"I love this class," Erich Schiffmann tells about 40 of us who gathered at Exhale in Venice for a class called Free Form Yoga. "Free form means instead of me telling you what to do, you do what you've learned to do after doing what someone else told you to do." Sounds complicated but it's really quite simple; do whatever you feel like doing, just don't bug anyone else.

We start with a meditation and I'm immediately lulled into a calm state by Schiffmann's hypnotic, soothing voice. He's an unsung yoga hero here in Los Angeles with a loyal following among those who don't expect to see him on magazine covers or to release slick DVDs. Instead, he's a proponent of helping students find the teacher within which is exactly what we do while listening to an eclectic soundtrack that includes Bahramji-Sufi Safir, the Beatles, Roberta Flack, Eddie Vedder, Sinead O'Connor and yoga classics by Krishna Das and Jai Uttal.

The goal of all this? I’ll let Schiffmann explain it to you via the You Tubes because I’m not nearly as charming or entertaining.

All this to say, the class is liberating, fun and quite revealing.

Free Form class: last Wednesday of the month at Exhale Venice.

Poke around Schiffmann's website too. There's a swell community board with a wealth of information and lively exchanges.