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.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
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:
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.
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.
Monday, July 25, 2011
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.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
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:
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!
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!
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Soon in Your Lifetime
I am visiting a studio in Virginia this week as a guest teacher, and it is really a joy to be here. The teachers and students have been so welcoming. I'm staying with a friend from my teacher training, and we've been staying up well past her bedtime looking through our yearbooks and reminiscing. (When will that get old?)
When I did the "traveling teacher" thing in Lexington last month, I felt that it took me a few days to really get my footing on the podium. It was tricky to learn all the different names, manage the different room, figure out the different atmosphere. For just those first couple classes, I felt like I was starting from scratch!
I'm not sure what's different this time - it's probably just practice - but I felt comfortable teaching here from the very first class. Is comfortable the right word? Teaching is never truly easy, just like the practice is never easy - it's a mental tightrope, a challenge every time. But I felt really good - calm, relaxed, breathing normal, everything under my control. I was able to learn almost every single name within the first 20 minutes. I had some rapport - when I cracked little jokes, people actually smiled and laughed. (It definitely helped that my friend was in the class!) I guess I hit the ground running. This never happened before!
I sure hope I'm not jinxing myself for tomorrow's classes...
There's a great expression that I heard somewhere (and I am probably butchering it here) that goes like this: "It is the teacher's job to hold up a higher vision for the students until they are strong enough to hold it for themselves." And I feel that way now, a little bit. Since all the other teachers here are kind enough to hold up this high vision of me - "Here she is, our special guest teacher!" - I feel myself stepping up a little bit more. Stepping forward. Okay, sure. Here I am, and here is what I do. Here is what I have to offer. If you want it, please take it.
The whole point of teaching is that it's a gift, or a prayer, that you give to someone else. There's nothing to actually hold on to. And it seems like ego, to ever think of myself as a "good teacher," but it's not about me. The further I go, the more I want to keep going and learn more. I'm barely even scratching the surface.
When I was practicing advanced series with some of the teachers this weekend, a little piece of a song drifted into my head, sometime from a tape that I listened to when I was a kid. And that's the real purpose of this post, typing away half-formed thoughts on a late Sunday night - I just wanted to send these words out into the ether, for you to read over your coffee in the morning.
Soon in your lifetime, something will happen
All at once for a moment, it will flash into view
And from that moment on,
It's all up to you.
When I did the "traveling teacher" thing in Lexington last month, I felt that it took me a few days to really get my footing on the podium. It was tricky to learn all the different names, manage the different room, figure out the different atmosphere. For just those first couple classes, I felt like I was starting from scratch!
I'm not sure what's different this time - it's probably just practice - but I felt comfortable teaching here from the very first class. Is comfortable the right word? Teaching is never truly easy, just like the practice is never easy - it's a mental tightrope, a challenge every time. But I felt really good - calm, relaxed, breathing normal, everything under my control. I was able to learn almost every single name within the first 20 minutes. I had some rapport - when I cracked little jokes, people actually smiled and laughed. (It definitely helped that my friend was in the class!) I guess I hit the ground running. This never happened before!
I sure hope I'm not jinxing myself for tomorrow's classes...
There's a great expression that I heard somewhere (and I am probably butchering it here) that goes like this: "It is the teacher's job to hold up a higher vision for the students until they are strong enough to hold it for themselves." And I feel that way now, a little bit. Since all the other teachers here are kind enough to hold up this high vision of me - "Here she is, our special guest teacher!" - I feel myself stepping up a little bit more. Stepping forward. Okay, sure. Here I am, and here is what I do. Here is what I have to offer. If you want it, please take it.
The whole point of teaching is that it's a gift, or a prayer, that you give to someone else. There's nothing to actually hold on to. And it seems like ego, to ever think of myself as a "good teacher," but it's not about me. The further I go, the more I want to keep going and learn more. I'm barely even scratching the surface.
When I was practicing advanced series with some of the teachers this weekend, a little piece of a song drifted into my head, sometime from a tape that I listened to when I was a kid. And that's the real purpose of this post, typing away half-formed thoughts on a late Sunday night - I just wanted to send these words out into the ether, for you to read over your coffee in the morning.
Soon in your lifetime, something will happen
All at once for a moment, it will flash into view
And from that moment on,
It's all up to you.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Ketchup!
Summertime, and the living is easy! Humid days. Iced tea. Warm nights. Afternoons on the porch. Dialogue at the pool. (One of my students is going to the next TT, hooray!) Fireflies. Outdoor music. And summer reading! Oh, how I love summer reading.
