Yoga as an Olympic Sport?

Apparently if Bikram has his way.

Neal Pollack, Slate, offers a dispatch Top Yogi from the 6th International Yoga Competition. He remarks - "Yoga has done more for my physical and mental well-being than anything else I've tried."

I steeled myself to bear witness to some sort of whacked-out yoga circus, and that's more or less what I got. But a lot of yoga culture feels weird and circuslike to me anyway, so I would have felt disappointed if it had ended up being otherwise.

Well if you're exposure to yoga is Bikram, it is wierd and circuslike and whacked out. It's also not yoga:

At the center of the weekend, wearing flashy suits and various fedoras, stood Bikram Choudhury, the animating force behind the competitive yoga circuit. Here's a man who's copyrighted his style of yoga (26 postures, repeated twice, in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit), sends cease-and-desist letters to those who dare flout the copyright, and, in interviews, summarily dismisses all other forms of American yoga while also bragging about his love for McDonald's and his large fleet of self-restored Rolls-Royces. He once famously told Business 2.0 magazine that his yoga was the "only yoga." When asked why, he said it was because he has "balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me." Not surprisingly, other yoga circles view him and his particular craft with everything from mildly dismissive amusement to a disdain coming close to disgust.

That sums up Mr. Bikram - but that's not why he disgusts me. Rather it's because he is popularizing only one very small part of yoga. Yoga has 8 limbs, or parts; the poses (asanas) are ONE part. One/eighth.

Regardless of the size of his balls, his pea brain can't apprehend. His ego is simply a symptom of his misunderstanding of all of yoga's component parts. If he understood yoga, his humility wouldn't enable him to say in a recent interview said that prop-heavy Iyengar yoga studios look like "a Santa Monica sex shop."

With out any sense of irony, Mary Jarvis, a San Francisco-based yoga-studio owner who was one of Bikram's first U.S. students, states:

"The more advanced a yoga posture is, the more humble the yogi should be," she said. "If somebody's really arrogant, I won't train them. They can have a great posture on stage and be a total asshole."

SO funny!

Yoga Journal Video on Romance Love and Yoga

A good friend and fellow yoga trainee attended the Yoga Journal conference in San Francisco last month and had a very funny, ironic (?) story about another attendee who appeared to be inebriated at 3:45 in the afternoon!

And now I've discovered that Yoga Journal produces small videos and this one is a treat - On Romance, Love and Yoga. YJ interviews Michael Franti, Scott Blossom, Tias and Surya Little, Rod Stryker and Gary Kraftsow. Cassandra Fox conducted these interviews at that YJ conference last month (and no one seems drunk on anything other than yoga - check out the first guy).

I found Rod Stryker and Gary Krafsow (who come at the end of the 8 minute video) the most helpful with constructive thoughts and perceptions.

Stryker describes the yogi who have partners who - egads! - don't practice yoga or don't practice as much or is not completely in synch - and who seem bothered by this. He dismisses that, suggests that those fixated on our partners' practices, or lack thereof, let that go. He urges us to be kind and be respectful to our beloved.

Kraftsow points out that we have to be fulfilled first and not look for fulfillment in the other. Yoga itself "says you have to do yoga for yourself no one can do it for you. Same lesson is true about successful, loving, romantic and passionate relationships...look for your own inner fulfillment and then share that with another."

Elizabeth Gilbert on the Creative Process

Some of you are aware of TED -  

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Most not in the know heard about Ted with the proliferation of Jill Botle Taylor's talk on her "Stroke of Insight," which you can watch here.   Last week, Bill Gates' 18 minute talk engendered some press because he released a swarm of mosquitoes during his discussion on malaria apparently as a visual aid.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray Love (which I reviewed here) gives a 18 minute talk about the creative process, which is actually pretty entertaining.   Just last week I posted an interview she did with the Seattle newspaper, which may also be of interest to her fans. 

