Yoga

Drag Me To Yoga School

Neal Pollack — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:25:54 +0000

A few weeks ago, I got accepted to study yoga with Richard Freeman, a master Ashtanga instructor who I highly respect. He only trains 40 or so students a year, out of Shiva knows how many who apply. From what I can tell, the ones who receive the special rose have either been studying yoga for a long time or reveal themselves to be completely broken-down and desperate. I fall into the latter category.

I’m going to get physically worked over in the Ashtanga primary and intermediate series, learn how to chant and count in Sanskrit, read essential texts, attend anatomy labs, and absorb the basic principles of Buddhist meditation. The whole thing will last 25 days, with 200 hours of total instruction, the yoga equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree. It won’t exactly be Spring Break. But at this point in my life, it’s exactly what I need.

Starting June 1, here I go.

Of course, this assumes that I can afford to attend the training.

*****

The day I got my acceptance email, after excitedly hopping around my office in my yoga shorts for 15 minutes, I got to thinking about procuring funds. Freeman’s studio, the Yoga Workshop, is in Boulder, Colorado. I live in Los Angeles, against all rational judgment. So, in order to study with the master, I must temporarily move to Colorado while continuing to support my family in California. This isn’t something I can easily do on a freelance writer’s income.

I have to pay for the training, and also for whatever futon-containing room I can find in Boulder for a month. Also in the expense report: A glamorous round-trip plane ticket to Denver on Southwest Airlines. Unlike Kevin Smith, I don’t take up two seats. I’ll require a small amount of money for food. As for beer, an essential item in any experience, I’ll pay for that myself. All told, it adds up to about four grand.

This is where Kickstarter enters. Kickstarter is a web site where creative types, from painters to filmmakers, journalists to videogame designers, can raise grassroots money for their projects. People who have Kickstarter projects offer “incentives” to their “backers” at various levels, some of the incentives quite juicy. The idea is that if you have a financial stake in the creation of a project, then you’re actually, in a way, part of that project. It’s Internet democracy in action, the best of what the web has to offer. The one catch, for people who start the projects, is that if you don’t make your entire fundraising goal, then you don’t get any of the money. It’s all or nothing.

Kickstarter accepted my proposal, not because I wanted to go to yoga school, as that doesn’t necessarily qualify as an artistic project itself, but because I needed the yoga school to support a book. I have a comic yoga memoir called Stretch coming out in August. By studying intensively with a senior teacher, I intend to banish, or at least diminish, my ignorance.

Thus blessed by the company founders, I made a Kickstarter page for myself. On it, I put a mini-essay, like this one but shorter and even more pledge-drivey. I also posted a picture of me doing janu sirasana while my befuddled Boston Terrier, Hercules, gazes adorably into the camera. Then, on my laptop camera, I filmed a cheapie video where I plead my case, kick up into headstand, make a joke about being willing to stand on my head for money, come down, and plead my case some more.

Then I set a fundraising goal and “launched” my project. Thus began the process of begging people for money, nearly every day, via my Facebook page, Twitter feed, and occasional group email.

In the spirit of Kickstarter, I’ve offered incentives to my backers. On the low end, people who donate will get emailed excerpts from my book. As the pledge levels rise, I offer signed galley copies of my book, some of my wife Regina’s handmade jewelry or, for more money, one of her beautiful paintings and collages. For a thousand bucks, I’ve promised to give the eulogy at people’s funerals, assuming I’m still alive and coherent when they die. Not surprisingly, no one has given $1000.

But I did have a friend give $700, in exchange for one of Regina’s paintings. I’ve had other people give $200, so they can have the dubious privilege of taking a private yoga class with me. Others have given a buck, or five, or ten. A cousin who I’ve known since the year I was born was quite generous, and so were many total strangers. One woman donated after Googling the words “namaste motherfucker,” which I include in my Kickstarter essay, because she has a T-shirt company called Namaste Mofo. I also got a $200 donation from a new video-game magazine called Kill Screen, en lieu of payment for an article that I’m writing for them. It felt like an appropriate thing to ask, because last fall that magazine launched itself through its own Kickstarter project.

Yoga brings people together in a world that attempts, at every turn, to separate and isolate us. For me, who practices most of the time by myself at home and sometimes goes days without speaking to another human being besides my wife and son, raising money to send myself to yoga school has allowed me to feel part of some weird sort of virtual kula, or community. I’ll not soon forget the generosity, kindness, and good humor that people have donated along with their hard-earned money. It’s been a lovely experience.

In fact, I’ve now given to a couple of Kickstarter projects myself: One for a computer game designed by a cartoonist who’s work my son likes, and one for New Orleans writer Michael Patrick Welch, who’s writing a memoir about escaping Hurricane Katrina with his pet pygmy goat. In the case of the former, I just found it by poking around Kickstarter. In the case of the latter, I got an email from Michael asking for help. All I could think was, I’ve been there, pal. In fact, I’m there right now.

Yoga has turned me, a notoriously cheap bastard, into a more generous person. This is coded into yoga’s DNA: When you practice properly, you want to do good and you want to help other people who are trying to do good. I try to remember as I post my daily Facebook moan for money. Kickstarter hasn’t seen my last donation.

As of this writing, I’ve raised 73 percent of my fundraising goal. But I still have more than a thousand dollars to go, and only two weeks to get there. Did I ask you for money yet? No? Well, here’s the official plea: Send me to yoga school, and win fabulous prizes!

Slow Night At The Shakti Box: The Humbling Of An Apprentice Yoga Teacher

Neal Pollack — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:46:02 +0000

One Thursday night last month, I taught a yoga class. It was the first in a series I’ve scheduled in L.A. leading up the monumental cultural event that will be the August publication of my yoga memoir Stretch. I figured the class, like most things yoga-related, could serve more than one function. Maybe I’d build a little audience for the book while also honing my yoga-talking and yoga-teaching skills. Essentially, it would be the yoga equivalent of an out-of-town opening.

