When Your Teachers Leave

May 9, 2013

teacher adjusting student I was happily settling on my mat for my Saturday morning yin class a few weeks ago when Dido sat down on a bolster at the front of the room, looking serious. Usually, her mood never travels south of jolly, so I knew something was up.

She said, “I’m not even sure how to begin to approach this…”

Uh-oh. 

Fortunately, what she announced was, on the whole, happy news. Her husband had gotten a job in California, one that he’d been aiming at for a long time. They’d be moving in a few weeks. Obviously, she wouldn’t be able to teach us anymore.

So even though she and her family were about to undertake a great (and hopefully profitable adventure), this news still left me feeling sad. When I moved back to Austin a little less than two years ago, I was pretty well broken, financially, spiritually, and physically. All the yoga practice in the world—and I’d pretty much tried everything—hadn’t been able to save me. I arrived in town with no teachers and no practice, other than what I could persuade myself to do when I rolled out my mat on my dirty livingroom rug.

But I had an intention: I was going to find some good teachers, and I was going to make yoga work for me. A good local mix quickly developed, but Dido had a good-humored, no-nonsense approach mostly devoid of New Age woo-woo, particularly when it came to my physical injuries. She gave me some very practical, easy suggestions, tailored to my specific practice, and I soon started to feel a lot better. Though my practice wasn’t as superficially intense as it one had been, I felt better, and more at ease in my body.

So that went on pleasantly for a year and a half. Then, essentially overnight, it ended. Almost simultaneously, I got an email from my beloved yoga teacher Patty, who’d run the one-room Los Angeles studio that had been my yoga home for years. The landlords were jacking up her rent, and she’d be shutting down operations at the end of June. So now, suddenly, in addition to losing my main teacher in Austin, I also had nowhere to practice when I visited friends and family in Southern California.

These losses made me wonder why I need yoga teachers at all. I don’t turn to them for “spiritual” reasons. That feels a little cultish to me. Once you start calling someone spiritual, it creates attachments. Idols always fall. I also don’t use them for exercise. If I was just looking for that, I could get my bike out of the garage.

But I do need teachers, for an extremely radical reason: So they can teach me something, preferably something specific. For Patty, it was certain alignment principles derived from her long study of Iyengar yoga, and also how to create a loving, unpretentious community among your students. Another teacher in L.A., Mara Hesed, taught me the rudiments of the Ashtanga Yoga Primary series in a makeshift studio in her tiny apartment. Richard Freeman, who conducted my teacher training (probably against his better judgment) refined that Ashtanga series and taught me a ridiculous amount of stuff about pranayama and Buddhist philosophy and anatomy and meditation and the Upanishads, among a multitude of other topics. It was the best training.

Dido, my teacher in Austin who is now no longer my teacher in Austin, had her own set of knowledge, from which I was happy to glean. Before she left, she did a 12-hour weekend workshop, which I attended. I learned how to prop students in restorative poses, how to put together a Yin Yoga sequence, and how to write a basic yoga nidra script. No one had ever taught me that stuff before. And now I have it, until I die, or, more likely, until my marijuana habit robs me of my memory.

The departure of one of my favorite teachers has given me a lesson in impermanence. No experience, pleasurable or unpleasurable, enriching or moronic, lasts forever. You just need to glean what you can from the moment and move along. Also, don’t forget to express gratitude.

Thanks, Dido.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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Suffering is Part of Life—That’s Why We Do Yoga

April 25, 2013

man standing on rocks by oceanLast Friday, at noon, I took a yoga class. The Boston manhunt was in full swing, but there was nothing I could do about it; I was more than 2500 miles away. The night before, I’d stayed up until 2 a.m. listening to the  police scanner online. Beyond the fact that I have some acquaintances in Boston (all of whom were totally unharmed), the situation essentially had nothing to do with my life. But I still needed a break, because it was making me crazy.