I've just finished the newest (?) Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw. It's a nice thick book of his various works from The New Yorker, and it's been keeping me happily occupied. Yes, XKCD, I am living the dream. In case you're not familiar with him, Malcolm Gladwell has written a string of non-fiction best-sellers (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) that all try to make you see the world in a different way. Blink, for example, is about the split second-decisions that happen behind the closed door of your unconsciousness, and it's fascinating. As examples, Gladwell talks about how art dealers instinctively identify frauds, why tall-dark-and-handsome types earn higher salaries, how hospitals should really diagnose heart attacks, and what makes the best car salesman in New Jersey so successful. It's an awesome book, the kind of book that has me telling me friends, "Oh, I'd lend it to you, but I've already loaned it to somebody else."
Anyway, What the Dog Saw is a loosely strung together collection of essays on various topics - hair dye, football, the Challenger disaster, etc. One of these essays is about ketchup. It's called "The Ketchup Conundrum."
Here's the question: "Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup?"
Never thought about it, did you?!?
For a long time, there was only one type of mustard: French's yellow mustard. Then, about thirty years ago, Grey Poupon launched a really successful marketing campaign to become a household name, and that spawned the whole mustard section that we have in the supermarket today. Meanwhile, we still just have Heinz ketchup, plus a few specialty varieties that never hugely took off. (Apart from Muir Glen at Whole Foods and some supermarket generics, there's not much out there.)
What works for mustard should work for ketchup, right? They're both just condiments! So eight years ago, a guy name Jim Wigon from Massachusetts decided to do for ketchup what Grey Poupon did for mustard. He started a business called World's Best Ketchup, using all sorts of premium ingredients that you can't get in Heinz. Build a better ketchup! This guy Wigon poured his heart and soul into the project, all kinds of research and taste testing, but it never took off. Why not?
Because the flavor of ketchup, as it turns out, is universal. The human palate recognizes five fundamental tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. When the Heinz company developed their ketchup, they ended up hitting every single one of these notes, in a balanced composition. Heinz ketchup is one of the only products on the shelf that pushes every single sensory button.
So how can World's Best compete with this? Jim Wigon made World's Best using different sweeteners and more tomato, but in doing so he changed the balance. The ketchup experts - and shoppers of the world - said that it simply wasn't ketchup anymore. A quote:
World's Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvelous thing. But it also meant that [Wigon's] ketchup wasn't as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude. "Our conclusion was mainly this," Bhuchholz (a ketchup taster) said. "We felt that World's Best seemed to be more like a sauce." She was trying to be helpful.Ouch! So much for building a better ketchup.
What the heck does this have to do with Bikram yoga? Oh, I bet you can guess by now!
Bikram yoga is ketchup. By a combination of cleverness and luck, Bikram put together a class that hits every single note in the human body, in just the right balance.
When I first started Bikram, I had done plenty of other exercise and yoga in my life, but I remember walking out of class thinking, "I think I just used every part of my body, and half of those were parts I didn't even know I had. What happened in there?!" Because unlike everything else - unlike dance, Pilates, running, sports, hiking, or even other types of yoga - Bikram's class hits every note. You've heard the spiel before - you're using every part of your body, every system, every muscle, joint, organ, and major gland. Inside out, bones to the skin, fingertips to the toes, blah-de blah blah blah. We say it all the time, but man oh man, we say it because it is true!
Just think of it. In 90 minutes, you stretch and strengthen lots of different muscles. That part is easy to see. But there's also tons of stuff happening inside your body, and it's easy to forget about the things you can't see. You're working your cardiovascular system (heart), your respiratory system (lungs), your digestive system, your immune system, and the rest of your endocrine system. You're working on strength and flexibility, plus balance. And you're working all the mental aspects as well - your determination, concentration, self-control, patience, and faith. All of this in perfect balance.
That is Bikram yoga. There can be only one. Bikram yoga is ketchup.
And if you change anything? Take things away, add other things in, try to build a better hot yoga? Well, my conclusion is mainly this: although it might be delicious in its own way, that seems to be more like a sauce.
Just think of it. In 90 minutes, you stretch and strengthen lots of different muscles. That part is easy to see. But there's also tons of stuff happening inside your body, and it's easy to forget about the things you can't see. You're working your cardiovascular system (heart), your respiratory system (lungs), your digestive system, your immune system, and the rest of your endocrine system. You're working on strength and flexibility, plus balance. And you're working all the mental aspects as well - your determination, concentration, self-control, patience, and faith. All of this in perfect balance.