I’d been preparing for weeks. First, I reserved the Shakti Box, a pleasant, warm, well-appointed space above the Video Hut near the corner of Vermont and Franklin. Some friends of mine had taught there. I liked the fact that it offered few frills, and also that it was very clean. Until the spring of 2009, it had been the private practice space of a nice woman named Edie, and then she decided to share the love. In addition to yoga, Edie books regular improv classes and a “Women’s Circle” at the Box, so clearly she’s open to different stuff. When I approached her with my idea for a “yoga comedy night,” she didn’t hang up on me immediately. She didn’t even hang up when I told her I was going to call the class “Club Sutra.” She offered a really reasonable rental price. Club Sutra was go.

The previous summer, I’d done a couple of Club Sutras at a Buddhist meditation center on Melrose, and had attempted to read from my book, talk about the Yoga Sutras, and teach an asana class, by myself, all in the space of two hours. I had six people for the first class, about a dozen for the second. Some of them seemed to enjoy themselves, but overall, results were mixed. I know how to read from a book and talk about philosophy, but when it comes to an asana class taught by me, you’d probably be just as safe following a blind man to the edge of a cliff at midnight.

A few weeks later, I ran into a friend who’d attended Club Sutra. “These things take time,” she said. That hurt. But the first step toward realizing you have a problem is admitting that you need help. I needed help teaching yoga.

To that end, I secured the services of my friend Julie, a good-humored, kind, no-bullshit professional yoga teacher with a few celebrity clients. She also gives classes twice a week at the Shakti Box. I came up with a theme-”The Beginner’s Mind”-and asked her to develop a 45-minute practice, plus a 15-minute cool-down, surrounding that theme. Then I chose readings from the book about my beginnings as a yogi, and I started thinking through a short and amusing lecture about the Eight Limbs of the Ashtanga system. This didn’t take me very long, so I had plenty of time to get down to what I do best. Promoting myself.

I posted on Facebook and Twitter. And then on Facebook again and Twitter again. I sent out an email to a lot of people. Also, I posted on Facebook three more times. It worked. The day before the class, a book blogger for the L.A. Times gave the class a skeptical preview write-up. I sent the link to Julie, and she wrote back, “It is ON!”

True enough, though I couldn’t quite share her excitement. I’ve had press before, and it doesn’t always lead to turnout. The post circulated, got mentioned in passing on The New Yorker’s book blog, and was retweeted here and there, but in the back of my mind, I thought, “if I had a free night in Los Angeles, would I go to a yoga class taught my a mid-list humor writer?” And then I thought, “probably not.”

*****

The class started at 7 PM. I arrived at 6:30 and played games on my Iphone until Julie showed up 15 minutes later with the keys to the space. We went upstairs, turned on some lights, modulated the temperature, and drew the shades. Soon after, Julie’s husband Eric came up the stairs. He wanted to show some support. At five minutes ’til, a woman appeared. She seemed to be in her mid-50s.

“Is this the yoga class?” she asked.

“Come on in,” I said.

“A friend of mine in Seattle read about this on Twitter and told me I had to come,” she said.

“Cool.”

“I’d never heard of you.”

“Most people haven’t.”

Spread out your mat, I said. There’s plenty of room. She hadn’t brought a mat, she said. That was fine. We had plenty of mats, too.

The four of us chatted for a while. Our mystery student had spent her whole life doing extreme sports, and now her body was ruined. She’d recently moved with a guy to L.A., and she’d been looking for some yoga. Every class she’d attended thus far had been too challenging for her, full of snobby agro-practitioners who thought they were so special.

“Well, you’re in good company here,” I said.

No one else appeared.

At 7:10, Julie said,

“You know what traffic’s like in L.A.”

“It’s hard to get people to come out to stuff,” Eric said.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m used to playing small rooms.”

I felt that mothy flutter in my heart that I always get at my gigs when I realize that no one else is coming. It’s very familiar to me. When it happens, I take a deep breath, say something to myself like “the show must go on,” and proceed as though I were playing to a packed house, or, in this case, yoga studio.

I read for a little while, to decent effect, and then Julie took over. We did some light seated warm-ups, and then she had the three of us stand. Julie later said that as soon as she saw our mystery guest attempt a forward bend, she threw her lesson plan out the door. Our new friend no longer had functional lumbar discs. She could barely move at the waist.

For the next 45 minutes, Eric and I were essentially on our own. We’d both already practiced that day, so it didn’t matter. Julie worked exclusively with our only student, giving her blankets and blocks and adjustments and more special treatment than anyone expects to get when coming to a yoga comedy night.

I took the floor again and spoke amusingly, our guest and Eric each asked a couple of questions that I answered more or less, Julie led us through some shoulder-stand variations, and then it was time for savasana, which I led. Then I shut up and meditated for about five minutes. It was over. Exhale. When the dimmers rose, my only student said,

“That was the best yoga experience I’ve ever had.”

“Seriously?” I said, and then, catching myself before I self-deprecated excessively, “Hey, that’s great. But it was mostly Julie.”

“We were a combo, Pollack,” Julie said.

“Seriously, though,” the woman said. “Thank you guys.”

My pleasure, lady.

As I walked back to my car, I felt a different kind of flutter, and this one wasn’t gnawing at the core. I’d helped give someone the best yoga experience of her life. That was no small matter. But if yoga teaches you anything, it’s not to become attached to such thoughts. The next time I did Club Sutra, I could easily give someone else the worst yoga experience of her life. Less likely things have happened.

When I do my second Club Sutra of the year next week, I’ll do it with no expectations. Anyone who shows up and puts money in the donation basket will be a blessing. Still, it would be nice to have at least two students this time.