Last week, it seemed like the world  degenerated into a chaotic mess of explosions, lockdowns, and political disappointments. The air had become palpably suffused with dread and misery. And, because I’m a nerd, I immediately thought, “What does yoga have to say about all this?”

Well, I’m here to tell you. Though your day-to-day classes are mostly concerned, as they should be, with hip-opening and backbending, yoga is all about suffering, or, more specifically, the alleviation of suffering. The ancient sages, from the Buddha on down, correctly surmised that suffering is the prima facie baseline human condition. They developed the amazing art and science of yoga to help us get through our crummy lives.

According to my teacher Richard Freeman, a learned man to be trusted in such matters, yogic concepts of suffering can be broken down into three basic categories. First, there’s suffering that comes from yourself. We constantly say things to ourselves that make us unhappy: “I suck at my job,” “I’ll never find love,” “I don’t like how I look,” on and on toward infinity. Yoga is about untying your mental knots and dissipating those essential misinterpretations.

Then, there’s suffering inflicted upon you directly by other people, via cruel or indifferent thoughts, or even violent actions. We’re hurt every day by our parents, our spouses, our siblings, our children, our partners, our friends, or random honking people in the Safeway parking lot. Occasionally, those who harm you do it deliberately, but most often, it’s accidental. They’re too busy dealing with their own mishugas. Yoga helps because it allows you to be both more compassionate about other people’s suffering, but also less reactive when they strike out at you.

The third category is suffering inflicted upon you by the world, which never lets up its assault.  Your roof leaks. You’re bitten by mosquitoes while walking your dog. Your flight to Charlotte gets delayed for two hours because of sequester cuts. A meteor fragment strikes your small Russian village. Or you’re caught up by a week’s worth of relentlessly bad current events news.

As if the terrors of physical reality weren’t enough, we also all exist inside a virtual world of endless chatter, opinions, fear, and violent images. Yet we need to remember that the media, though it’s certainly part of reality, isn’t really happening to us. While Twitter can occasionally be fun and helpful, most of the time, it represents little more than a swarm of word mosquitoes. It distorts our perception of reality, and therefore spreads suffering.

For the victims of the Boston Marathon violence and their families and friends, suffering is real and tangible, and we all must extend our hearts to them. The same goes to the people directly affected by the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, and of other violence all around the world. But for the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, last week was just a macabre show, full of gore, heroes, villains, and bumbling comic-relief CNN reporters,  a carnival of needless anxiety and tiny sufferings magnified ten thousand times.

That’s why, in times of news lunacy—especially if that lunacy isn’t directly affecting us—we should turn to yoga, if we’re so inclined. This doesn’t mean we should ignore the news. If there are political actions to be taken or opinions to be stated, then we should do as conscience compels. But regardless, quietly sitting with our breath and our bodies helps enormously, without fail.  So last Friday, I took a good yoga class, an hour and fifteen minutes of vigorous exercise, calm breathing, and a Savasana where I gently snored away the previous night’s police-scanner-induced anxiety.

When class ended, the manhunt was still on in Boston, and would be for many hours still. But from where I sat, the sun was warm, the trees were green, and my hips were sore. Despite its endless and eternal tendency toward misery, the world still moved forward. Then some jerk honked at me in traffic because I’d stopped at a yield sign to wait for a blind person to cross the street. But I didn’t let it get to me.

He was just suffering.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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The Yoga Trap

April 11, 2013

man in meditationIt’s easy to practice non-attachment when things aren’t going well. My failures don’t define me, you think. They’re temporary blips on the path toward something better. My relationship problems, my professional problems, my family struggles, my poor health: They aren’t me. 

But what about when things are going well? Can you non-attach then? If you’re madly in love with the perfect person, or if you’re having career success, or if you’re making a lot of money, it’s not quite as clear-cut to say that these things aren’t me, because you want to believe that they are, that you’re awesome and unique. But you’re not, at least not in the way that you think.

