this is NOT yoga

“You don’t do yoga, yoga happens to you.” — Sharath Jois

Like falling in love.

And like love, yoga’s not easy. But, I’ll tell ya what, yoga’s certainly not crazy circus tricks, astonishing acts of contortion, or spandex clad group fitness classes where you’ll be encouraged to blossom your heart. Or your buttocks. (You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve heard!)

Getting your leg behind your head isn’t yoga. 

Don’t be scared off, yoga’s way deeper… and way cooler.

Let’s get away from what yoga isn’t and get to what yoga is

For clear a nice, definition of Yoga, I always err to the Yoga Sutras. Written by Patanjali a few thousand years ago, the underlying assumption of this seminal text is that the true state of human spirit is freedom, and that yogic practices brings us back to it.

The rub here is that we get all caught up. We start to identify with the world around us, defining ourselves by our bullshit. Our addictions. Our emotional baggage. Our physical baggage . Our attachments.

This is super problematic, because the self is totally not that: it’s in fact the opposite of that. Our true self isn’t our bullshit, it’s  freedom from our bullshit. But that’s still not a definition of yoga, huh?

Don’t worry, unlike me, the  The Yoga Sutras  handle all of this right off the bat.

First they tell you that “This is the teaching of yoga” in Sutra 1.1– throwing their clout around, makin’ sure you know that they’re the authority and,  and then BAM! They immediately follow with a definition. Sutra 1.2: “Yoga is the cessation of the fluxuations of the mind.”

Why do we need the mind to calm the heck down? So we can be observers to the world, seeing things clearly without prejudice. Thoughts are composites of our mind, our  intelligence, and our ego– all of which are created as reflections of stuff from outside the self. AKA: our bullshit.

When we’re free from our bullshit,  we’re doing yoga.

om is where the heart is

Looking to practice Ashtanga in the Washington, DC area? Gettin’ a little sick of me?

You’re in luck, as DC and Northern Virginia has a bounty of powerful, talented teachers… no wonder we have such an inspiring community of practitioners.

Open your heart to the discipline of freedom at one of these fine venues:

Embrace DC
1650 Columbia Rd. NW, 2nd FL Washington, DC 20009
202.525.1083

Who? Antonella Ancilloni (authorized)

Why? A Full Mysore Program, and its where I practice.  Need a led primary?
Wednesday: 6:15pm- Led Primary – Antonella

Ashtanga Yoga Center
4000 Albemarle Street NW

Who? David Ingalls and Keith Moore (authorized). Run the joint. Wendy and June take Wednesday and Saturydays, respectively.

Why? A Full Mysore Program! This studio is all Ashtanga, all the time. This is where I learned Primary series, and I couldn’t have more affection for the studio, the teachers, or the community. Tends to be more old shala than new shala.

Little River Yoga
North Studio
6025 Wilson Blvd Arlington VA 22205

Who? Tova Steiner (authorized) runs the joint with Peg Mulqueen (who I know you’ve heard me mention before) pinch hitting.

Why? If I lived in Virginia, this would be my shala.  This studio is chock full of Mysore and Ashtanga options. Check out the full schedule!

Flow Yoga Center
1450 P Street Northwest Washington, DC 20005-2048
(202) 462-3569

Who? Jen Rene and Gail Harris

Why? Jen knows her stuff up and down and runs a mysore room a few days a week. Gail’s Saturday morning led primary is not to be missed if you decide to *gasp* practice on a Saturday.

Woodly Park Yoga
2625 Connecticut Avenue Northwest

Who? Megan Riley

Why? A full mysore program. I can’t vouch for the authorized teacher who owns the studio, but Megan Riley is wonderful.

Your cheatin’ heart…

If you need to a break from the daily discipline of a set sequence, you can whet your bad-boy whistle here. I won’t tell the Ashtanga Police.

Yoga Chai
1744 Columbia Rd. NW 2nd Floor
202-746-YOGA (9642)

Who? Kristen Krash.

Why? She knows the body like a mechanic knows a car and the philosophy like a scholar. As close to a guru as I’ve ever known. Do I need to say more?

Yoga District
1910 14th St., NW, #1 & #4, DC 20009
202.265.9642

Who? Be sure to check out Steve Abate and Mike Girglia’s classes. They’re both fantastic.

Why? A Studio with heart. This place offers affordable and by-donation yoga classes in community-run yoga centers committed to eco-friendly practices. They have a handful of studios, but I’m partial the 14th Street location because it’s close to my house. I also love the one in Dupont.

My Little List

I started out brainstorming “10 Things I Love About India” in order to make a cute little Valentine’s Day post. Silly boy. Making a list of things that I love whilst here in India could have endangered a forest—who has that much paper?

After glancing over the list, I noticed how many “C” items there were… and so my Valentine’s Day photo hunt was born.

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so easy, so delicious

Buying a single cup, a single plate, and making selections for bed linens illuminated just how far away my old paradigm is while I’m here. Megan Riley said “It’s not like you need your margarita and wine glasses.” No, my one chai cup and my one drinking cup is perfect, thank you.

My first few days here I hedonistically enjoyed all things food: chapattis, curries, roti, rice, barfi, and naan. In short order, the gluten effected my arthritis. I’m in India to practice, and having stiff and immobile arthritic shoulders is not conducive to a juicy practice.