YouTube Yoga And Gay Dog Sex: The Perils Of Practicing At Home

Neal Pollack — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:02:58 +0000

A few months ago, I decided to stop spending money on yoga. I now knew enough, I thought, so that I could practice by myself at home. The prospect excited me, because eliminating yoga classes from my life meant one more reason to not leave the house. When you can get away with staying home all day, life in Los Angeles is almost tolerable. I had some open floor in my office, and French doors that, when opened, invited gentle breezes, the endless sound of yard-maintenance noise, and a nice view of a hill behind which sat Dodger Stadium. One day in November, I unrolled my mat and began my perilous voyage into self-practice.

Four months later, I’d like to report on my progress. Today’s to-do list, made around 9 AM, contained three items: “Practice At Home,” “Write About Practicing At Home,” and “Email Questions About Jon Favreau To Scarlett Johansson.” At this writing, it’s almost noon, and this is the only one of the three I’ve broached. Thinking about practicing at home is easy. Actually doing the practice is hard.

Yet some form of physical yoga happens in my house about five days a week. Like the great God Krishna, my self-practice appears in many incarnations, all of which seem to involve stopping my male Boston Terriers from rolling around on my mat and licking each other’s privates. The Yoga Sutras say that when you reach the highest state of consciousness, you should be able to regard all occurrences, now matter how debased or exalted, without emotional attachment or judgment. Though Patanjali doesn’t spell it out as such, that includes gay dog sex happening under your legs while you’re moving into revolved triangle pose. When it comes to yoga, everything’s a test.

Most often at home, I practice the familiar: The primary series of Ashtanga yoga, a self-guided series of Sisyphean postures, linked by breath, that never fails to deliver on its promise of making me feel like an exhausted, humbled dishrag. I’d been studying some Ashtanga before I went into my monastic yoga seclusion, so I know the series well enough to do it myself. But I also, after a few days of trying it alone, found that I was leaving out certain poses, or skipping a step here or there to wipe the sweat off my brow or peel my toenails with my fingers.

Clearly, I needed discipline. This is where YouTube enters to help the modern self-practicing yogi. After a month or so of grinding through the practice, I discovered that someone had, kindly and more than likely illegally, posted videos of the entire primary series led by David Swenson, one of the modern masters of the Ashtanga yoga system. Suddenly, I had free high-end instruction coming through my auxiliary speakers.

This helped a lot. The video version of David Swenson (who was, much to my shock, about 15 years younger than the actual David Swenson who I encountered recently at a conference) kept my alignment honest and helped my practice flow with his laid-back, affably Texan manner. But a YouTube practice also has its pitfalls. The series has been broken into 12 separate parts, each anywhere between seven and 10 minutes long. I intermittently find myself having to extricate myself from an impossible pose to click on the next installment. Still, old, choppily edited yoga videos are better than no yoga videos at all, and I often feel actual gratitude toward virtual Swenson for his help.

Ashtanga can get dull even when you’re practicing it every day in a hot room surrounded by dozens of other yoga freaks, some of who are quite good-looking. Trying to do it consistently by yourself at home is like drinking a shot of wheatgrass every day for lunch: Though it’s probably the best thing for your health, most of us, myself included, don’t have the discipline to get it done consistently. I often seek easier yoga elsewhere on YouTube.

Some nights I have trouble getting to sleep, my mind skipping with worries about my financial problems, receding hairline, and the Dodgers’ puzzling offseason. A wise teacher of mine had said that yoga makes everything that comes after it better. That included, I assumed, sleep, so early on in my home practice I went searching for a yoga flow to help me sleep.

It didn’t take long for me to find a video called, appropriately enough, “Hatha Yoga For Better Sleep” on the YouTube channel of a website called Yogayak. Thus, at anywhere between 10:30 PM and 1 AM many weeknights, I found myself moving through a gentle 35-minute flow, led by a healthy Canadian woman who appeared to be practicing among a flock of geese in a public park. It always left me drooling, my brain heavy and empty, and my subsequent sleep undisturbed and full of vivid dreaming.

Less successful has been Yogayak’s 45-minute “Grounding Afternoon Practice,” mostly because, for some reason, it takes about three hours to load in my browser, which means that if I want to ground myself around, say, 4 PM, I need to remember right after lunch, or the practice won’t be ready in time. More than once, I’ve accidentally shut off Firefox, thereby scotching my yoga goals for the day of practicing with an attractive woman named Dagmar who has a studio in Costa Rica. This teaches yet another lesson unstated in the Sutras: Don’t become attached to YouTube videos for your yoga practice. Your Airport could go wonky at any moment.

Occasionally, I feel lonely and come down from the mountain to take a class with Patty, a teacher who I’ve been studying with for a good number of years now. She’s as familiar with my practice as anyone. One Friday morning, as I twisted into parivritta parsvakonasana, or “intestine-mangling pose”, she said, much to my surprise, “That looks good. Have you been practicing at home?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that, by practicing something, I could actually improve my skills. I’d just assumed that yoga would stay with me as a balm throughout my life as I became balder, fatter, older, and stupider. In true yogic style, I didn’t become attached to the compliment, but I enjoyed it, because it meant that all my extremely intermittent hard work hadn’t been a total waste.

A few weeks later, on a press pass at a yoga conference, I had the privilege of taking a daylong seminar with Sarah Powers, a foremost proponent of Yin Yoga and an advanced Buddhist meditation instructor. She spoke highly of self-practice. It was actually the highest form of yoga, she said. The best way to do yoga is to practice by yourself, and then when you fall into a rut, seek advice from a respected teacher or two so you can advance the practice at home further. Group classes are often an attractive trap that falsely props up the ego into believing it’s important.

I’d been doing yoga properly all along. Who knew? Even if I wasn’t grinding hard every day, I was on the mat, or at least thinking about the mat. Yoga is a life-long, multitudinous thing. Your practice is your practice no matter what, even when you’re doing it half-assed at home, directly adjacent to a pair of flatulent, incessantly humping dogs.