Yoga helps you get through the tough times in your life, but you need it during the good times just as much, because that’s when the ego threatens to disrupt your equilibrium. And it becomes doubly true when you succeed at yoga itself. When you start to think you’re good, you start to get into big trouble. As my teacher Richard Freeman likes to say, “yoga sets traps.”

This came to mind last week when I read a New York Observer story about Jared McCann, a two-time U.S. National Yoga Asana Champion who is, apparently, our next big yoga star. In the article, they called him “Yoga’s New Messiah.” Obviously, that title was bestowed with more than a little irony, but it’s still upsetting to hear such a sentiment. McCann is a glamorous former heroin addict with abs that ripple like estuarial waters in the wind. He’s a studly dude. It’s dangerous to follow such a person, but it’s probably a lot more dangerous to actually be such a person.

Despite constant warnings to the contrary, and despite the seemingly endless stream of scandals that topple yoga teachers who ascend to a lofty perch, we continually want to place them on a pedestal, to proclaim them as rock stars, as something special. Witness a recent New York Times article that dubbed Colleen Saidman Yee the “first lady of yoga,” whatever that means. I don’t know Saidman Yee, have never met her, and probably never will, but I sympathize with the position that article put her in.

While it means nothing now, 10 years ago, I had a run of two or three books that got me a lot of attention, even if they never earned me a lot of money. I was a guest on The Daily Show and profiled on CNN. The New York Times gave me full-page book reviews. Nightline did a feature on my family life. And it was really bad for my ego. While I never totally believed the press, I believed it enough. It messed with my mind. I couldn’t detach from all the hype.

Things were going well for me, but I couldn’t enjoy them. I couldn’t see clearly. My mind was clouded  by the simultaneous praise and criticism that I was getting from all corners. I got confused. I did drugs. I said stupid things and ruined more than one friendship. And that happened when my life, and my career, were supposedly at their height.

Only after I unrolled the mat for the first time and started practicing yoga regularly was I able to finally see that all the good things that had happened to me, as well as all the bad things that were starting to happen, weren’t about me. My “life,” as I perceived it, was just a series of random events. My real self, wherever and whatever that involved, was something grander and higher, which I could occasionally and briefly access through diligent practice.  Yoga, if it does its job right, makes you humble in the face of the universe’s infinite mystery.

The same is true for you as well as for “rock star” yoga teachers. No matter how many followers they have, no matter how much money they make, no matter how awesome their trademarked asana systems might be, they’re still people, just like you, battling their ego-structures and trying to figure things out.

Idols have no place in ordinary life, but they have even less place in yoga, which is about freeing yourself from your attachments to the artificial systems that are set up to distract us all from the pure happiness that’s our birthright. We’re all one, on the mat and off. The sooner we start to realize that, the sooner we’ll free ourselves from the yoga trap.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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So Many Yoga Technologies

March 28, 2013

hst052I got an email recently from a young woman, distraught because a knee injury had derailed her yoga teacher training. “I often feel defeated and hopeless about the whole situation,” she wrote, “and it makes me want to scream.”

Well, that’s totally understandable. I blew out my left hamstring in the middle of my teacher training in 2010, which was not only physically painful, but also a bitter pill for my ego, which had begun to become obsessed with my asana awesomeness, to swallow. This young woman said that she had to start over, but that’s not exactly true.

I’ve said it here before, and elsewhere, and so have lots of other people: Yoga is not about the poses. Just look at the recent public humiliations of Bikram Choudhury and John Friend, two modern asana masters, and that fact should become obvious. Those guys mastered their physical “systems,” but some of yoga’s deeper lessons seem to have gotten obscured along the journey.