That is Bikram yoga. There can be only one. Bikram yoga is ketchup.
And if you change anything? Take things away, add other things in, try to build a better hot yoga? Well, my conclusion is mainly this: although it might be delicious in its own way, that seems to be more like a sauce.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Six Months of Joy
Hello my lovely and patient (?) readers!
I have some catching up to do here! Let's see - when last I wrote, I was teaching in Kentucky, getting ready to head out to Tennessee for Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. So tonight, I will tell you a little bit about my adventure at Bonnaroo!
Bonnaroo was awesome. I totally loved it and I will probably go again next year. For those of you who aren't familiar with this festival, let me briefly explain. Bonnaroo is a 4-day music festival on some farmland in the middle of Tennessee. And for those 4 days, Bonnaroo is essentially its own city, kind of like at Burning Man - this year, there were 90,000 people at Bonnaroo, and most of these people are camping out next to their cars. (The cars are nicely laid out in grids in camps with names like Camp Chewbacca, Camp Stewie Griffin, and Camp Marsellus Wallace. We got a corner spot in Camp Ed Rooney, which was a prime location, only 10 minutes from the stages.) It is hot and very dusty during the day, and gorgeous at night. We never set an alarm clock while we were there - all the acts start in the afternoon, but also, you automatically wake up at 8am when you start sweating in your sleeping bag. As a Bikram yoga teacher and a fairly-frequent camper, I felt that I was very well prepared for this environment! I wore a hat, a bandana, and SPF 50, my friend and I carried around CamelPaks and gallon jugs of water all weekend, and we both felt great.
The city of Bonnaroo is a fun and happening place, even before you take the music into account. There was a surprising amount of delicious and reasonably-priced food - some of the smoothie stands were excellent, and I had the best iced chai tea that I've ever had in my life. The girl at the chai stand gave me the ingredients but not the proportions, so I will spend the rest of my summer in my kitchen on a quest to recreate the perfect chai. Some booths were just blatantly selling stoner food - hot waffle ice cream sandwich with hot fudge, anyone?! The shopping was great - I bought quite a few sundresses, a new backpack with an Om sign on it, and some feather earrings. There were also rides - a water slide, a Ferris wheel, and a giant slip-and-slide - and lots of hula hoops.
So my friend Slappy and I basically spent the first day wandering around ooh-ing and aah-ing over all this fun stuff before remembering that there was also supposed to be some music involved. And a LOT of it! With 2 main stages, 3 music tents, a comedy tent, and a cinema tent, the big challenge at Bonnaroo is getting to see all the acts you want to see! There were some amazing acts that we missed seeing, either because they conflicted with another group that we wanted to see or because we couldn't make it in.
Here is most of what I did see, in order. (I am consulting my schedule for this.) Thursday: Futurebirds, Karen Elson, Beats Antique. Friday: Bela Fleck and the (Original!) Flecktones, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket, Arcade Fire. Saturday: Old Crow Medicine Show, Alison Krauss and Union Station with Jerry Douglas, Mumford and Sons, The Black Keys, Buffalo Springfield, Eminem, String Cheese Incident, Girl Talk. Sunday: Mavis Staples, Amos Lee, Iron and Wine, Ben Sollee, White Buffalo, Robert Plant and the Band of Joy, The Strokes, and Widespread Panic.
Pretty good!!
That's a wide variety of musical styles (which is the cool thing about going to a huge festival like this) - along with the jam bands (which are a Bonnaroo staple), we had rap, soul, dance, bluegrass, and rock and roll. It was very cool and I'm discovering my latent love for bluegrass music. (The Telluride Bluegrass festival is seriously tempting me for next year, if only Colorado weren't twice as far as Tennessee...)
There were a lot of great acts, but there are two that really stand out for me.
First standout: Mumford and Sons. My god, but those men can play. That was hands-down one of the best live performances I've ever seen. Watching those men jam out, it is impossible to imagine anyone enjoying himself more than that. They are pure energy and joy, and if you ever get the chance to see them, GO!!
Mumford had a 6:15pm spot on the second-largest stage, and Slappy and I essentially camped out at that stage for the entire afternoon in order to get a decent viewing spot. And we did - we were close up enough that we could actually see the faces of the guys on stage!