Chairgasm In The Basement: My Intro To Tantric Meditation

Neal Pollack — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:31:10 +0000

When I went to my first San Francisco Yoga Journal conference in 2009, I mostly found myself wandering around the Hyatt confused, frustrated, physically exhausted, and waiting for lunch. This year, I returned with a strategy, a curriculum of sorts. I’d barely do any physical yoga at all; with that, I’ve become all too familiar. Instead, I’d begin my journey into yoga’s subtler aspects, its deeper mysteries. It was time for an introduction to Tantra.

Most people, if they’ve heard of Tantra at all, would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s that thing Sting and his wife do before they fuck.” Until pretty recently, I’d have said the exact same thing. And now, though I know far less about Tantra than I do about, say, the mechanics of the NBA Draft Lottery, I’ve begun to acquaint myself with some basic facts.

Essentially, Tantrism is a school of yoga that began to emerge around 800 A.D. in reaction to certain facets of Vedic orthodoxy. Yoga at that time had grown quite practical, rigid, and exclusionary, and Tantrism brought a mystical element to the proceedings, the possibility that yoga could be practiced by anyone, including, shockingly, women. Tantric practitioners saw yoga as a way to tap into the “divine energy” of the universe. Sometimes this was achieved through identification with traditional Hindu deities, but, since many of its practitioners were Buddhist, that pantheon didn’t always apply. Alternate paths to the divine included meditation, scholarship, mantra (either recited privately or sung with a group), and other, more complex “secret practices” that probably cost a lot of money.

The popular Western yoga form that most closely resembles traditional Tantric practice is kundalini, what with its chanting and its coiled-snake energies and all. But Tantra is actually a complex, variegated body of spiritual work that has only really begun to leach its way into contemporary yogic study. You’re more likely to find a class about paganism than one about Tantric yoga.

But at the Yoga Journal conference, which caters largely to extreme yoga weirdoes like me, Tantra can carry the day, as it seemed to this year. There were lectures in Tantric philosophy, courses on Tantric history, and intimations of larger things to come. I tuned in to some of those, and also took a class called The Art Of Tantric Meditation.

The class leader, Sally Kempton, was (and is) an extremely advanced meditation teacher, which either made it totally ironic or completely appropriate that the class took place in a thin-walled basement conference room in the middle of the convention’s noisy and crowded Yoga Marketplace. From the crackling walkie-talkies and guys who occasionally walked through the room whistling and wearing beige work shirts, I gauged that we were also directly adjacent to some sort of maintenance closet. It was noisy in there. We sat in straight-backed conference chairs, the color and consistency of old puke, and attempted to connect with the divine.

As any master teacher worth his or her cushion would, Sally Kempton told us to ignore the sounds. More accurately, she asked us to let the sounds penetrate our consciousness, notice them, meditate on them, and then let them go. The sounds were, like our breath, or bodies, our thoughts, and everything around us, part of a greater cosmic energy. I found myself somewhat distracted by the extraordinarily hot woman sitting to my left, so close that our knees were almost touching, though the distraction had less to do with the fact of her extraordinary hotness than with the fact that she kept fidgeting with her cell phone by pulling it in and out of a plastic Bakugan backpack. Why, I wondered, did this woman have such a backpack, and how could I incorporate the backpack into the Tantric idea that all physical things are really just a condensed form of “divine light”, or sound vibration? This was a difficult question that our teacher wouldn’t be able to answer, because there was no way in hell I would ask.

In any case, we did many different meditations over the course of two hours, including one where Kempton taught us an interesting technique to intensify and then expel negative emotions. Then arrived the moment of truth, the money shot, so to speak. The teacher announced that we would now do a sexual energy meditation.

In traditional Tantrism, sexual-energy rites were practiced by obscure sects as a kind of clan initiation, and had very little to do with mainstream belief. In contemporary interpretations, they’re a way for middle-aged hipsters to blend their Shiva and Shakti energies together into a series of million-dollar orgasms. What we did in that basement conference room was neither obscure nor wealth generating, but it definitely felt good.

The teacher said: Imagine something extremely sexually arousing. I initially thought of Lynda Carter, circa 1976, but that seemed like kind of a cliché, so instead I concocted a few other scenarios that I won’t share with you right now. Regardless, as she instructed, a warm feeling, almost like intense light, began to emanate from my genital center. No, it wasn’t a boner. Don’t be perverted. This was a higher sensation that transcended mere sexual pleasure.

Then she told us to take that divine feeling and move it through our bodies, starting in our toes, and then into our ankles, and then our calves, and then our legs, and then our thighs, and traveling upward through various meridians and chakras. Getting to such a place wasn’t so hard, really. I’d been meditating all morning, even all weekend, and my mind was primed. As I sat there in that shitty chair in that shitty room with its shitty carpet, a strange kind of semi-ecstasy permeated my every pore. My body began to involuntarily shudder with pleasure.

Next to me, the hot woman with the Bakugan backpack went “OHHHHHHHHHH!” Then the woman sitting next to me on the other side, in a slightly lower tone, went, “MMMMMMMMM!” Not wanting to be left out, I murmured a deep, low, “AHHHHHHHH!” The room had reached a state of Samadhi, where our individual selves had dissolved into a greater cosmic consciousness, probably fueled (though not in my case, I swear), by fantasies of having sex with George Clooney.

Then it was over, and our teacher released us into a room where entrepreneurs were selling stretchy pants and massage balls. A few hours later, after I’d gone to The Ferry Building to quite wisely invest $3.50 on a mixed “meat cone” from Boccalone, I returned to the conference to attend a lecture on the future of Tantra in the West. On the way there, I ran into the woman who’d been seated to my left.

“So, that workshop…” I said.

“Yeah, that was kinda weird,” she said, without looking me in the eye. “What’s up?”

And then she walked away, spastically and hurriedly, carrying the secrets of the Tantra in her Bakugan backpack.