When I wrote the woman back, I advised her to practice meditation, and pranayama, and even just to practice being nice to people. There are other limbs to the yoga tree, I said. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, while not an unwise suggestion, it was somewhat incomplete. Of late, I’ve begun to understand that yoga is way deeper and more complex than I’d ever realized. It ‘s almost like a bottomless well.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk and a kind-of asana class at a yoga conference in Houston. After that was over, a friend and I went to hear a lecture by Master Del Pe, an eccentric “pranic healer” who lives in the area. Now, Master Del Pe may very well be a snake-oil salesman. The bio on his website claims that he received his training from “4 advanced masters from the Himalayas and Asia.” Beware the man who’s unspecific about his spiritual lineage. At the same time, he had some fascinating things to say about the chakra system, taught me several mudras I’d never experienced before, and had a ballroom full of people doing exercises that mixed pranayama with martial-arts stretches. I felt fantastic when it was all done.

“So many technologies,” my friend said.

There are indeed. As Hamlet says to his dear friend Horatio, “there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

A couple of years ago, another friend of mine took a month-long business trip to India. The stress of work and travel and the overwhelmingness of daily Indian life took a toll on him. After a couple of weeks, he was feeling lousy. So he went to nearby Pune, to seek help from the great B.K.S. Iyengar. He walked straight into Iyengar headquarters, where he found the ancient master at his desk, doing paperwork.

“I need to do some yoga,” he said.

Mr. Iyengar doesn’t offer walk-in privates, but he did send my friend to a nearby shala. The guy running the place took one look at my friend, pointed to a couch, and said, “go lie face down over there for an hour.” My friend did, and when he stood up, he felt a lot better.

This, too, is yoga. We think we need to contort and sweat and exert and get all serious about everything, but sometimes we just need to lie down for an hour. So if you get injured, don’t worry. There’s almost certainly a yoga technology out there just for you.

 

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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No Depression Yoga

March 14, 2013

namasteA couple of weeks ago, I taught a class at a yoga conference in Houston. The first person there was a young guy, probably in his mid-20s, who approached me sheepishly.

“I came straight from a microbrewery,” he said. ”I thought you might appreciate that.”

It was late afternoon on a Saturday, so who was I to judge?

“Cool,” I said. ”I like beer.”

In any case, we weren’t there to talk about microbrews. He’d been doing yoga several times a week for nine months, he said. It had really helped him deal with stress, and to sleep better.

“I’m also using it for depression,” he said.

“I can relate,” I replied.

He looked surprised, but it was true. Despite the cheery, trouble-free façade I present to the world, I suffer from depression. I have since I was a teenager.

For decades, “The Noonday Demon” would descend without warning, clouding my mind with misery. It didn’t matter what my personal, professional, or family circumstances were at the time. Blackness consumed my heart and despair ruled my days. I stayed in bed until dusk, unable to move, to speak, even to think, sobbing at random intervals and unable to see through the fog.

Sometimes the depression would take the form of anger, not sadness. I couldn’t control my emotions; I got into bar fights; I lost friends. And I probably blew any number of career opportunities. It’s hard to say. I was too depressed to properly evaluate.

I’d like to say, “then I discovered yoga and all was healed,” but that’s not exactly how it went.  First, I went on an antidepressant called Wellbutrin. And it worked great. A month passed, and I didn’t cycle down at all. Then it was two months, and then six, and I rarely felt sad, not even remotely. There were drawbacks. It felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest all the time. I was hornier than a high-school sophomore. There were crazy bursts of energy followed by periods of complete exhaustion. My blood pressure shot up 20 percent.

After about three years, the pills stopped working so well. I upped the dosage, which only made the side effects worse. Soon enough, a little blackness began to bother my mind. One day, I quit the drug entirely. It was a risk, but I was fine. By then, I’d already started practicing yoga.

