Get Rid of the Gum

My first class on Thursday was with Manouso Manos, an Iyengar teacher. Manouso sat down at the front of the class and quietly started breathing and observing the students. His first words were a stern reprimand, "Get rid of the gum," he boomed, without even looking at the at the guilty party. About an hour into the class it happened again. Not sure why the person who was chewing gum didn't listen the first time, but we then got a little monologue about why chewing gum in Yoga is a big no-no. Of course, Manouso was right, but I tell this little anecdote because, to me, it embodies the personality of the Iyengar teachers from whom I have taken classes. There is not a lot of "please will you do this" or gentle individualized instructions whispered to a student as the teacher makes an adjustment.

Once the tone was set, Manouso took us through 2 hours of detailed instruction in many of the basic poses. We started with Tadasana and moved on from there. As expected, his instructions were very precise. He talked about the dynamics between instructions which seem to contradict each other and how this was a tool to keep the mind engaged and not let the mind wander. An example is in tadasana where you rotate the inner thighs back but at the same time draw the tailbone toward the floor. If you stay in tadasana long enough, and focus on the pose, besides thinking about the rest of the body, your mind should constantly be checking and adjusting these two actions as they challenge each other.

As a student and practitioner of Vinyasa style yoga, in which the breath is used to focus the mind, I found this idea very intriguing. I have always wondered how Iyengar students keep their minds from wandering or constantly wondering "How much longer in this pose" without the help of the breath work.

The best adjustment I learned in his class, which was repeated later in the day in Rodney Yee's class, was in Uttanasana (standing forward fold). He asked us to draw the femur bones towards the hamstrings to engage the legs and create length in the pose. This works in down dog as well.

Manouso warmed up (sort of) during the class and even made a few jokes between his (well intended) reprimands. He ended the class with a 5 minute demonstration of how to prepare for Savasana (final relaxation pose) properly - as you might have guessed, you certainly do not just lay down and relax in Manouso's class.

Left Brain vs. Right Brain

I attended the Business intensive at the conference on Thursday. All of the speakers had something pretty interesting to say about their topic - from marketing advice, to developing a budget, to creating alternative revenue streams. The most interesting part of the day, however, was witnessing the dynamic between the left and right brain perspectives on running a Yoga business.

The day started out with a left brain presentation by Brandon Hartsell, one of the founding members of Sunstone Yoga. Sunstone is a franchise which aims to bring yoga to the masses. Their approach is very business-based. They strive for consistency in classes and consistency in the yoga students' experience when they go to a Sunstone studio. All of the studios teach the same set of classes, each of which has a script with specific poses and specific alignment instructions. Teachers are allowed to bring their personal experience and style to their teaching, but, like a coloring book, they have to "color inside the lines." The idea is that this makes the student's experience about the yoga, and not about the specific teacher from whom they are taking a class. The analogy that Brandon kept coming back to was Starbucks. He asked if every time you went to a Starbucks and got a latte it was made differently, would you keep coming back, and would they be as successful as they are?

This really got some of the right brainers in the room in a twist. "Where is the Yoga in this model", someone asked. The idea put forth was that students come to classes to learn from the teacher's unique and creative style of teaching. They also come for spiritual reasons and will not find it in a "corporate" yoga setting.

All week long I have seen a tension between the "hard core" yoga practiotioners and the folks who came to yoga or do yoga for reasons other than enlightenment. In my opinion we need to get as many people as possible exposed to the benefits of Yoga. If their first taste of yoga is in a studio witout incense or tapestries, then that's OK. Yoga should be about maximizing the inidividual's experience and not the teacher's ego.

The Sunstone folks made it clear that they are not going after the 10% of the population who have already found Yoga. They are after the 90% who are looking for new modalities of fitness and wellness and who may not walk through the doors of a traditional yoga studio. Since they opened their first studio in 2002, they have taught 25,000 different students. Wow.

