slowga

i've been doing yoga for about eight years now. i practice more or less every day for between an hour and an hour and a half, usually in the early morning, sometimes in a class, sometimes with gabriel, sometimes with lots of others, mostly alone. a few years ago i trained to teach yoga at the kripalu center for yoga in lenox, massachussetts. at the time i really had little interest in teaching. in fact my decision to do a 200-hour yoga teacher training program was somewhat frivolous. i told myself i was deeply serious about yoga and needed to go deeper, but really i was looking for escape, something completely different, a hyperwarp to a distant galaxy with focus, clarity, physicality and good food!

the training was excellent. my two primary teachers, naresh and yoganand, were longtime yogis who had lived at kripalu when it was an ashram. they both practiced and taught yoga with unmistakable authority. however, my experience of yoga itself during the course was shallow. i did not experience epiphany, release or much of anything other than lots of sore muscles and a vague embarrassment that i seemed to be one of the only students not surfing deep emotional swells. i wasn't unhappy that i was losing weight, gaining muscle, growing limber and learning a lot of new-age vocabulary. all that was fabulous and i enjoyed checking out my new body in the full length mirror down in the basement men's locker room where it seemed many came to admire their own bodies and those of others (at least that was my fantasy, unyogilike as it was).

back at home, life returned to normal, meaning all the stresses and unresolved things that had complicated my life prior to hyperwarp into yogaland asserted themselves again. my life was remarkably the same, unchanged. i resolved to try teaching yoga and found a position at a local gym where i taught for about nine months, ironically in the same space that i had first taken a yoga class. i developed a loyal following of several students who told me they enjoyed and benefited from the classes. but, i found myself simply repeating what i'd been taught at kripalu and that grew stale very quickly. not much later, my own practice dwindled to a day or two a week, if that and it felt like a chore. i found myself not really caring at all about yoga, thinking about other things during practice, begrudgingly doing postures. the more i parroted what i'd learned in teacher training during my classes the more i realized how little i understood about yoga and how deeply shallow my experience of it was. i walked into a local clothing shop owned by a friend. she sported a tight-fitting "fuck yoga" t-shirt. i kind of gasped at first, but then i thought, yeah, fuck yoga. i stopped teaching partly because of conflicts but also because i felt fraudulent teaching it.

since then, slowly, i've dropped a lot of what i considered yogic discipline: i started eating meat (killing); i started having wine with dinner now and then (and recently even some martinis) (impurity); i started drinking coffee, even getting into a dunkin donuts coffee-in-the-morning habit complete with eco-unfriendly piles of styrofoam cups in the back of my car (more impurity!); and there's more. but, what's fascinating to me about this turn of events is that re-engaging my old habits (and dropping the superficial yogic ones) has brought me face-to-face with yoga.

how? well, in saying "fuck it all, i'm going to just be who i am, not try to be perfect" the yoga postures became real to me. i began to feel my limitations, muscles that were held tight by stress, fear, anger. postures seemed to intensify and filter my experience--if i allowed them to--providing feedback about myself. this has helped me realize that almost all yoga classes i've experienced move much to quickly for me. it takes me a long time to sense what's happening and without awareness yoga is meaningless to me. this new sense of yoga has more than once made me think about teaching again--i'd love to bring this slow yoga to others. but, i want to remain, for the time being, in research mode. i'm very much enjoying yoga as an experiment, as a kind of self-science that uses the body to enter the soul. after i've banged about with this strategy, and maybe cleaned up my act, perhaps then i'll teach again.