It’s been quite a year…

As I was walking around the block after tonight’s dinner, I had a chance to reflect back on this year of intense change. Despite having some major personal losses, this year has also had a few bright spots for me.

One major highlight was finally meeting H.S. Arun. In the above picture, before a class in his Kailua workshop he asked me “how much do you weigh?” “200 pounds” I replied back. He then had me sit on him as a weight for his Upavishta Konasana. He asked me to take my hands to Urdvha Hastasana to centralize the weight. We really bonded well during the workshop. Thank you Robin Mishell for the photo.

My classes are growing. I used to have an average of about 6 people per class. This year it has grown to about nine. The really nice thing about these numbers are that many of my students have been practicing with me for more than 5 years, and a small handful for more than a decade.

I’m still in teacher training. Despite all that has happened this year, I am still working toward my Junior Intermediate I certification. Above is one of my mentoring teachers Ray Madigan with Laurie Freed (in Kurmasana) who passed her Junior Intermediate II this year. Along with Shelley Choy, Ray has been leading trainings a few days a month. I am blessed to have these small sessions with my teachers.

My garden. I can’t express how much pleasure I derive from gardening. Watching life grown and change daily before your eyes awakens me to the miracle of this existence. Above is a tiny lettuce sprout springing out of the straw. I may even start another blog just focusing on my garden and the techniques of the Fukuoka style.

My loving, talented wife. She has propped me up during my down times, and I have propped her up during her down times. We make a great team and I love her very much. Also helping to keep joy in our lives is my hanai niece Sasha who often joins us for our misadventures like eating robot served sushi.

Lastly, my blog. If people keep viewing at the current rate, I should make 100,000 views this year. To me that is far higher than I have ever dreamed for this little blog of practicing Iyengar yoga at home. Thank you all for your readership, and I hope to have some great posts in 2017…

 

Fictional negative Yelp reviews of yesterday’s yoga masters (humor)

Probably one of the most simultaneously amusing and irritating things for me are when people Yelp yoga studios and trash teachers who have been teaching for decades. People who walk in off the street with no prior yoga experience are suddenly an “expert” on what yoga should provide them. These social media parasites aren’t looking for classical teaching, enlightenment, or any type of discipline. They are just looking for a glorified workout. For lampoon purposes here are some “reviews” from the lens of fictional popular elite yelpers who went back and time and attended a class with the great masters of yesterday. (Disclaimer: these do not reflect the author’s views).

Ramanashram (Arunanchala, India)

 Becky “good hair” S.

OMG! I HAD THE MOST NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE OF MY YOGINI LIFE HERE! Just a little about me. I am an advanced yogini who just completed her 200 hour training at Core Fitness Powered Yoga™. Well I get to this ashram and give my donation, and the teacher, this creepy old man (Ramana Maharshi) is just sitting there in a loin cloth staring at me not saying a word…ewwww! Finally I ask him if we are going to do a vinyasa flow and he just keeps asking me “who am I?” I mean WTF!? Can’t you read? My name tag says “Becky.” They wouldn’t even refund my donation!

***

Nisargadatta Maharaj (Mumbai, India)

 Biff B.

As I braved through the crowded streets of Mumbai, I finally made it to this teacher’s class. There are a bunch of people sitting in this guy’s apartment where he teaches and nobody is doing yoga postures. He didn’t even speak English! Good thing he had a translator. He saw I was new and made me come to the front of the room and introduce myself to him and asked me about my yoga practice. I told him I am an advanced teacher at Broga Flow© and I am here to get CE’s for my Yoga Alliance registry. He then blasted me on how my practice only supports my ego and that I am not really my body and if I want to make any progress, I have to imagine myself outside of my body to be greater than the universe. Talk about a total jerk! He didn’t even notice my chiseled six pack abs. Then he did the most unyogic thing I have ever seen in my life: he started smoking cigarettes! Definitely not for the fitness minded. After I told him this, he threw me out! This didn’t even count towards my Yoga Alliance CE hours 😦

***

Papaji Satsang (Lucknow, India)

 Ashleigh F.