All told, there were about 50,000 of us jammed onto that dusty little field, standing room only, jostling around each other with our backpacks and water jugs, trying not to end up standing in a ditch or behind someone really tall. We stood around like that for a while, waiting for the band to come on, and I was very proud of myself when I started up a half-decent Eagles sing-along. ("Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load, I've got seven women on my mind....") And then the band came on. And we sang.
Here's the gorgeous thing about being a fan among other fans. Listening to music is normally a semi-private experience. You listen to an album in your car, in your kitchen, during dinner, on your iPod, on the subway, in your bedroom. If you love the album, then you listen to it over and over again, until you know every word. And that's a very personal thing, right? When you love a song or a band so much that you play it on your iPod all day, until you know the music inside-out...
Until one day, you go out into a sea of people, in the middle of nowhere. And the band starts playing, and everyone else knows the words, too. Everyone in this space has been listening to these songs over and over, in the car, on the subway, in their bedroom. So the private experience becomes a shared experience, and you realize - how can you miss it? - that all these strangers share the same emotions. You know, beyond doubt, that our hearts all keep the same beat. A sea of strangers, thousands of people, stand together, soclose, nearly touching, in a dusty field, at sunset, moving to the music, and singing out: "Love, it will not betray, dismay or enslave you, it will set! You! Free!"
It's just the same in yoga sometimes, isn't it? You come together with these strangers, and you sweat together, you breathe together, your hearts pound together. And you end up kind of loving and respecting each other, even if you never know each other's names, because you recognize that common bond. You're having this intense, private experience (that's called life), but everyone else is having the same experience with you, side-by-side.
Not to mention the other yoga-to-music analogy - you can walk up to a fellow yogi and say "eventually, in the future..." and they will fill in the blank. I know that you guys know the lyrics.
So that was one memorable experience.
Here's the other one.
Saturday night is basically big, loud, chaos. We saw Eminem on the big stage at midnight, who was okay. (He spent an awful lot of time sort of talking about himself and shouting, when we mostly just wanted to hear "Loose Yourself." Which he got around to, eventually, and which was a lot of fun.) Then I ran around and went to the jam bands and dance parties until the wee hours of the morning. There was a big blow-up dinosaur at one, and lots of balloons and confetti at the other - fun!! Then I went to bed at about 4:30am - so early, by festival standards! - because I wanted to go hear Mavis Staples on Sunday morning. I had heard her once before on the radio and I liked her.
Mavis Staples played at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, on the main stage. The last act to play on that stage had been Eminem, and that field had been trashed, but it all got cleaned up overnight, just in time for some gospel music. There were not too many people there - most people were still sleeping off Saturday night! - so the field was nice and open, great for spreading out the picnic blanket (i.e. sheet), lounging in the grass, and listening to some happier music.
It was a beautiful day.
Mavis Staples. Look her up. Her family has been making music for 61 years, and they - The Staples Singers - were basically the musical voice of the civil rights movement. (Mavis's father was friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Now, according to Wikipedia, Mavis Staples is 71, which I find hard to believe, because she looks about 50 and has the energy of a 25-year-old. She reminds me of a yogi - ageless! And she has a presence. That's the only word I can think of for what she has, and really doesn't even begin to cover it. When she sings, you feel her, right down to the soul. Oh my gosh, that's why they call it soul music. You can feel her soul, and she is talking to you.
She sang some amazing songs. She sang "Wade in the Water," which led Slappy and myself to dance around like fools doing our best white girl impression of Alvin Ailey. She sang a gorgeous song from her new album, "You Are Not Alone," and she sang very old songs like "For What It's Worth" ("stop, children, what's that sound?") and "I'll Take You There." Did I mention that this woman has presence? When she was singing, "I'll Take You There," she called out, "Our family has been taking you there for 61 years, and we ain't tired yet!"
In that moment, I thought of Bikram. Two completely different individuals - Mavis Staples and Bikram Choudhury - but both of them getting up in front of a crowd, tirelessly, for decades, repeating the same words, to lead people to a better life. And I thought of myself and all the other yoga teachers, because what is it that we're trying to do? We'll take you there. We want to take you to a better life, a better way of living.
On top of being a singer, Mavis Staples speaks with magnetism of an old-school Southern preacher and the affection of a mother. When she speaks, your ears perk up and you listen. So I remember, very specifically, something that she said in the middle of her performance. She said, "I just want you to walk away from this performance.... feeling joyful... for at least... six months."
