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!

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.

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.