The day ended with a presentation by Shannon Paige, owner of OmTime. Her business started as retail for Yoga and has grown exponentially in the five years she has been open. She was one of the most passionate and down to earth speakers I have ever seen. What is interesting is that she is definitely a right-brainer but has also built a very successful business. How did she do it? She did enough self-analysis to know her strengths and surrounded herself with talented people who have the strengths she is missing. The trick is that she defers to these people to help make decisions and does not make all of the business decisions based on her creative instincts.

Hmmm..... so who has the right approach? Well I think that depends on one's personality and goals as a studio owner. A Sunstone studio may not ever feed the part of one's soul that is pushing a person towards studio ownership. If that is the case, then even the pre-packaged business knowledge they provide to francise owners will be lost on that person. Since running a Yoga business is hard work and typically has very low margins, studio owners need to be both logical and passionate about what they are doing, whichever approach they take.

Since part of Yoga is about cultivating balance, finding that balance between the left and right side of the brain should be our work in this practice.

Lasy Day of Mysore Class

My last mysore class at the conference was joyfully uneventful. I had finally gotten into a groove and was able to go through my practice withour much internal dialog distracting me from my work.

I got a great adjustment for Marichyasna C from Eddie Modestini - he told me to sit up and put my weight on the bent leg foot. Wow! What a difference that made. maybe one day I will be able to bind, now that I know how to find some ease in the non-binding version of the pose.

The highlight of the class was at the end when all of the teachers joined together on stage to chant the closing prayer. From left to right the teachers in the picture are: Richard Freeman, Maty Ezraty, Eddie Modestini, Nicki Doane, Tim Miller, David Swenson and Chuck Miller.

By the end of the three days I had taken a class from each of the teachers. I am not sure if I can name a favorite because thay all had different qualities. I loved Chuck Miller's wisdom and soothing energy and the way he looked me in the eye when we spoke. David Swenson was both wise and funny at the same time and made his class loads of fun. Richard is sort of like a combination of Chuck and David in that he has this quiet, soothing Chuck-like aura, but sprinkles his teaching with unexpected humor the way David does. Eddie and Nicki seemed to really want to help me find my poses and they have a funny married couples' dialog between them when they teach together.

I am a little sad that the Ashtanga intensive is over, but looking forward to the rest of the conference. Thursday is the Business Intensive, so hopefully I'll learn how to make a living doing Yoga - it is definitely more fun than managing software projects.

Do You Need a Guru?

The panel discussion on Tuesday night was pretty lively. The panelists were Barbara Benagh, Judith Lasater, David Swenson, and Aadil Palkhivala. Three westerners and Aadil from India. The views on this pretty much followed that split as well, though they did agree on one thing - that the "Age of the (true) Guru" is ending. But before I get to that...

While the question was about whether we need a Guru, a lot of the discussion was about the definition of a Guru. Aadil started out by describing two types of gurus. One makes you a servant to their authority and slave to their method. The other helps you explore your own inside knowledge and actualize your self. He did not think everybody needs a guru, but that there are some "lazy" people who will not do this seeking on their own and will need some encouragement...perhaps from guru type 1. He did talk of his two gurus - one (he calls this one his guruji) which helps with day-to-day questions (in his case this is BKS Iyengar). His other guru (his gurudev) helps with the bigger questions. His gurudev gives him the tools to make decisions but does not provide the answers.

Judith spoke of "upagurus" - which are the gurus near us, which we find in daily life. She says that many of her upagurus have the same last name as she does! Having just read her book, Living Your Yoga, this was not surprising. In it she often speaks of the lessons she learns from her children.

David started out by pointing out that the western view of the word guru is different than what the word has meant historically. An "old world" guru, usually came from a lineage of gurus, became a renunciate, and spent many years learning the divine truths. In today's world, a guru has come to mean simply a teacher - and sometimes one without the right intentions. David described his experience of giving himself over to a guru, giving up his western name, shaving his head, and living the life dictated by his guru for five years. He finally woke up one day and realized that the life he was being told to live did not mesh with his ideas. I later learned that he had joined the Hare Krishnas during that period.