 I would give this place zero stars if Yelp would let me. First of all they don’t accept payment through mindbodyonline.com, so I had to pay in cash. The teacher is some fat old man who just keeps telling people to “keep quiet.” Then he takes people up one by one and tells them that they are “special” or something and then they start cracking up. I mean who can take this guy seriously?! But the real thing that made this a sub par experience is everyone was chanting to Shiva. I mean, talk about being insensitive to people with non-Hindu beliefs!

***

Sadhu Yoga (Ujjain, India)

 Anne “RYT” T.

These guys don’t know anything about yoga. All they do is stand around for 20 years with their arm in the air saying “Ram, Ram, Ram…” Talk about boring! One guy just sits on a bed of nails. In my yoga teacher training, my teacher said never sit on anything that could hurt you, and here these guys are just waiting to be injured. Not to mention these guys aren’t wearing any clothes. I have been to a few coed naked yoga classes in NYC, but at least those students had the decency to get dressed before they went out again in public. Plus they were filthy all covered in ashes or something. My YTT told me you always have to be clean when teaching. One more note about this style, is it is only in Sanskrit. I mean c’mon! Don’t they realize all the paying customers speak English! No wonder they can’t afford a studio and have to practice outside…

***

 

Disclaimer (again) these are not actual reviews and not actual people.

Westernized Yoga can use a dose of Aparigraha

I got the strangest “job offer” from an acquaintance the other day. She said “I’m thinking of opening a yoga studio downtown. It will double as a smoothie stand, will you teach for me?” I asked her if she has ever done yoga before and she replied she had tried if a few times and it made her feel better, and that is what gave her the idea for the studio/bar/what-have-you.

I politely declined without an explanation, and suggested that she at least “acquaint” herself with the practice before her business venture. After reflecting on this job offer, it dawned on me that this is how Yoga is being propagated in the West. Corporate burn outs are going to a yoga class, they feel great afterwards, and it doesn’t take long before they are printing studio fliers.

Rewind a few years back. I used to be part of a mediation sangha that would meet weekly. Once in a blue moon, we would meditate in a tree house that could hold 20 people in the back of the verdant Manoa Valley. We had guest speaker Rev. Lekshe Tsomo, a buddhist nun who works with the Dalai Lama, run the group. We sat for an hour, then she gave her talk.

“The tree house is nice, isn’t it?” She inquired. “Don’t you want to own it?” Most agreed. “How come we can’t just enjoy it for this time, without having to want to own it?” A deep question indeed.

There is this strange phenomenon in Western yoga in that people to want to “own” yoga. That is, cash in on all that yoga has to offer. Just go to your local corporate chain yoga studio and drop in rates run as high as $25. People pay. The studios keep charging.

Teacher trainings are offered to students who just walk in the door without an iota of yoga experience, nonetheless teaching experience. “For $4,000, you can join our teacher training to deepen your practice.” People pay. The studios keep charging.

J. Brown just wrote a scathing piece on teacher trainings. In the comment section, a representative from Yoga Alliance gave an interesting statistic: 50%-75% of YTT (yoga teacher training) students do not intend to teach. If they are not intending to teach, why shell out 4 or 5 grand when you can just learn to “deepen your practice” in a classroom setting? Unless studios aren’t actually “teaching” instead of just doing a follow-the-teacher class with a killer playlist, very much like aerobics classes a decade ago with a savasana thrown in. Then it all makes sense.

This may sound like a crude comparison, but I felt like my friend’s job offer was akin to someone asking a devout priest if he would like to join a money making venture on teaching people how to pray. Of course any priest worth his salt would simply say: “just pray.”

Levels of practice in Yoga

 

There is a lot of talk nowadays about “advanced” Yoga. There is a studio down the block from me that has a large banner that says “advanced teacher training.” I wrote a post about a woman who would not attend classes at my studio because the highest level is labeled “intermediate 2” and she wanted something more “advanced” even though she did not practice on her own.  So what exactly considered “advanced” in Yoga?

