Los Angeles Times Yoga's rock stars:
"Although (Shiva) Rea, 39, and other A-list yogis may begin their mornings with ancient Indian meditation and tongue-scraping rituals, their days are frequently filled with more contemporary marketing duties. Such is the odd, new balancing act of today's top yogis, many of whom have been teaching for 20-plus years and are now confronting international fame.
Riding a wave of unprecedented yoga mania  fueled in part by star practitioners such as Madonna  modern yogis' lives, especially in Los Angeles, increasingly resemble those of the celebrities they often teach."
I ran across this article from August 21 and thought it was intriguing for a number of reasons, aside from the glimpse at the life style of the yoga demi-gods. It also lays out some of the financial considerations that go into workshops and classes. Although the article mentions a $4-7 per student range, I know that most studios pay teachers on a per-class basis, probably around $30 and up. That's not going to put you in the same tax bracket at Shiva Rea. Around here, there are few venues that could put "80 people in a class." Yoga teachers do not have to take a vow of poverty when they go through training, and most of them are in this line of business because they love yoga.
I've been reading the news reports about the agreement between the three "rebellious" Republican senators and the Bush Administration on legislative language on interrogation techniques, compliance with the Geneva Convention and trial procedures for unlawful combatants. Washington Post news report and editorial: The Abuse Can Continue. I am sickened to my stomach by the positions being taken by the U.S. government. It reminds me how I felt back in 1973, listening to Nixon talk about Vietnam and feeling the worst aspects of the American Way of Life. I took the easy out back then -- I fled the country to Peru for 18 years.
Now every strong-man, authoritarian or sectarian government in the world has the model of how to finagle the wording of human rights provision from the beacon of liberty itself.
The Art of Living Foundation's DC Chapter has a physical home, located near Columbia Heights in the District:
DC Center 2401 15th Street NW. Washington DC, 20001<
They will be having a Maha Kriya (large group practice of Sudarshan Kriya) at the new place on Saturday, September 23 at 4:00 pm. They also have a new web site and address: [ http://www.artoflivingmetrodc.org/AOL/Home.aspx ]. There are some pictures of the new headquarters. Very impressive.
Labels: art_of_living
I was checking out Spirit Voyage Music, a distributor of sacred music (some would call it New Age), and I realized that they are located in northern Virginia, in Purcellville. They are strong on Kundalini, but have lots of other world music styles. They also have a ticket outlet for concerts.
I followed a link to the blog of one of the employees, Hargobind, and discovered that I had just missed a concert of Dave Stringer, one of my favorite kirtan musicians, at Willow Street Yoga on September 15. I will have to add this to my blog roll and ping it frequently because he will probably be in the know of other concerts in the DC area.
Yoga Today has been putting on a daily yoga video for more than 100 days. It proposes to have a fresh video feed seven days a week, 365 days a year. Excellent production qualities, usually with an instructor and two students. The setting is in the stunning Grand Tetons region of Wyoming. The instructor gives a lot of verbal orientation and tips, as well as demonstrating some of the poses and vinyasas.
These videos in QuickTime format are major downloads, around 250-350 MB. The site's video archive has the previous three videos. I don't know if the other 100 videos are available. There is also an iHD format video, but I was unable to install the software, probably because my firewall is blocking the connection to the server. Or it may be an issue with the Firefox browser.
At the start of the video, a few commercials appear, nothing more intrusive than what you see on standard TV. The practice itself is not interrupted by commercial breaks.
This week I went back to TranquilSpace for the first time in 18 months. I took a weekly class at the studio until early 2005. I had also gone on a retreat with Kimberly at Yogaville in November 2004. It was where I made my first serious effort at learning yoga, kind of like going back to the high school 25th reunion.
I took a Yoga II class with Kimberly Wilson, the owner and lead instructor, after work. As usual, the class was maxed out -- at least 30 people squeezed into the equivalent of a brownstone living room. There were six inches between the mats. Kimberly made several adjustments to my postures during the class so she knows how to move around in confined spaces. I also suspect that she had to limit the repertoire of postures and vinyasas because you simply can't let it all hang out in close quarters.
After class, I approached Kimberly and she remembered my name and also my wife's. I told her about how I had based my yoga practice at Thrive Yoga because of a great exchange (web hosting and maintenance for classes).
I was actually hoping to get an ego-tweak from Kimberly, make her say how my yoga had improved. She did not say anything and probably couldn't even remember what state my practice was in. She only taught me those three days on the retreat. In any case, I confirmed in my own mind that I had moved beyond my novice status. I also knew that I preferred to practice in my usual yoga haunts (Thrive and Flow).