Six months of joy. Gorgeous. What a brilliant goal. What a fantastic power.
Just take me by the hand.
Let me, let me, let me lead the way....
~~~~~~
Next up: How Bikram Yoga is like ketchup! I know you are dying to find out....
I have some catching up to do here! Let's see - when last I wrote, I was teaching in Kentucky, getting ready to head out to Tennessee for Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. So tonight, I will tell you a little bit about my adventure at Bonnaroo!
Bonnaroo was awesome. I totally loved it and I will probably go again next year. For those of you who aren't familiar with this festival, let me briefly explain. Bonnaroo is a 4-day music festival on some farmland in the middle of Tennessee. And for those 4 days, Bonnaroo is essentially its own city, kind of like at Burning Man - this year, there were 90,000 people at Bonnaroo, and most of these people are camping out next to their cars. (The cars are nicely laid out in grids in camps with names like Camp Chewbacca, Camp Stewie Griffin, and Camp Marsellus Wallace. We got a corner spot in Camp Ed Rooney, which was a prime location, only 10 minutes from the stages.) It is hot and very dusty during the day, and gorgeous at night. We never set an alarm clock while we were there - all the acts start in the afternoon, but also, you automatically wake up at 8am when you start sweating in your sleeping bag. As a Bikram yoga teacher and a fairly-frequent camper, I felt that I was very well prepared for this environment! I wore a hat, a bandana, and SPF 50, my friend and I carried around CamelPaks and gallon jugs of water all weekend, and we both felt great.
The city of Bonnaroo is a fun and happening place, even before you take the music into account. There was a surprising amount of delicious and reasonably-priced food - some of the smoothie stands were excellent, and I had the best iced chai tea that I've ever had in my life. The girl at the chai stand gave me the ingredients but not the proportions, so I will spend the rest of my summer in my kitchen on a quest to recreate the perfect chai. Some booths were just blatantly selling stoner food - hot waffle ice cream sandwich with hot fudge, anyone?! The shopping was great - I bought quite a few sundresses, a new backpack with an Om sign on it, and some feather earrings. There were also rides - a water slide, a Ferris wheel, and a giant slip-and-slide - and lots of hula hoops.
So my friend Slappy and I basically spent the first day wandering around ooh-ing and aah-ing over all this fun stuff before remembering that there was also supposed to be some music involved. And a LOT of it! With 2 main stages, 3 music tents, a comedy tent, and a cinema tent, the big challenge at Bonnaroo is getting to see all the acts you want to see! There were some amazing acts that we missed seeing, either because they conflicted with another group that we wanted to see or because we couldn't make it in.
Here is most of what I did see, in order. (I am consulting my schedule for this.) Thursday: Futurebirds, Karen Elson, Beats Antique. Friday: Bela Fleck and the (Original!) Flecktones, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket, Arcade Fire. Saturday: Old Crow Medicine Show, Alison Krauss and Union Station with Jerry Douglas, Mumford and Sons, The Black Keys, Buffalo Springfield, Eminem, String Cheese Incident, Girl Talk. Sunday: Mavis Staples, Amos Lee, Iron and Wine, Ben Sollee, White Buffalo, Robert Plant and the Band of Joy, The Strokes, and Widespread Panic.
Pretty good!!
That's a wide variety of musical styles (which is the cool thing about going to a huge festival like this) - along with the jam bands (which are a Bonnaroo staple), we had rap, soul, dance, bluegrass, and rock and roll. It was very cool and I'm discovering my latent love for bluegrass music. (The Telluride Bluegrass festival is seriously tempting me for next year, if only Colorado weren't twice as far as Tennessee...)
There were a lot of great acts, but there are two that really stand out for me.
First standout: Mumford and Sons. My god, but those men can play. That was hands-down one of the best live performances I've ever seen. Watching those men jam out, it is impossible to imagine anyone enjoying himself more than that. They are pure energy and joy, and if you ever get the chance to see them, GO!!
Mumford had a 6:15pm spot on the second-largest stage, and Slappy and I essentially camped out at that stage for the entire afternoon in order to get a decent viewing spot. And we did - we were close up enough that we could actually see the faces of the guys on stage!
All told, there were about 50,000 of us jammed onto that dusty little field, standing room only, jostling around each other with our backpacks and water jugs, trying not to end up standing in a ditch or behind someone really tall. We stood around like that for a while, waiting for the band to come on, and I was very proud of myself when I started up a half-decent Eagles sing-along. ("Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load, I've got seven women on my mind....") And then the band came on. And we sang.