You can watch here:

Yoga - The Reliable Raft

Gary Kraftsow has long been a hero of mine but I did not know of his own personal health "opportunity" until I read this piece, Radical Healing, in the current issue of Yoga & Joyful Living (formerly Yoga International). Kraftsow won't allow his brain tumor and surgery to be called an ordeal.

I've admired him because of the medical studies on yoga he conducted which got wide coverage -

Kraftsow may be best known as the architect of rigorous studies of yoga’s efficacy. He showed that yoga can alleviate chronic back pain in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, the results of which were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That's the sort of credibility yoga needs and won't garner with gym rats taking a weekend yoga teaching course and hanging out a shingle.

In the three hour teaching seminar I took with him, Gary Kraftsow also impressed me greatly with his knowledge base, intuition and approach. So I own both his books. Perhaps he simply resonated with me because of my own health opportunities. He articulated my experience. I feel I have a sense now of how and why.

Of his health crisis, he says, “I would never wish it on my worst enemy. But if it happens to you, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to grow.” In the hospital, when the haze lifted, Kraftsow discovered new depths of stillness. “The stillness of meditation is one thing, but this stillness—I hadn’t had any experience of it before,” he says.

I've said, and never lightly, that yoga saved my life. Not simply the poses, but all of it. This article on Kraftsow explains what yoga teaches beyond the asanas.

Kraftsow stresses two aspects of yoga - the individuality (which is the primary difficulty in conducting medical studies) and that yoga is more than the physical poses (asanas). He properly notes that asana is mentioned only twice in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

“My desire for all those who have only been exposed to the asana part of yoga is that they have an opportunity to appreciate the depth and breadth of this great tradition,” he says. “When you have a life-threatening or serious condition, you can’t rely on what you could rely on before. Yoga is like a raft that can help you go through these things. But in my case it wasn’t asana. It wasn’t even breathing. It was attitude, prayer. These are going to help you when you can’t do anything else.”

Just as illuminating, the piece fleshes out the Kraftsow's principles by following Ellen Fein's pilgrimage after she became ill. She came to study with Gary Kraftsow and he helped her. Regarding his teaching method -

“It’s so individual,” says Kraftsow. “You never know what it’s going to be, what gives somebody a sense of pleasure, fulfillment. What we as teachers are trained to do is read body language. When someone makes a connection to something that’s meaningful, they’ll light up. That’s like a clue, and then you’re like a treasure hunter. You follow it, try to bring it out, and help them make a connection to something that can give them some sense of joy.”

Here's just a clue to one part of his teaching which touches on the layers of the body (some translations call the layers sheaths).

The cornerstone of Kraftsow’s practice is pancha maya, a model of the human system referenced in ancient Indian texts. According to this model, also known as the kosha model, we are comprised of five dimensions or layers: the physical body (annamaya), the breath or life force (pranamaya), the intellect (manomaya), the personality (vijnanamaya), and the heart, which is the seat of bliss (anandamaya). In the days leading up to surgery, Kraftsow plumbed every dimension of his being.

Yoga teaches so much, so much that is valuable and helpful.

New Interview with Eat, Pray, Love Author

The Seattle Post Intelligencer's John Marshall did a recent interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.  

Topics covered include her nervousness preceding her appearance on Oprah; the status of her relationship with the Brazilian man she fell in love with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love; the nature of her fan mail and what she likes; what fame has been like; and what's she working on for her next book -  


The alchemy of "Eat, Pray, Love" is specific to that book. That was five years ago -- my life has changed since then, my voice has changed. I can reconstruct that voice, but that would not be authentic. Authenticity is what people want..

Enjoy. 

A Yoga Lesson for Blagojevich? Not Seriously.

A columnist at Huffington Post put together a tongue and cheek yoga lesson for former IL governor Rod Blagojevich.   The primary focus is the "monkey mind"   There's a list and a video.  

I think this does a disservice.  To yoga.  It trivializes yoga.  Her remark about supta virasana (reclined hero's pose) to me is out of line and not funny.   She obviously thinks it is as she repeats it twice.  That's aside from the fact that she doesn't demonstrate it properly adapted for the runner that every one knows that Blagojevich is.