David concluded by warning us that if we are seeking a guru and find someone who claims to be a guru, we should be very afraid of this person. The real gurus have no interest in being gurus, he pointed out, so it will be impossible to find them....

In the end, the group agreed that times are changing and the true gurus of old are becoming extinct. So what are we to do? We can find a teacher (acharya) we trust and hope that they guide us to find the guru within that holds the answers to the questions that we are asking.

David Swenson Rocks

Tuesday afternoon I took David Swenson's "Floating, Flying, and Handstanding" class. It was definitely one of the best Yoga classes I have ever taken. David is a very charismatic teacher, sprinkling his teachings with personal anecdotes and lots of humor. He also has the most amazing strength and flexibility - just watching him demonstrate the poses is a joy.

If you have ever watched one of David's videos or seen him live you have witnessed the floating he tried to teach us. Floating refers to the anti-gravitational grace with which he transitions from down dog to uttanasana (and between other poses), while most of the rest of the world jumps and lands with a thud. The bottom line is that is comes down to physics and control (and a decent amount of strength). You also need to relax the muscles that are not needed in the pose. In floating from uttanasana to chataraunga the basic recipe is this: keeping your hands flat on the mat, jump about 3 inches into the air, lifting with the the hips, and then let the feet slide back through the air as if they are on rollerskates; when your feet land, use your arms like shock absorbers to lower into the pose, ending up with elbows in by your sides, head facing forward.

He eventually moved us through various jumping and floating exercise until we got to the mother of all floating movements - the jump through. He used the metaphor of a halfpipe to describe the movement in the pose. When you lift off, you need to lift the hips as if they are at the apex on one end of the pipe and then relax the legs (sort of) and let gravity swing the hips forward and (hopefully) through the arms, hips lifting twoard the apex on the other side of the half pipe, eventually loweiring softly into dandasana. Many of us do not have the hamstring flexibility to get into a deep enough forward fold to keep the legs straight as we swing forward and through the arms. For us, it is good enough to cross the shins and either land in front of our hands or swing through.

After struggling through a few attempts he reminded us that being able to jump through with or without straight legs is really not that big of a deal, anyhow. "How will achieving the jump through change your life?" he asked us. "You will not get a letter fom Pattabhi Jois congratulating you," he continued. "If you knew today that you would never be able to do a straight leg jump through, how would it change your attitude toward the pose?"

This gets us back to the non-violent approach to our practice that Chuck spoke of. While I will continue to practice toward the jump through, I am hoping that I will stop beating myself up mentally when my efforts do not result in a pretty jump through.

Through the rest of the class we learned techniques for various arm balances, leading up to the handstand. We worked in teams of 3-4 people and everybody in the room, as far as I could tell, was doing handstands by the end of the class - most folks were holding them unassisted for a good amount of time, using the techniques he taught us. The basic trick is to train your fingers to act like toes and know how to grip or release to maintain your balance.

He ended the class by asking all of us to stand in a circle with our teammates, touching fingertips in the center of the circle. We started synchronized breathing, exhaled and opened our arms and then stepped to the center of the circle and gave each other a big hug. What a wonderful way to end a wonderful class.

Chuck Miller and the Art of Non-Violent Adjustments

My second class on Tuesday was Chuck Miller's class on Making Adjustments with the Right Intention. He started off with a short talk on how Ahimsa (non-violence) - which is the first Yama in the first of the eight limbs of Ashtanga - applies to adjstments in our practice. His message was that we need to approach adjustments in our selves and our students with the intention of helping them progress in their whole yoga practice - it is not about pushing the body into the "perfect" form. Since every student is different, we need to read their bodies and their minds and make sure we are being respectful of their personal situation as we apply adjustments. We also need to make sure we are non-violent with ourselves in terms pushing ourselves into poses that do not come easily.