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Yoga When You’re Broke

Neal Pollack — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:27:30 +0000

A year ago at this time, I had a consistent yoga schedule, an effective program that kept me sane, balanced, and on the brink of physical exhaustion. I attended conferences and seminars, learned how to meditate, and found myself balancing on my arms in new and interesting ways. The first two weeks of June, I went to a retreat in a distant time zone, and came back a man transformed, my body in full yogic form, and my mind totally at peace.

For a few months, I kept a semblance of that going.

Starting in about mid-October, though, I found myself faltering, in body, mind, and spirit, mostly because of money. My income, never that voluminous to begin with, completely stopped flowing at the same time some big bills came due. We were broke, and yoga had to go. The ten-class pass for $120 became an unaffordable luxury rather than a slight extravagance, and the unlimited monthly membership was simply out of the question. I realize that, in the annals of economic tragedy, not being able to afford yoga instruction is about equal to having to borrow someone else’s golf clubs. But yoga had been my lifeline for years now. So I knew I was in for a hard few months.

I found myself stringing a routine out of spare parts. The first route I tried was that of the donation-only class. A couple regular and trusted teachers had started offering those at places not too far from my home. They kept me going, but while donation classes are great, and necessary to keep the yoga community afloat during these dark days, it’s hard to give your friends and mentors just a couple of bucks for two hours of hard work, even if you pride yourself on being a legendary cheapskate. After a while, those $10 bills dropped into brass bowls start to accumulate. Despite efforts to cut corners, before you know it, you’re out a Benjamin anyway.

So I stopped going the donation route, and then I really started to slip. My joints ached constantly. When I sat down, when I rose up, my body felt heavy and lifeless. My upper back developed more knots than you see on a Boy Scout merit-badge qualifying day. That old demon that the Yoga Sutras call avidya, or misperception of the true nature of reality, began to cloud my mind beyond recognition. I felt confused and directionless, totally out of control. Ego had started driving the bus, and like at the end of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, it was headed for an evil place.

*****

The week after Halloween, I had to meet with some guys out in Studio City. A nearby yoga studio was offering a five-dollar lunchtime flow class. Generally, studios don’t assign their best teachers to those sessions. You pay for a five-dollar class, you get a five-dollar teacher. But my toes had started to throb in the morning. I was desperate.

The teacher looked more than a bit like Jennifer Aniston, and clearly aspired to Ms. Aniston’s level of star-crossed narcissism. She gave us a vigorous workout, punctuated by descriptions of how some pervert in West Hollywood had tried to look up her Alice In Wonderland dress on Halloween night. It’s hard to focus your mind during yoga when the teacher and her largely gay clientele spend several minutes, during class, arguing about whether or not Lady Gaga is a “slut.” That’s exactly the kind of temporary distraction that yoga is supposed to eliminate. And, for the record, Lady Gaga is not a slut. Or maybe she is.

A few days later, my soul crashing to the pit of my being as though it had two anvils tied to its metaphorical base, I scraped a bunch of quarters out of my change jar and headed out, latish on a Sunday night, to an Iyengar “restorative” class with a prominent local teacher, who’d forgotten to inform the studio that he was on vacation. I lay prostrate on a block, covered with blankets for 20 minutes, until I realized that he wasn’t coming. A quick nag at the front desk later, I got my $17.60 back, plus a free class.

This I cashed in the next Sunday afternoon, and it was fabulous, given by a true pro with who I’d study with again if given the opportunity. My mind and soul felt washed clean. I bought my wife a bouquet of roses at the farmer’s market, and went home whistling.

Two weeks passed, and I did no yoga. At my parents’ in Arizona over Thanksgiving, I was such a physical and mental nightmare that my mother told me she’d pay for a class just to get me out of the house. I declined her charity, and sucked up the courage to spend 16 bucks at a Phoenix studio. Once again, I drew a bum teacher card, in the form of a wide-eyed, pigtailed gal who had us spend half the class sliding around on blankets, and who played a live version of Many Rivers To Cross during savasana. As the song ended, with applause, she said, “that applause is for you, for taking such good care of yourselves.” She was quite obviously deranged.

That moment turned me. If I couldn’t consistently afford actual teachers I could trust, then I was going to teach myself. I’d been doing yoga long enough that I could set up some sort of reasonable home program. It would require discipline, patience, and skill, but that’s what yoga is supposed to involve anyway. I don’t need hippie aerobics theater with out-of-work actors. I need to clear the lens of my mind.

So I’ve begun my home practice. And it’s not costing me a cent.

I’ll let you know how it goes

Yoga and Sex: Yoga Makes You a Little Less Horny (It’s True)

Neal Pollack — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:33:47 +0000

Once it became public knowledge that yoga had taken over my life, people started asking if I’d learned any new sexual positions, largely because they wanted to make fun of me. Someone asked if I was now more “bendy.” Another said, “so, are you like having that Tantric sex stuff for 12 straight hours at a time, you know, like Sting and Trudy?”

Well, I’d definitely grown more agile and more flexible. I wasn’t flopping around like a decked marlin in bed, and didn’t find myself wheezing for breath when I was done. But it’s not like my wife and I continually writhed in sweet Kama Sutra sexual congress, tenderly moving our outstretched hands in a circle while facing each other in half-moon pose. Allow me to quote Sting from a revealing interview he did with a British tabloid: “Yes, you can have sex for six hours, but it includes dinner, a movie and maybe a lot of begging! Tantra is a well-documented science, it’s not just about sex. It’s a devotional exercise to express adoration. Sex is a sacred act and incredible fun.”

What he said. Let me add that I actually hadn’t studied Tantra, at all, so I definitely wasn’t having rock-star intercourse. Plus, if Sting, a physically impeccable world-famous billionaire musician who owns most of Scotland, has to beg his wife for sex, where did that leave guys like me? By the time Regina and I got done with dinner and a movie, all we cared about was rushing home so we didn’t have to pay the babysitter an extra ten bucks, which didn’t really put us in the mood to make the sexy time.