Yoga Sutra 1.22 says mrdu madhya adminatratvat tatah api visesah, or the time necessary for success further depends on whether the practice is mild, medium or intense. Of course every practice in the beginning is “intense,” or at least “intense feeling.” The ego is quick to identify this as “intensive practice” or even “advanced.” But does that make one “advanced” at Yoga?

A raw beginner at yoga needs at least two years of standing poses done two or more times a week before that practitioner just gets a “glimpse” of what the body is supposed to do in Asana. From my experience as a teacher and practitioner, that figure is more like 5 years. Keep in mind I am only speaking in terms of Asana and not the other limbs.

The progression from what I can perceive is as such: first you learn how to do the asanas while maintaining the yamas and niyamas. Then you learn pranayama. Then you begin your own practice based on what you have learned and study the sutras. Then you start to have realizations that asanas are not merely physical postures and pranayama is not merely “breathing exercises,” but create certain effects in the mind and behavior. Then you have realizations that the practice is slowly stripping away parts of your self perception that don’t correspond with your own true self. Then, eventually, there is only the true self practicing. You are no longer doing asanas and pranayama, they are doing you. At this point, then one can say they are “advancing” in Yoga and not necessarily “advanced.”

If this does not fit into your concept of Yoga, then good! You will not have the aforementioned experiences in a yoga studio, in teacher training, in workshops. You will only experience these on your own in your own practice. Are you mild, medium, or intense? That’s up to you. Are you advanced? That is not for me to judge.

 

 

Reflections a year after becoming Iyengar certified

The face above is one that had just come out of the last portion of the rigorous two day Introductory II assessment for Iyengar yoga certification. Exhausted, hopeful, anxious and relieved, I could barely walk out of the venue site in Lemont, PA. I would find out the next day that I passed. That was a year ago.

It is also a face that represents four grueling years of teacher training. When I started the teacher training program, there were 17 of us. Only three finished the program with certification (one moved away and got certified through another instructor). Our program included five and a half hours of weekly classroom time and one weekend a month teacher training classes on both Saturday and Sunday. In the month before our assessment we met every weekend and would practice on our own outside the studio at a student’s home.

We trainees had to stand in the back of the room and observe. When we were competent enough, we could assist. Our teachers would allow us to teach one pose to the class we were observing. We would always get a lesson after the class: How do you teach this to someone with a knee injury? How do you teach this to someone with a back injury? What if they are too weak to do it this way? What is an alternate pose if someone has high blood pressure? Those and many more questions are ones we had to work through and show mastery in before our teachers would allow us to apply for certification.

I am grateful for my teachers Ray and Shelley for being so hard on us. Without them, I would not have had the toughness to get through the rigors of the assessment process. I have to say that there were many times that I questioned their methods. I often thought they were too strict. But I stuck with it until the end.

In the year that followed, I have reacquainted myself to my devoted wife and have made more time for her. There have been many changes in the Iyengar community. Earlier this year, Guruji received the Padma Vibhushan award in India. For me that validated his dedication to Yoga and its spread throughout the world. He was also in a good position to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, on an August afternoon, I heard the news that Guruji had passed. I immediately called my teacher Ray who confirmed it. It was a very sad time.

Luckily, there was a workshop taught by Laurie Blakeney at the time. She is a very long time student of Guruji. Her teaching respected the heaviness of the time, but made it light and healing for the O’ahu Iyengar community. Despite hearing of Guruji’s passing when she got off the plane in Honolulu, she was still able to provide a first class workshop.

Blakeney’s toughness to teach jet lagged in the midst of bad news comes from the same toughness that was taught in our four year apprenticeship. It is now dawning on me the value of going through such a difficult process. Like the pressure that makes a diamond out of coal, this process brought out the inner luminosity that was dormant in us.

Blessings to my wife, Guruji, my teachers, and the Iyengar community for this experience.