He pointed out that a lot of what we are doing is adjusting the attitude. Wow. That really struck me. If we come in a aggressively push a student or ourselves into a pose, we are promoting violence and breaking the first Yama. If we instead approach the adjustment as a gentle instruction on how to move our bodies into a safer place, we are adjusting with the right intention. We are also teaching the students to be non-violent towards themselves.

A couple of specific verbal cues he gave were really great - in down dog, move your heels away from your toes - instead towards the mat. Also in down dog, widen and lengthen the back of the knees. We actually spent the whole two hours working with partners just on adjusting down dog. The trick is figuring out how to do the adjustments on lots of poses in a class with 10 people! This is why I really like teaching my Yoga Basics class. I get to see most of the same faces week after week and really get to know the students and their own anatomical (and mental!) issues. and I can take the time to really break down the poses in the detail required to find that place of balance and ease in each pose.

OK. Enough for now, details on my David Swenson class in the next post.

Mysore for Beginners

Tuesday was beautiful. It snowed overnight al higher elevations as you can see in this photo of the same mountains that I posted yesterday. I definitely need some leg warmers though. Yes, the eighties are back, even in yoga fashion, and for the first time I actually see how this oft maligned fashion would be useful.

The day started again with a Mysore class but this time it was different. As requested, they designated an area in the yoga room for people less familiar with the poses and sequencing. While we were waiting for class to begin I pulled out my David Swenson book and started reviewing the poses. About 5 people came over and asked to look at my book before the class even started and then they kept coming back and flipping through during the practice. It was also interesting to note that there were about 30-40 folks who came back to the beginners area - which is about 25% of the class.

My own practice was dramatically different this time. My mind was much less agitated about what I was doing wrong and I was able to really focus on my yoga. I asked for help several times and got excellent detailed instruction in several poses that are a challenge for me. I even got into Marichyasana B, which is one of the binding poses I have not been able to do before.

One funny thing was with Virabhadrasana 1 - in yesterday's class with Nicki and Eddie we worked on VB1 and I specifically asked Nicky if I should work on keeping my heel on the floor if my hands did not come together or if I should allow the heel to lift if that meant I could reach my palms together - she recommended (pretty strongly) that I bring my pams together and allow the heel to lift and work toward letting my heel get to the floor over time. When I got to VB1 in Tuesday's Mysore class I confidently set myself up in my first VB1 with the heel lifted and palms touching and Maty came over and suggested that I put my heel on the floor. I listened patiently and then asked her if i should do this at the expense of my plams touching and she said definitely - and that my work should be on moving the hands toward each other over time. Hmmm....

This too was a great lesson. It happens pretty often that we get different advice from different teachers, so how do we know what to do? Well this is where the inner guru has to come in and guide us in what is best for us at this point in time (unless you are studying in Mysore with Guruji, I suppose!). In my personal practice I will probably drop the heel and work on the hands. If I go to a class though and the teacher feels strongly about palms touching, I will touch my palms. I will also definitely be putting my heel down in Mysore class on Wednesday just in case Maty is looking!


One of the best parts of the class for me was after Savasana. I stayed and watched the advanced students who practice the intermediate series do their challenging poses. This photo show the teachers helping several students with some really deep back bends. While I have seen David do these poses in his videos, I was not sure that I believed that there were real peoples (over the age of 12) who could get into these poses and do it gracefully.

My Ashtanga journey is just beginning, and it will certainly be challenging if I stick with it, but I like the fact that the practice challenges the student and sets a specific path for moving through your practice. The challenge will be to not get caught up in quickly achieving the poses as they get more and more difficult. Yoga is about the journey not the destination.