Certain things did change. When you spend ten hours a week or more doing intense yoga, you continually contract and flex your perenium muscles, meaning that the area between your testicles and your anus becomes one of the strongest parts of your body. I found myself learning how to draw my prana, or yogic energy, up through my corporeal center from my nuts. It made all the difference. I may not have been fucking in the lotus position, but when you’ve got the mulabhanda going on, your orgasms are twice, maybe three times longer and more intense. You can’t buy that at the pharmacy.

Still, despite modest pleasure-based improvements, yoga’s main sexual accomplishment involved changes to my attitude toward the nasty. Since the moment I first sprouted pubes, I’d thought of nothing but sex. It had possessed me like a rampaging demon that could only be briefly exorcised in messy intervals. Sexual desire led me to do a lot of stupid things: I hung around in bars long after I should have gone home, made weird, obsessive phone calls, had naughty exchanges with strangers in Internet chat rooms, and, more often than not, found myself pining, miserable, and frustrated.

As with everything else yoga-related, this astonishing change had philosophical underpinnings. The Yoga Sutras, yoga’s Ur-text, understood me perfectly. According to the Sutras, all human suffering stems from something called, in Sanskrit, avidya, or misperception of the true nature of reality. Suffering clouds the “lens” of the mind and keeps us from seeing clearly. And few things cause more suffering than sex, or misunderstanding about sex. Just ask Othello, or any human being ever.

Hence the most unpopular of all the sutras, chapter two, verse 38, which explains the concept of brahmacharya. This sometimes gets translated to horrified listeners as “celibacy,” meaning that the true student of yoga must be celibate to practice properly. Fortunately, TKV Desikachar, the wisest living scholar of the Sutras, explains it this way in his book The Heart Of Yoga:

“At its best, moderation produces the highest individual vitality.”

In other words: Have sex, sure, but stop seeing it as a game, or a goal. Avoid obsession. Go about your sexual business ethically, causing as little harm to others as possible. Amazingly, as I practiced more physical yoga I felt this happen to me as a palpable mental change. Here I was surrounded by more attractive, cool, smart, skimpily dressed women than any other time in my life, and I barely felt a tug toward naughty behavior. Not only had I learned to control myself, the idea of controlling myself came almost naturally. I realized that I no longer needed sex. Yoga had calmed my inner pervert.

Of course, I learned, the physical aspects of sex don’t go away when you practice yoga. When you’re sitting sweaty in your basement in your stretchy yoga shorts all day, certain sensations will inevitably arise. I’m no eunuch. But after a while, though I still found sex infinitely pleasurable, I didn’t desire it any more than three or four times a day, down from a record high of about 45. Learning the tools to control desire, as I lurched into middle age and therefore probably would have substantially less sex anyway, made my life a lot easier.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, writing this has made me kind of horny. To calm down, I’m going to go do some yoga. As far as you know.

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Neal Pollack on Depression

Neal Pollack — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:39:50 +0000

I’ve been depressed for the last couple of weeks. This hasn’t been some mild gloom frosted with a little self-doubt. Rather, it’s been depression of the “I have no friends, I’m a worthless failure, and my whole life is going to shit” variety. Yet the actual evidence of my life indicates otherwise. A check arrived. A career break happened. I got invited to a couple of parties. My kid started doing well in school. I had reason to be excited. Still, the “noonday demon,” as author Andrew Solomon puts it, descended.

Depression is like that. In the opening scene of his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron describes an overwhelming bout of depression that paralyzed him just as he was about to receive a major literary prize in Paris, hardly a depressing situation. My own visible darkness didn’t contain an irony that large, but despite my relative good fortune, nothing could persuade me that my life had any worth at all.

Not even yoga.

This frustrated me. Before I started my dedicated yoga practice, I felt depressed all the time, at regular intervals. Wellbutrin shaved the edge, as did proper dosing of medical marijuana. But yoga put me over the top of happiness. My turbulent mind calmed. The fog of self-doubt and self-hate lifted. I could see my situation clearly, consistently, for the first time in years. Life didn’t feel perfect. I still experienced sadness and uncertainty. But the crushing and inevitable recurrence of depression, which had tormented me forever, appeared to be gone for good.

Then, recently, yoga appeared to fail. I went to my morning Ashtanga practice feeling emotionally as though I’d been dragged 20 miles by a tractor. My brain was sad and heavy, and my heart ached. But a little practice, I figured, would cure my ills. I’d slog through my series, and emerge from savasana feeling worse than before. My bones ached, and my brain was sluggish and exhausted. The water just kept getting muddier.

This went on for a few days, until finally I went to my teacher for advice.

“I can’t do this any more,” I said.

“Well, you can always go to Yoga Works,” she said. “They have all kinds of classes there.”

Don’t get defensive, I thought. I’m not looking to pony up my bucks to a fancy yoga studio chain. I explained to her that this wasn’t personal, that I was feeling tired and heavy and that the Ashtanga series suddenly seemed like a tremendous burden on my body and my soul.

“So don’t do it,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

“Of course. This is Mysore practice. You can do whatever you want.”

To the un-brainwashed, “Mysore practice” means a self-guided yoga done under the auspices of a trusted instructor in the Ashtanga style developed in Mysore, India, by the late Sri K Patthabi Jois. It’s been the bulwark of my yoga existence for the better part of two years. Now my teacher had given me a fresh peek into its true purpose. Come in on Monday, she said. We’ll run you through a series of relaxing poses and we’ll see if we can’t get you feeling better.

Monday arrived, and I went to yoga feeling crappy and tired as usual. My teacher gave me some meditation exercises. I did a supported bridge pose for a while, and a headstand prep with my back propped against the wall with a block. Various other relaxing poses followed. Then, in the parking lot next to the rundown Silver Lake dance studio where we’ve been practicing lately, some guys started unloading a bunch of stuff out of a truck, or into a truck. I couldn’t tell. All I knew is that the noise was loud, obnoxious, clangy, and intrusive. It got louder as I headed into savasana.

