because then you'll always be waiting.  Stop that.  You have so much already, I guarantee it.  Wherever you are, whoever you are, you have something.  Most likely, you already have everything you'll ever need.  You have your body.  You have your mind.  You have your spirit.  Those three things will be with you for your entire life.  That is your wealth.

Just figure out how to use it.

Didn't I tell you in the beginning that I love my life?  I meant it.  I really did.  I have a job that doesn't feel like work.  I have amazing friends, family, and teachers.  I have a great spine.  I have a messy apartment with some used furniture.  I have some ice cream in the fridge (mostly gone).  I have blue car (a Toyota Corolla named Callie), and in the trunk I have a hula hoop, a beach chair, a grassy towel, some road maps, cashews and Pedialyte (in case of emergency) and a kite.  I have a sunburn from a weekend on a boat.  I have a gig in Rhode Island at the end of this week and some new CD's for the drive.  What more could I ask for?  I have everything.

So do you.

90 Minutes off the Grid

I read a great article from the Wall Street Journal this weekend about "The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do."  It was written by Scott Adams - the creator of Dilbert - and I'm very sorry that I can't link you to the full text, because apparently WSJ articles become "subscriber content" after a couple of days.  But here's how the article began:

We've won the war on boredom! If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!

But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they're right. I've noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

There's been plenty of other text - whole books! - written on the perils of modern overstimulation.  It seems that our brains are being significantly rewired, if not completely turned into mush, by our relentless addictions to Facebook, text messaging, Twitter, and the like.

But Scott Adams puts a slightly different twist on the idea.  He basically says - You know, it's too bad we never have to get bored anymore, because our brains do their best inventing when they are temporarily under-stimulated.  Then he says - In a world where no one every gets bored and creativity dies, all the movies are going to be lifeless, derivative sequels, all the television is going to be unscripted nonsense, all the politics is going to consist of tedious, partisan bickering.... oh, wait.  That sounds suspiciously familiar.  Oh damn.

We've been raised to multi-task, and I am not sure this is so great after all.  I find that I have to deliberately force myself to single-task.  If I want to read a book, I first have to power down the laptop completely and go sit on the porch.  If I'm even in the same room as my little MacBook, the actual book will end up on the losing side of the battle.  And I love books!  (I have been reading a lot this summer.)  I always feel great after focusing all of my attention on one thing - and I like doing it! - but single-tasking takes a conscious act of will.

Now here's where yoga comes to the rescue!  For at least 90 minutes of your day - assuming a 90 minute yoga class, of course - you are forced to turn off your fucking iPhone and pay attention to just one thing. Off the grid.  No email, no updates, no texting, no nothing - just you, your body, and the teacher's voice.

You're still being stimulated, of course, but in a totally different way, because your attention has to stay in the room.  As Bikram says, we are trying to "bring the mind back into the body," which is the hardest thing in the world to do, for even one second.

Maybe you don't achieve that perfect meditation.  (Who does?)  That's okay.  You'll still get the benefits that you need, because at least you've removed yourself from all that outside chatter.  It's a 90 minute mental vacation, in more ways than one.  Maybe sometime during the second set of pranayama, after repeating the same inhale-exhale exercise fifteen times, your brain gets a little bit bored.  Well, Mr. Adams is saying that this is also good.  This is what your brain needs in order to be creative.

This surely helps to explain why so many great thinkers are famous for retreating from civilization.  For Henry David Thoreau (the obvious example, sorry), even working at a pencil factory in Concord, MA in the 1840's was too much of a distraction.  God knows what he would make of the internet!  Thoreau brought the Bhagavad Gita with him out to Walden Pond, but you know, those long epics can get boring after a while.  Maybe he got bored with Arjun and Krishna's eloquent but repetitive back-and-forth after a while (many yoga teacher trainees can relate to this feeling) and just sat around staring at the trees, and that's what gave him all his beautiful new ideas.

Of course, now it's 2011, and it's tough enough for us to switch off a laptop for more than a day, nevermind building a log cabin on a freaking pond in Massachusetts.  But at least we can go to yoga and do the same exact sequence again, listening to the same exact words as last time, freed from the outside world for 90 minutes.