There’s a Sanskrit word I learned in Ashtanga school: Samskara. Perhaps you’ve heard it, too. It translates, literally, as “seed,” but in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali refers to it, more obliquely, as “negative sense impressions that cause suffering.” Everyone gathers their share of samskara in their lives; we all come to the mat with something we need to sweat away. But those of us who suffer from depression start with a little extra samskara. We suffer from the onset, whether anything in our life has caused that suffering or not. When we’re asked to participate in normal life, it’s unfair, like trying to play golf without your handicap. Yoga evens the score. It balances out the mental injustice.

When you practice yoga, it changes your brain chemistry. I haven’t done any research, or read most of the countless studies that prove this. I can only speak from direct experience. I’m not depressed anymore, at least not in any way that matters. Sure,  I have down days and still experience disappointment. But the formless, causeless misery that only a true depressive can understand is gone, completely. Yoga practice did this for me. What else could it have been?

Occasionally, I feel a little  random sadness creeping in along the edges. When that happens, I get to the mat as soon as I can. When I do, I’ll acknowledge the depression and not try to push it away. Fighting it can be worse than just acknowledging the battle. Those generally aren’t very fun hours, but when they’re over, I feel such sweet relief.

So yeah, kid, I can definitely relate. Let my heartwarming story be your guide. Just keep practicing, and you’ll get better.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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Rock ’n’ Roll All Night, Yoga Every Day

February 28, 2013

guitarist on stageTen years ago, I started a band. We made  loud, stupid, angry comedy rock, played shows to mostly tiny crowds, and recorded an album (on a bankrupt label), that sold 400 copies. A disastrous nationwide van tour left me with an empty bank account, a torn meniscus, and a near-addiction to Vicodin. There were some good times, too, but mostly, like Iggy Pop once sang, no fun. The project collapsed, and I was staring at the bottom of a deep well.

Soon after, just in time, I took up yoga. The sutras talk about samskara, or negative sense impressions that cause suffering. Well, I had samskara up to my eyeballs. The drugs, the drinking, the stress, and my plainly rampant egomania filled me with unhappiness. It was time to mellow out and leave my febrile dreams of the rock ’n’ roll life behind.

This happened gradually, but it definitely happened, and I was happy to feel the changes. My body grew stronger and more flexible, and my mind grew clearer. By degrees, I became a happier person. That’s often the result when you practice yoga. But there was one problem.

I missed the music.

Everyone around me seemed to be grooving to Michael Franti and MC Yogi and Jai Uttal. A massive kirtan festival bloomed in the California desert like a thousand cactus flowers. My life became a musical miasma of sugary devotional chanting and one-note invocations to gods I didn’t believe in. When I heard teachers telling me to “rock my asana,” I abstained, because I didn’t trust their taste. I’d seen The White Stripes play in a basement and Joe Strummer fronting The Pogues. I knew what real rock looked and sounded like, thank you very much, and it didn’t much resemble the yoga I’d grown to love.

Then, miraculously, the rock returned to my life. A year and a half ago, I moved back to Austin, Texas. Quickly, without any real effort on my part, the band reunited. A local record label agreed to re-launch our album. We recorded a new song. And we got booked to play two relatively high-profile gigs during South By Southwest.

In most ways, this has nothing to do with yoga. None of the guys in my band practice, nor do they have any interest in doing so. I did change one lyric in one song so I could make fun of Bikram, and I referred the head of the record label to my yin teacher to help him rehab from knee surgery, but that’s been the extent.

But in other ways, this revival has everything to do with yoga. When my band incarnated the first time, I was full of hopes and dreams and fears. This expectation generated mega samskara and made me very unhappy. Now, though, I’m approaching every rehearsal and every step without expectation. I’m merely enjoying the experience, feeling the wail of the guitars and the drums vibrate my bones, laughing with the guys, drinking a beer. I’m creating something, no matter how pointless and silly.

Living in the moment, without expectation, is the essence and soul of yoga, no matter what you’re doing. Now, when I’m playing with the band, I’m filled with a simple joy, with the unique sensation of being alive. That may or may not have an effect on the final product. But if you’re one of the about 50 people who will see The Neal Pollack Invasion play this year, I recommend not standing too close to the stage. We can get kind of loud and I’ve been known to spit beer.