I finished reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience - Steps toward Enhancing the Quality of Life
One evening, I was sitting in a cafe waiting for my wife to get off work and reading the opening chapters of the book. I read the rather dry definition:
"The events that constitute consciouness -- the things we see, fell, think and desire -- are informaiton that we can manipulate and use. Thus we might think of consciousness as intentionally order information."
A lot of ideas started falling into place. We can choose how we perceive the world -- or that small stream of events that we perceive through our senses and interpret with our mind."We create ourselves by how we invest our energy " (p. 33) and I understood that I had a lot more power over what mattered in my life than I thought.
I can't do justice to the book here, but I do want to mention the eight elements that distinguish the flow experience:
- The task must be attainable or within reach of being completed through employing skills.
- We have to concentrate on what we are doing so that action and awareness merge into a single stream.
- The task must have clear goals.
- It must provide immediate feedback.
- It rises above the concerns of everyday life.
- It makes us feel as if we are in control.
- Concern for the self disappears, but a stronger sense of self emerges out of the flow experience .
- The sense of time is altered, even suspended.
The author cites yoga (and the martial arts) as an experience open to the psychology and physiology of flow. Indeed, he answered a question that I had been chewing on: why does yoga seem so hard for me, even after nearly three years of practice? When I'm in the middle of a vinyasa class, I never feel that I've have command over the asanas and movement, but I am still testing my edge, taking poses deeper, holding them longer, adding a bind. Some day I may master Sun Salutation and its variations. Hatha yoga offers an almost limitless horizon of challenge. But in the meantime, I can still savor the initial achievements of riding the breath and turning inward. Physically, yoga opens the door to flow so that I can experience it direclty, so that I know what it feels like. Then, I can come back to that same feeling when I am thinking, writing or cutting the lawn.
I have been lazy in putting up my photos and comments on several yoga ventures that I've been involved in. For instance, as announced here, I went to an Amy Weintraub workshop at Spiral Flight Yoga on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. This was back in -- shock -- March. It was a four-hour session called Life Force Yoga to Beat the Blues and Amy (her photo is on the right) kept the participants actively involved throughout the whole show at a pace that would have been daunting had not most people already been acquainted with her work from her book, Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through Yoga, or from her CD. But there's a big difference going through all the pranayama exercises, chants, visualizations and yoga postures with her leading the way, rather than just picturing them in your mind and trying to imitate them.
I went to the event with my daughter, Stephanie. The practice room was full, perhaps as many as forty people. There were wall-to-wall mats as a way of defining personal space during the talk and exercises. Although we did not do any vinyasas, you still need an area to spread out in. At the end, Amy spent as much time as possible talking to people and signing her book. I got her to sign my copy, dog-eared, underlined, comments in the margins, tagged with colored flags.
While putting this entry together, I noticed on the Spiral Yoga website that Amy will be repeating this workshop in March next year, which I recommended to anyone wishing to deepen their pranayama practice or acquire skills for managing their emotional balance. She has a compelling approach, and this is a very accessible form of yoga with immediate pay-off.
Jacob Perkins asked me to add his blog, cloudshadows.net: Understanding Yoga, to my list on online resources. Done. He is "currently blogging the yoga sutras" -- it is no tall order to interpret those sacred aphorisms . First, they're in Sanskrit and their translations can be cryptic, sometimes even jibberish. I have tended to plunged ahead with my physical practice, rather than delve into the sutra's mysteries, but I've come around to the realization that the non-physical side is more important than the asanas and vinyasa. More power to him and may the sutras shine through his daily practice.
Jacob lists several books on the sutras so I assume that he's reading them. He should probably list Stephen Cope's new book, The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living, which is based on an interpretation of the sutras. I would like to get ahold of it, but I've still got a backlog of required reading books.
He also also points to Trinity Yoga: Teacher Training, which includes some excellent photos of yoga postures, blog and a forum, and yogascope kaleidoscope, a very active blogger. Yoga Teacher Training is another blog that has some interesting content.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. - Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)When the expression "Survival of the Fittest" gets thrown around in conversation, we usually interpret that phrase to mean that only the strongest, the meanest, the most ruthless will come out on top in the end. But that is not what Darwin was saying. Fittest means the organism that could adapt to an ecological environment or niche -- in other words, it fits in, not that it was in the best physical shape. It also implies that survival implies a capacity to listen, to adjust to the environment and to take fullest advantage of the conditions.