Haven't you ever had a really great idea in the middle of yoga class?  One of those fantastic ideas that drops into your brain from out of the blue?  Afterwards, you can't say what made you think of it.  You didn't even have to go looking for it.  It just came to you.  That's because your brain was in a different state.

So please, let's just get all the policy makers, authors, CEOs, musicians, senators, script writers, television producers, teachers - and hell, even the comic book artists - and shove them in a hot room for 90 minutes!  Then we'll see if we can't get some creative new ideas around here.

Open All the Doors

"When you do yoga, all the doors is open, PLUS you create hundreds and hundreds of new doors and windows." - Bikram, teacher training, 5/27/10.

For more than a week, the city has been slumped under another "record breaking" heat wave, with heat index values in the triple digits.  It was a humid one.  I'd shower after the morning yoga class, get in my car to do errands, and immediately feel like I needed another shower.  Instant sweat!  Phew!  I don't mind sweating when I'm in my cool little yoga outfit, but sweat-soaked dresses, shorts and t-shirts are another story.  My friends and I have mostly spent our afternoons indoors, hiding in air conditioned basements and watching old movies on Netflix.

Today - it rains.

Not just a little bit of rain, but a full-on, glorious, noisy summer thunderstorm.  I got back to my apartment just in time, and my roommate and I shut off the A.C. and opened all the doors and windows. Cool, fresh air - fantastic!  We let the indoor cat run out onto the porch, since she wouldn't go far with the rain.  When a big noise scared her in the street, she bolted from the front porch, through the house, and all the way out onto the back porch.  (She is still out there happily, crouching under a chair and munching on green things.)  It's cooled down so much that I tossed a light pashmina scarf on over my sundress, feeling slightly chilly from the breeze.  The rain is still coming down - drip, drip, drip - the weeds are already growing at twice their normal rate, and lots of interesting crawly things are coming out of the ground.

And as we threw open all the doors and windows, I felt a little tickle at my memory, and I remembered Bikram, in the middle of another late night lecture at teacher training, saying something about yoga.  Yoga opens all the doors and windows, and then makes new doors and windows.

I love that.  When I think of those words, I can practically feel the breeze that swept me away from my old life and into something new and strange and wonderful.

I've got another one: Yoga is the rain after a heat wave.  Yoga is the fresh breeze, and yoga - ironically! - is the cool air.  Yoga is water in a dry ground.

You come to yoga dry and brittle, tired.  Yoga wakes you up.  Yoga opens up all those parts of your body that have been neglected and underused, and it brings the circulation and vitality back into them.  You thought you were getting old?  Emmy always said, "you are only old when your joints are no longer juicy."  Yoga is the oil can - yoga makes your joints juicy.  It opens up your spine so that the life force can get back in.  Yoga makes you drip sweat out of every pore - did you even know there was that much water in your body? - just to let you know that you are alive and you are growing.  Yoga comes like the rain and makes things change and grow - tomorrow, when we step outside, everything will be greener.  Everything will look new.

The heat wave diminishes, and a new cycle starts.

Yoga is fresh air in your lungs.  Yoga is relief.

Yoga is rain.

The Basic Needs of Human Survival

For number 517 (approximately) on my list of "Reasons Why Teaching Yoga is the Best Job," I want to share some words from a musician.

Karl Paulnack, the director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, gives a speech to incoming music students about how music is a basic need of human survival:

"Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”

Yoga teacher trainees, take note.  This applies to us, too.

Every day, students walk into the hot room, some of them for the first time.  Some of them will need saving - from broken hearts, from turbulent minds, from aching souls.  And it's not like the E.R., where the wounds are obvious - you might never even know which people need saving.  But sometimes, you might save them anyway.  It depends - partly - on how well you do your craft.  So practice with attention, with care, and with love.

~~~~~

Note:  I read Paulnack's speech at this photo blog, written by a very talented young lady who is recording her time as a Swedish exchange student - worth a look!