Also, I can guarantee there won’t be any kirtan. 

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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That Clown in the Back Row

February 21, 2013

man playing around in yoga classA guy dropped me an email a few weeks ago. It read, simply: “Do yoga teachers ever wish that clown in the back of the class would never come back?”

My initial thought was that it’s very difficult to practice yoga while dressed as a clown. The makeup runs when you sweat and the large shoes and baggy pants make it very hard to transition between poses. On the other hand, the large red nose does make for an excellent drishdi. 

After I was done totally cracking myself up, I thought, most yoga teachers are in no position to wish any of their students away. Unless they’re in one of a dozen studios in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, they’re not exactly playing to a full room. At least that clown in the back of his class took the time to leave the house.

And then, like Dorothy’s Scarecrow, I thought and thought some more. What does it mean to be a “clown” in yoga class? Are you putting whoopee cushions on the teacher’s mat? Or are you just feeling out of place and insecure? When I lived in Los Angeles, I practiced with my teacher Patty once or twice a week. It was my unannounced role in the class to occasionally drop a joke, and it became an accepted part of the routine. I didn’t lay it on too thick, or interrupt her when she was talking. But occasionally, in a blank space or a transitional moment, or when things were seeming difficult, I’d see an appropriate moment for a one-liner. And it was fine.

Now, Patty is a long-term friend, and she’s also someone who actually thinks I’m funny. I wouldn’t just walk into any Tom, Dick, or Shiva’s class and start cracking wise. That would be rude. But it’s ridiculous to think that there’s no place for a “clown” in yoga.

Why does yoga have to be such a self-serious enterprise all the time? When you look at the idols of Ganesha that grace the altars of nearly every studio, is he frowning? Does he look unhappy? Of course not. He’s smiling, usually subtly, not like an idiot, but definitely like he’s in on a gentle joke. It’s as though he’s thinking, I see all you Type-A Westerners in your $100 pants desperately trying to gyrate your way toward enlightenment. He’s charmed by how cute and earnest everyone is, when all they really need to do is just sit quietly and smile like him and breathe calmly. Also, maybe they should stop eating breakfast pastries.

My teacher Richard Freeman always says that yoga should be done with a bit of a sense of humor. It’s an absurdly comic enterprise that we mortal humans, with our imperfect bodies and our deeply imperfect minds, have undertaken. The fact that we dare to even think that we can approach some sort of “divine union” through our practice is the essence of comedy. And yet it’s also kind of possible.

If you can laugh at yourself and your endeavors, that means that you’ve begun to realize the absurdity of the “self” that you’ve created. That’s one of the main goals of yoga practice, to break down the constructed layers of your personality so you can get in touch with the higher aspects of your nature, in both grand and subtle ways. Once you begin to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, then that all-important deconstruction has begun. So teachers should welcome the occasional (respectful) joker in the room. When it comes to yoga, whether we sit in the front or the back of the class, we’re all clowns.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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Knowing My Limits

February 7, 2013

Uttanasana with bent kneesA few weeks ago, at my regular Wednesday night class, the instructor asked us to do some partner work. When improperly deployed, which it often is, partner yoga is just a lazy time-filler, wherein you end up sitting down, pressing the soles of your feet against a stranger’s, and moving your torso rhythmically while knocking your spine out of alignment. In this case, though, our experienced teacher just wanted us to help each other sink deeper into Chair Pose.

The other youngish, strongish guy in the class got assigned to me. The teacher gave us very specific instructions. We were supposed to hold each other’s wrists in a certain way and then do something with the shoulder blades and then pull or sit or stand firm. Actually, I didn’t understand what was supposed to do, and therein lies my problem.