I hate noise, particularly noise related to construction. The arrival of gardeners to a house anywhere on my block is an occasion for me to stuff earplugs, crank up the fan, and bemoan my fate. Noise drives me crazy when I’m in a good mood. When I’m depressed, it sends me over the edge.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Just focus on your breath,” my teacher said as she wriggled my legs around. “Let me help you.”

“Noise makes me fucking barkers.”

“Don’t let yourself be distracted.”

I spent about two minutes in savasana before I shot up, rolled my mat, and left the room, barely acknowledging anyone. Clearly, my chemically saddened brain wasn’t yet ready to relax.

The Yoga Sutras describes depression as a “lack of mental clarity,” which can be caused by nine different types of “interruptions.” These include: Illness, mental stagnation, doubts, lack of foresight, fatigue, overindulgence, illusions about one’s true state of mind, lack of perseverance, and regression. All these things are “obstacles”, says Desikachar in The Heart Of Yoga, which “create mental disturbances and encourage distractions.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure which of those things caused my depression. Some of them may be the chicken, and some of them may be the egg. But I do know that I was wrong to believe that yoga could be the cure to all my troubles. Yoga practice isn’t magic. It requires dedication. You’ll encounter things you can’t do and people you don’t like in the process. When things go wrong in your life, either for real or via your misperception, it’s important to remember that the yoga is unconcerned about your troubles or your joys, and isn’t there specifically to solve your problems. But it will still be there for you, patiently waiting and always available.

As I write this, I’m feeling a little better. The noonday demon has receded. By the time you read this, it’ll probably be gone entirely. Meanwhile, I’m still doing yoga, and the practice hasn’t changed at all.

Yoga: The True Path to Awesome Poops

Neal Pollack — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:54:50 +0000

Yoga does many wonderful things. It clarifies the mind and provides a solid ethical foundation for a productive, happy life. For physical fitness and a way to make loving friendships that last, it can hardly be topped. It can be a path to spiritual ecstasy. But for me, one of yoga’s most profound benefits is also one of its most simple:

If you practice regularly, you take awesome poops.

The masters think so, too. BKS Iyengar’s first instruction in Light On Yoga is that you should “evacuate” your bowels before practice. In general, I try to follow that maxim, but the after-yoga sit is so much sweeter. When I’m grinding myself through another brutal Ashtanga primary series, or holding artachandrasana for a seeming eternity, the thought of my coming yoga poo often gets me through. Sure enough, about an hour after I get home, a five-dollar foot-long, a quarter pounder, emerges from my body like some sort of fecal alien. I gaze at it in wonder, and yoga redeems itself yet again. The pain of practice is worth the resulting endorphine release. After a particularly good session, sometimes the day brings two poops, or even three. You could build a log cabin with the magnificent yoga-caused arrays that I produce. My insides are scraped clean and my steps get bouncier. It makes me want to practice again.

Lest you think I’m being vulgar (or at least needlessly vulgar), yogic literature backs up my shit. Yoga philosophy says that we have an agni, or fire, in the body, located near the navel. Breathing directs the fire. The in-breath creates a wind that moves the flame downward toward the belly, burning up waste matter, and the exhale moves that waste down toward its eventual home in the toilet. If your exhales are twice as long as your inhales, Desikachar writes in The Heart Of Yoga, it provides “more time for freeing the body of its blockages.” In other words, long exhales lead to making poopy. This is particularly true if you’re doing your long exhales while upside down. For this reason, among, I’m sure, many others, inverted postures such as headstand and shoulder stand come toward the end of the practice. Yoga studios might smell very different if they didn’t.

The Yoga Sutra talks about poop as well, in its usual inscrutable way. Desikachar shares this interpretation, straight from the mother-text: “If a farmer wants to water his terraced fields, he does not have to carry the water in buckets to the various parts of his fields; he has only to open the retaining wall at the top. If he has laid out his terraces well and nothing blocks the flow of the water, it will be able to reach the last field and the furthest blade of grass without help from the farmer.”

Translated: You are the farmer, and your body is full of what Desikachar calls “rubbish.” If you practice yoga properly, regulating the breath in a well-designed series of postures, then your internal fire will literally burn away all the crap in your body. As a result, you’ll find yourself reading a magazine in the bathroom with a beatific smile on your face.

Yoga tells us not to become attached to pleasurable things, merely to experience and enjoy them when they come. It’s unhealthy to desire what cannot happen again. Therefore, though I sometimes find myself thinking about excellent poops hours afterward, they can’t be re-created. You don’t automatically turn your agni up to high and expect the deluge. Instead, you need to remain dedicated to your practice, to the integrity of your postures and the quality of your breath. With diligent focus, magical nuggets of reward will emerge when you least expect them. As the late K. Patthabi Jois said, “practice, practice, practice, and all is coming.” Including transcendent quantities of poo.

Mazelfuckingtov, Jonathan Ames! Neal Pollack on Envy and Yoga

Neal Pollack — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:38:33 +0000

Though it seems that sometimes my life is comprised of practicing yoga, eating many sandwiches after practicing yoga, and lying on my floor and moaning while recovering from yoga practice, I do have another existence outside of my stretchy shorts. For instance, I lead a fascinating and glamorous literary career. I only mention that because the nature of this particular entry forces me into the unsavory activity of name-dropping. So here we go, with what they disingenuously call “full disclosure.”

Recently, I’ve watched the first few episodes of the new HBO comedy Bored To Death. I know Jonathan Ames, who created the show. Many publications have shared our bylines. Though I wouldn’t consider us close, when you wave imaginary swords together at midnight in the parking lot of a Tampa gas station, some sort of friendship gets forged. We always seem very pleased when we encounter each other, usually on the bill of a reading series, sometimes in the lobby of a random New York building; we’ve had a few times, Ames and I.