YJ Conference Day 1

I made it through the first day and had a blast but am definitely feeling it this morning. The day started with the Mysore style class which I was nervous about. Luckily when I got there and started to talk to the folks on the mats around me I learned that I was not the only one who was new to Ashtanga and not the only one who might have trouble remembering the poses in the Primary Series. Just as I feared, when they started the class there was no explanation or caveats for beginners. Richard Freeman lead us in the opening chant and then everybody started doing their practice at their own pace. FortunatelyI know the first part of the series very well because I have been practicing the A and B series salutations for years. It was amazing to be in a room with 150 people doing yoga together and to see some really advanced students doing their beautiful practice.

After I got through those and the first several standing poses, though I began to look to the cheat sheet I had written up earlier in the morning. The anxiety started when I got through the abbreviated list of poses I had written down and I had an hour left. I finally waved down Maty Eszraty and asked her what I should do at that point. I admitted to having my cheat sheet and skipping a few poses and she gave me a half-joking scolding for breaking the rules. She suggested that I just start over at the beginning. So there I was, feeling like the only person doing A series salutations while the rest of the crowd was working on the advanced balances. Truth is there were plenty of beginners, but I was self-conscious.

And that was wonderful! Going to this class reminded me how intimidating a yoga class of any sort can be to a beginner. I tell my students all of the time that they should not be self conscious and not worry about what the other students around them are doing and stay in their own practice, but I was having a very hard time doing it. As a teacher I also strive to remember that a lot of the ritual associated with a yoga clas can seem a little odd to someone who walks into their first yoga class after years of aerobics at the gym. Not ever having done a Mysore style practice before I was definitely uncomfortable about "not knowing the rules."

Later in the day I took a class called Preparation for Ashtanga Yoga from Nicki Doane and Eddie Modestini. They started the class by asking what folks thought of the Mysore class, since it was the first time they have done this at a conference and it is a sort of experiment. After a few "it was great" comments and some uncomfortable silence I raised my hand and told them that I thought it was little initmidating for beginners like me. I suggested that maybe they create a special zone where beginners can congregate and get a little extra help and not feel awkward about using cheat sheets or asking more basic questions than the rest of the crowd. At that point many others chimed in about their anxiety as well and the teachers told us that they might rearrange the class for the next morning. I'll let you kow what they do since I've got tow more mornings of Mysore class on my schedule.
The photo at the left is of some students asking Nicki and Eddie questions after the class. I guess I should mention that their class was really great. They spent the two hours working us through the A and B series salutations and a few of the standing poses. There was not enough time to get through all of the standing poases as I had hoped (and as the class decsription said) but what I will definitely incorprate a lot of the details they taught into my practice. My shoulders were shaking through the class from the workout in Maty's class, but it was great to be doing yoga at that level again.

Backing up a little, after the Mysore class and a short break I took a really informative shoulder alignment class from Maty. She is a tough teacher as I witnessed in the first practice, but she has an incredible depth of knowledge and patience when teaching teachers about the minutiae of reading and adjusting students' bodies. My shouldres were very tired after the class, but I learned some new techniques that I will definitely incorporate into my practice and teaching. The biggest eye opener was that we should not be squaring our shoulders in many poses, but rather finding the place betwen hunched and squared, where the arms rest in the shoulder sockets and create a stroger base for supporting down dog, handstand, etc. The photo above was taken as students were assembling for her class. The hall was the same as the one we practiced Mysore in and can hold about 200-250 students. Not sure if you can tell, but they put painters tape on the floor to show folks here to place their mats. Great idea and makes sure people don't waste space in limited studio area.

The final event of the day was a panel discussion of whether a student should pick one style of yoga or practice many. The moderator jokingly described this as "should I date around or be monogamous in my practice." The discussion started out pretty reserved but got very lively at the end when other topics like the 200 hour RYT teaching certification came up. Some of the members of the panel expressed a dislike for the "fad yoga" which is popping up and allowing teachers to be certfied to teach very quickly. They claimed they worry about injuries to students, but there was definitely a sense I got that many of the current teachers had to study for many years to get where they are, often with a "real guru," and the new crop of teachers do not "get it". Some folks in the audience pointed out that for many it is hard to get access where they live to "real" yoga teachers, and that even a Yoga for Fitness class can open the door to the rest of Yoga. In the end, the main message from the panel was that if we plan to teach yoga, we need to go deeper into our studies (in whatever manner we can) and that we need to teach authentically based on what we know...and not pretend to be something we are not.