I’ve been consistently practicing physical yoga for nearly a decade now, and have had the privilege of studying with some of the finest teachers in North America. In 2010, I completed one of the toughest, most exclusive teacher trainings around.  I’ve taught classes and workshops from coast to coast.

And I wouldn’t understand how to give my students serious adjustments if you guaranteed me a $1,000 a body.

My yoga, whether I’m practicing it or teaching it, happens very slowly, one pose at a time. But it’s not Iyengar Yoga either, where the physical instructions are so detailed that you feel like they’re trying to turn you into an android. Honestly, I don’t understand how those teachers who do complicated vinyasa flow classes constantly sooth out their physical instructions. I’d go crazy after five minutes.

Lifting, lowering, sliding, externally rotating, internally rotating: Very little of it makes any sense to me. Teachers will correct me one day, and the next day I’m still making the same mistake. It took me five years to learn how to plant my back foot during Warrior II. So how am I supposed to tell a student what to do?

The answer is not to teach anything I don’t understand. For instance, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of basic pranayama techniques, so I give detailed breathing instructions at the beginning of class. I also understand, from my own experience, that if you bend your knees a bit in Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend), it’s not as hard on your lower back and you also preserve your hamstrings. A few tumbles have led me to understand to draw your elbows in close during Headstand to give yourself a stronger base. You can only teach what you know. If I’m a little slow on the physical uptake, then I need to teach like that, with sincerity.

One of the great side benefits of yoga is that I’ve come to realize how my brain works. For many years, I had trouble telling my right from my left. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 16 years old. If my kid wanted me to build Lego sets or do puzzles with him, I simply wouldn’t be capable. But for good or bad, he’s inherited my lack of interest and ability in the minute physical details. This used to torment me, but now I deal with my deficiencies with acceptance, most of the time. There’s room in yoga for clumsy incompetents, too.

So on that evening in class, I went first, letting the other guy give me the necessary adjustments, and he did a great job. Then it was my turn, and I muddled through, not hurting the guy, but not giving him the full benefits of the pose, either. So I called the teacher over, and he took my place and gave my fellow student what he needed. Sometimes, you just have to know when to call in the yoga cavalry.

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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A Yoga Room of One’s Own

January 17, 2013

Eighteen months ago, I was renting a house on a hill in Los Angeles. It was a modest house, and a modest hill, but I loved living there. I had an office, with its own bathroom, on a second story. Two small private decks gave me views of the mountains and Dodger Stadium and downtown. I could open the French doors, on just about any given day, and feel cool breezes on my back as I wrote, or as I pretended to write.

Almost every day, I did yoga up there.

Anyone who’s ever had a consistent home practice knows the importance of space. When you’ve got the yoga bug, you’re more likely to unroll the mat when you feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed in your environment. Up there in that room, I worked on my yoga, quietly and alone. Some days I did very aggressive sequences. Others, I just did 20 minutes right before bed. I would sit and meditate for up to an hour, listening to the rustling leaves, the birds, and, because it was Los Angeles, the endless scream of the leafblowers. I was so happy up there in my room; I just wanted to stay in it forever, doing yoga, vaporizing pot, and writing.

Then, for reasons that I don’t want to go into here, we had to leave town, dramatically, traumatically, and almost overnight. We moved back to Austin, Texas, a nice place to live by most standards. But we ended up in an old, drafty house, the most decrepit place I’ve lived in 20 years. We’re still here.

The house is small. There’s nowhere to store our stuff, and we don’t have a lot of stuff. Our old house had never been particularly clean, but in this one, every corner is taken up by boxes, or crates, or piles of laundry both dirty and folded. It’s a hard place to love, and a harder place to practice yoga.

Not only am I uninspired, I also have no space. My small office is crammed with furniture. I practiced in the yard for a while, but then our erratic landlady dumped a pile of gravel back there, so that was out. A couple of times a month, I’ll clear a corner of the living room and do my Sun Salutations or follow along to a DVD. But the floor is cold and dirty and I keep hitting my hands on the bookshelves. For these reasons, yoga is mostly a road game for me right now.