Here's the gorgeous thing about being a fan among other fans. Listening to music is normally a semi-private experience. You listen to an album in your car, in your kitchen, during dinner, on your iPod, on the subway, in your bedroom. If you love the album, then you listen to it over and over again, until you know every word. And that's a very personal thing, right? When you love a song or a band so much that you play it on your iPod all day, until you know the music inside-out...
Until one day, you go out into a sea of people, in the middle of nowhere. And the band starts playing, and everyone else knows the words, too. Everyone in this space has been listening to these songs over and over, in the car, on the subway, in their bedroom. So the private experience becomes a shared experience, and you realize - how can you miss it? - that all these strangers share the same emotions. You know, beyond doubt, that our hearts all keep the same beat. A sea of strangers, thousands of people, stand together, soclose, nearly touching, in a dusty field, at sunset, moving to the music, and singing out: "Love, it will not betray, dismay or enslave you, it will set! You! Free!"
It's just the same in yoga sometimes, isn't it? You come together with these strangers, and you sweat together, you breathe together, your hearts pound together. And you end up kind of loving and respecting each other, even if you never know each other's names, because you recognize that common bond. You're having this intense, private experience (that's called life), but everyone else is having the same experience with you, side-by-side.
Not to mention the other yoga-to-music analogy - you can walk up to a fellow yogi and say "eventually, in the future..." and they will fill in the blank. I know that you guys know the lyrics.
So that was one memorable experience.
Here's the other one.
Saturday night is basically big, loud, chaos. We saw Eminem on the big stage at midnight, who was okay. (He spent an awful lot of time sort of talking about himself and shouting, when we mostly just wanted to hear "Loose Yourself." Which he got around to, eventually, and which was a lot of fun.) Then I ran around and went to the jam bands and dance parties until the wee hours of the morning. There was a big blow-up dinosaur at one, and lots of balloons and confetti at the other - fun!! Then I went to bed at about 4:30am - so early, by festival standards! - because I wanted to go hear Mavis Staples on Sunday morning. I had heard her once before on the radio and I liked her.
Mavis Staples played at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, on the main stage. The last act to play on that stage had been Eminem, and that field had been trashed, but it all got cleaned up overnight, just in time for some gospel music. There were not too many people there - most people were still sleeping off Saturday night! - so the field was nice and open, great for spreading out the picnic blanket (i.e. sheet), lounging in the grass, and listening to some happier music.
It was a beautiful day.
Mavis Staples. Look her up. Her family has been making music for 61 years, and they - The Staples Singers - were basically the musical voice of the civil rights movement. (Mavis's father was friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Now, according to Wikipedia, Mavis Staples is 71, which I find hard to believe, because she looks about 50 and has the energy of a 25-year-old. She reminds me of a yogi - ageless! And she has a presence. That's the only word I can think of for what she has, and really doesn't even begin to cover it. When she sings, you feel her, right down to the soul. Oh my gosh, that's why they call it soul music. You can feel her soul, and she is talking to you.
She sang some amazing songs. She sang "Wade in the Water," which led Slappy and myself to dance around like fools doing our best white girl impression of Alvin Ailey. She sang a gorgeous song from her new album, "You Are Not Alone," and she sang very old songs like "For What It's Worth" ("stop, children, what's that sound?") and "I'll Take You There." Did I mention that this woman has presence? When she was singing, "I'll Take You There," she called out, "Our family has been taking you there for 61 years, and we ain't tired yet!"
In that moment, I thought of Bikram. Two completely different individuals - Mavis Staples and Bikram Choudhury - but both of them getting up in front of a crowd, tirelessly, for decades, repeating the same words, to lead people to a better life. And I thought of myself and all the other yoga teachers, because what is it that we're trying to do? We'll take you there. We want to take you to a better life, a better way of living.
On top of being a singer, Mavis Staples speaks with magnetism of an old-school Southern preacher and the affection of a mother. When she speaks, your ears perk up and you listen. So I remember, very specifically, something that she said in the middle of her performance. She said, "I just want you to walk away from this performance.... feeling joyful... for at least... six months."
Six months of joy. Gorgeous. What a brilliant goal. What a fantastic power.
Just take me by the hand.
Let me, let me, let me lead the way....
~~~~~~
Next up: How Bikram Yoga is like ketchup! I know you are dying to find out....
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