I found myself immensely entertained by Bored To Death. I love noir and I love good comedy, and therefore, the show works for me. It’s funny, Jewy, urbane, charming, and a little perverse, just like its creator. But as I watched it, particularly that first night, I also felt envy, that most negative of emotions, bubbling to the surface of my consciousness. I’ve been grinding it out in L.A. for years, hoping against massive, almost impossible odds to get a show on the air. On the rare occasions that someone I know lands a gig, envy threatens to upset the apple cart of my relative placidity. Some Morrissey lyrics come to mind: We hate it when our friends become successful/And if they’re Northern, that makes it even worse/And if we can destroy them/You bet your life we will/Destroy them/If we can hurt them…

The bigger the gig landed, the greater threat posed by envy.

Only yoga can save me.

*****

Envy has created a lot of problems for me in the past. For a while, I spent time publicly destroying other writers’ books while in the grips of an alcohol-soaked, jealous rage. And when I say destroy, I don’t mean, “savage in print,” though most print-based attacks also stem from some sort of envy. I mean that I would actually, physically tear the books apart. One of my favorite targets was Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, who, immediately upon the book’s publication, became the hot Jewish voice of his generation, a spot that I’d (unrealistically and without merit) been hoping to claim for myself.

If I’d been 18 years old at an open-mic, this behavior would have made some sense, but it was no activity for a reasonably accomplished man in his thirties. Also, not surprisingly, this occurred before I’d discovered yoga. Sutra number 33, in the Desikachar translation, spells out the proper mental framework:

In daily life we see people around who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some may be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate toward those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our mind will be very tranquil.

According to the sutras, the real obstacle to human happiness is avidya, or misperception, not seeing things the way they truly are. So now, after years of dedicated yoga practice, I can see, for instance, that while Everything Is Illuminated definitely isn’t one of my favorite books, its creator can still be a well-meaning, talented force for good in the world. Any anger that I once had toward the book, and the author, mostly came from my misperception of it as a threat to my own imagined literary dominance. And thus the impulse to destroy books left my body, and my mind.

I try to remember this every time a friend of mine becomes successful, especially if they’re Northern. So when my former literary agent suddenly emerges as a regular character on The Daily Show and gets cast on one of the most successful TV ad campaigns of all time, I can feel happy for him, because he’s a great guy who deserves all the odd success that comes his way. When a book that I blurb becomes a runaway global bestseller, I can send a hearty congratulatory email to the writer and invite him out for a drink, hoping that he’ll pay. And when Dave Eggers, with whom I acted out a very public psychodrama in the first half of this decade, raises countless dollars for vital causes through writing books of extremely high quality, I can say, very quietly, “good for him” instead of saying, “why not me?” Then I can go back to my busy schedule of playing Civilization on my iphone.

Every day, I struggle against envy, but it’s a struggle worth fighting, because jealousy blackens the mind and the heart. Of all the unproductive emotions in the world, none is worse for the soul, none more toxic to creative output. Envy will burn hot and fast for a short time, but when it flames out, it leaves a confused, miserable husk of a person in its wake. It creates massive avidya and always leads to unhappiness, no matter how powerful it feels at the time. Do your own work, the sutras say, and don’t let other people’s work ripple your waters. Their business, whether you choose to enjoy it or not, has nothing to do with you.

So for Bored To Death, created by the hilarious and lovely Jonathan Ames, I say, mazelfuckingtov! May it live a long, happy, Emmy-filled life. I hope it runs on HBO forever. And if I really want to challenge myself yogically, I’ll try to feel the same way about Entourage.

Bonus Read: Not that You Asked: Roman Polanski Edition

Yoga Fashion: Sleeveless Tops and Workout Shorts That Don’t Bunch Up Around Your Crotch

Neal Pollack — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:07:00 +0000

A yoga-related question came down the Facebook transom the other day. “Dear Neal,” it read. “I’ve been practicing yoga several days a week and enjoying it, but I’m starting to get annoyed by my baggy T-shirts flopping around in my face. Do you have any suggestions?”

I do.

The topic of women’s yoga fashion is a minefield from which, if I stepped into it, I wouldn’t emerge alive, so I’ll avoid. But when it comes to men and yoga clothes, the standards are much lower and the needs are simpler. If you look at old photos of Krishnamacharya, pretty much universally recognized as the founder of modern, physical yoga, he appears to be wearing not much more than a tastefully folded cloth diaper. As the years progressed and he grew slightly trendier, Krishnamacharya progressed to some tight-fitting striped boxers, and also rocked a nifty white goatee. However, you never see photographs of him practicing asana while wearing a shirt.

In general, I find that it’s a lot easier to do yoga shirtless. You move more freely and don’t constantly have to deal with itchy cloth bunching up at unforgiving and complex moments. At the same time, we live in a world where a lot of people want to practice yoga, and you may find yourself in a class with 30 people in a room better suited for 20. This sets you up for getting known as the shirtless guy who splashes sweat all over everyone else’s mat. The last thing you need, when you’re trying to practice yoga diligently and sincerely, is to be a topic of snarky twitters at the juice bar after class.

So I recommend a compromise position: sleevelessness. I own two nice, form-fitting sleeveless tops that my wife gave me for my 38th birthday. When those get crusted with sweat and grime, and laundry isn’t happening, I also have several cheap white cotton sleeveless tees, which are available at Target for five bucks a six-pack. Yes, if you go sleeveless you’ll look a bit like a neutered yoga guy, but if you’re already worrying about your practice clothes, then you’re far enough down the path that it shouldn’t matter to you. So go sleeveless, middle-aged man. Feel the cool air swoosh across your pits as you rise up into Warrior One. And don’t forget to bring a sweat towel.

As for your bottoms, just find a pair or two of good-quality workout shorts that don’t bunch up around your crotch and shoot up your ass crack. Those aren’t the kinds of adjustments you need to make during class. And please make sure the pants fit your waist snugly. Going shirtless during yoga may be annoying, but dropping your pants can be a misdemeanor.