There are countless situations in the world more tragic than “middle-aged guy doesn’t like his house.” We’re hardly trapped forever. When our lease runs out, we’re going to leave. But as always, I’m trying to learn some larger yoga lesson from the experience.

I went from my favorite house as an adult to my least-favorite, from an ideal location to practice asana and meditation to a terrible one. But yoga teaches us that all situations, from the most exalted to the very low, and everything in between, are worth contemplating. When I think about the house I loved and the house I loathe, I have to remember that neither of them were my house. They were just spaces I was renting, kind of like our bodies are spaces that we’re just renting. They’re vehicles for us to observe the world as it changes around us, to experience suffering and joy, fitness and sickness, confusion and clarity. Your current situation, no matter how terrible, or wonderful, or dull, will change. It will all expire, like a travel visa.  This is life’s only guarantee.

That said, someday I really would like a dedicated yoga room in my house. If that happened, I’d be so grateful. I’d even consider sweeping it occasionally.

 

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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The Yoga of Poker

January 3, 2013

Texas Hold 'EmI used to be a really bad poker player. There was no hand I couldn’t misplay, no ill-advised bet I wouldn’t make, no tell I wouldn’t reveal. People would invite me to their games just to take away my 40 bucks, because they knew that I’d lose. Poker made me miserable. It cycled me downward. But I kept sitting at the table, determined to get better.

These days, I’m still not a particularly good poker player. But I don’t lose as much money. Occasionally, I even win a little. Why have I improved? Partly, it’s because I’ve played thousands of hands, online, in casinos, and at home games. People who I trust have given me advice, and I’ve read some books.

But mostly, I credit my limited poker progress to yoga.

At first, they seem incompatible: Poker, with its reputation for late nights, cigar smoke, foul invective, drunkenness, and ruinous financial loss; and Yoga, designed to purify the body and clarify the mind. But I’ve found myself able to reconcile them without too much trouble. As one wise teacher once said to me, “yoga makes whatever you do next better.” And that includes playing poker.

First, and not insubstantially, practicing yoga has allowed me to be able to sit at the poker table for long periods of time without becoming twitchy and uncomfortable. Poker isn’t a sport, really, but it does require a lot of physical endurance. The final table at this year’s World Series, with millions of dollars at stake, went more than 12 hours. That would challenge even the most serene vipassana master.

More importantly, though, yoga philosophy has helped me deal with poker anxiety. The sutras teach that you must approach every situation mindfully, but without attachment to results. Where better does that apply than in poker?  The game demands that you devote your full attention to the present moment. If you don’t, you risk total destruction. But even when you play perfectly, you can still lose if fate isn’t on your side that night. Random forces can destroy you at any moment. We’ve all dropped money to a giggling noob on a lucky streak. As Patanjali says, you have to, no matter what, “acquire contentment.” And that doesn’t come when you cash in your chips.

I can think of countless other ways that yoga has helped me enjoy poker more: Where once the game was a source of anxiety about losing money, now it’s about hanging out and having a good time with friends. I know my limits and don’t push beyond them. In yoga poses and in poker, you must know when to hold and when to fold. May Shiva forgive me for that last sentence.

Poker, like yoga, and like everything in life, is an activity with no endpoint, no real goal. It is random and fun and should be enjoyed in its true nature, even if that nature involves getting consistently, and for no good reason, raised on the flop by a sweaty, alcoholic weirdo. As Pattahabi Jois often said, “practice, practice, practice, and all is coming.” Though I doubt even guruji would have felt that way after getting beaten by a nut flush on the river.

 

Neal Pollack is the author of Downward-Facing Death, a serialized Kindle yoga murder mystery, the memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, and the self-published novel Jewball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. You can find out more about him at nealpollack.com or follow him on Twitter.

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