I am planning a trip to India to study at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in November and December and am really glad for this after listening to the discussion. While I am proud of what I have done and what I am doing with my instructing, I am looking forward to going deeper.

Yoga Journal Conference Keynote

I registered today for the conference and then headed over for the first event - the opening keynote. It was intersting (but probably not surprising) to see that about 85% were women, mostly over the age of 30. Guess I'll fit right in.

Gary Kraftsow gave the keynote. He is the founder of the American Viniyoga Institute and focuses on Therapeutic Yoga. His talk was very dense and covered tha gamut from the history of Yoga to "group think" in modern american yoga. He spent some time defining what he thinks the difference between a Yoga teacher and a Yoga therapist is. The short version is that a therapist has clinical skills to diagnose issues and ailments and can prescribe an appropriate yoga based treatment to help address the symptoms. He also stressed that Yoga therapists need to work closely with other practitioners like doctors and psychotherapists. While the main message of his talk was that there is a need for a structured curriculum for training Yoga Therapists, what struck with me was his statement that we need to *Examine what we think we know.*

Examine what you think you know.... An example would be the idea is that the world is flat - taken for truth by many for many years. He also used the example of doctors removing tonsils as a matter of course for many years, a practice that is not done very often in this day and age.

According to Pantanjali's Yoga Sutras, "Viparyaya" or illusion is false knowledge formed of a thing as other than what it is. Until this lecture I never really understood what this sutra was getting at. I had the notion that it might be talking about the idea that everything we perceive might be a dream or illusion. But I think its actually much simpler than that (though that other idea might also be true?!?).....I think we are simply being asked to critcally evaluate what we hold to be true or assume to be true based on circumstance and our own perspective. How many times have I interpreted someone else's actions based on my context and later learned that their intentions were different than the "truth" I had imagined. How many times have I parroted statements I read in book or magazine without really checking out their validity? hmmmm....

On another topic (and the last for today) GK made a really great point about Yoga in its original form ~4000 years ago - Back then, Yoga was non-sectarian but not secular. This means that while the practices associated with Yoga were practiced across sects (i.e Hindis, Buddhists, Jains, even Christians), there was historically a spirtual and religious aspect to the various forms. This has disappeared from most American Yoga. Whether this is good or bad is not the issue, but while we can say Yoga is not a religion, historically, the practice was associated with religious faith.

OK..enough for now. tomorrow's musings should be less esoteric and more about the pain of 3 hours of ashtanga practice.

First Post

Hi there. I just set up this blog to track some of the yoga travels and studies I will be undertaking in the next few months.

My first stop will be the Yoga Journal Conference. I leave tomorrow for Estes Park, Colorado and will be there taking classes and meeting fellow yogis and yoginis for a week. The first three days on my schedule will be an Ashtanga yoga intensive..which I am both excited and nervous about.

Ashtanga has a very rigorous physical practice which requires students to master the sequence of poses in order, before progressing to the next level. While I have practiced many of the postures in the Primary Series, I have never taken regular classes from an Ashtanga teacher. I am hoping that because my teacher in Redlands, CA taught a class heavily influenced by her Ashtanga training with Maty Ezraty, that I will be reasonably comfortable surrounded by what could be lots of expert ashtangis.

The Mysore style practice first thing on Monday morning should be especially nerve wracking since the students are supposed practice at their own pace without the crutch of a teacher leading them through the sequence of poses. I'll be studying on the plane on the way over to make sure I can remember what comes after Uttita Hasta Padangustasana!

Stay tuned to find out if I get singled out for being unprepared or if the gurus are happy to teach beginners like me.