Adios, gratifying gluten gluttony.

Maintaining the gluten free lifestyle here hasn’t been hard, as there are so many food options on the street and in restaurants that are rice and lentil based. My skin refusing to clear and my mood’s instability belied that something else was amiss. After getting to practice on a Sunday morning around 4am and being unable to fold because of the bloat in my belly, I knew something else had to happen.

Inspired by a friend’s ability to remain raw in Mysore, I knew my paleo-vegetarian diet could be done, and done well. Cutting out the sugar, milk, and grains was intimiating, to be certain. But, if she can make it work, I knew I could, too.

As Antonella told me: you can do anything you set your mind to.

Learning how important maintaining my diet is for overall well being has really been a gift. My skin clearing back up, my mood stabalizing, my practice flourishing: paleo is right for me

Decadent meals aren’t a thing of the past. Check it:

Chocolate Paleo Pumpkin Pancakes
serves two

Ghee or coconut oil
3/4 Cup Almond Meal (for the calorie conscious, 1/2 cup works)
3/4 Cup Pumpkin Puree
4 Eggs (or flax substitute for vegans)
4 tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
2 pinch salt (to taste)
2 pinch stevia (to taste)
splash almond milk (optional)

Store Bought Ingredients:
1. Heat pan/skillet over medium-low heat. Use ghee or coconut oil to prepare pan.
2. Mix all ingredients together.
3. Pour mixture onto pan in circles no bigger than 3″.
4. When top is no longer super gooey, flip.
5. When browned to your liking (I like mine dark!), remove.
6. Enjoy!

Serve with almond butter on the side and top with a slab of ghee or coconut oil. I love this with a banana!

Put It Away

Wrong. In more ways than one. Cause it’s not about age. Its about ethics.

Regardless of what you’re teaching, for a student-teacher relationship to work, there is an inherent and necessary power dynamic. Transmitter of knowledge and receiver of knowledge. Implicit and necessary. If there isn’t, you’re not teaching.

And, obviously, if you’re not teaching yoga, you’re not a yoga teacher. You’re something else.

I wear many hats in my shala: bootcamp general, therapist,  standup comic. The army doesn’t think it’s a good idea to sleep with a commanding officer, and few folks would cosign shnogging your shrink. Heck, having worked in a comedy club for many years, I can tell you whole heartedly it is rarely a good idea to nail a comic (I kid!).

It doesn’t take an ethics professor to see that the underlying issues of power dynamics aren’t age specific.  And, as the adage goes, power corrupts (if you’re not vigilant). My students are off limits, though they are gorgeous, intelligent, and often quite in synch with my beliefs.

Why the line in the sand?

Because the aim of yoga is to allow the spirit to find it’s true nature as observer of the world– and its a teacher of yoga’s responsibility to guide the student towards that mark. The process itself is ugly, uncomfortable, and as wildly arduous as it is necessary.

Lust over trust? You can’t teach yoga that way.

As students (and every teacher is foremost a student), we work so hard to get tranquil thought; thought that isn’t corrupted by bullshit, tainted by the phenomenal world. According to the yoga sutras, uncorrupted thought comes through impartiality to virtue, vice, pleasure, and pain. Tranquil thought is free of sensuous passion… and I can’t help but ask, how many flings fill that critera?

I’ve got no fingers up.

A yoga teacher has to treat every student as a spiritual aspirant. Teaching methods not congruent? Fine. But to literally f*ck up and deteriorate an aspirant’s spiritual path by breeding insolvency? This doesn’t just make someone a bad teacher– it makes them something far worse.

To engage in a sexual relationship and not edit the student-teacher dynamic is an act of violence and dishonesty. But, listen, I know, it happens.

Lets be radical to the brink of hyperbole for a moment. If sleeping with someone who isn’t old enough to consent is called statutory rape, what do we call it when we sleep with someone who isn’t far enough along on their path to know better?

Spiritual rape?

Think that title is ugly? Remember the stakes.

Swami Sivananda says to “Bear insult, and bear injury” is the highest spiritual practice. Go ask a rape victim how easy that is. Teachers are human, and they make mistakes– but no amount of 200-hr trainings or branded yoga mats will make it any less wrong or the stakes any less high.

This Deserves A Massage, Right?

Perfectly timed to my adventures in Mysore, The New York Times has an article this week that discusses the science behind massage’s power to heal muscles. A somewhat regular user of body work, I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t the foggiest notion as to why massage works so damn well.

Why perfectly timed? I bent over backwards and grabbed my ankles today. Like Sharath said to me last week as we inched closer to my heels: “No fear, no fun.”

Indeed.

Way worse to imagine than my circus contortions, doctors found volunteers who agreed to exercise like crazy, then get cut. Delightfully gruesome. Here’s what senior author of the study, Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky, had to say:

“Vigorous exercise causes tiny tears in muscle fibers, leading to an immune reaction — inflammation — as the body gets to work repairing the injured cells. So the researchers screened the tissue from the massaged and unmassaged legs to compare their repair processes, and find out what difference massage would make… The bottom line is that there appears to be a suppression of pathways in inflammation and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis, helping the muscle adapt to the demands of increased exercise”

Less inflammation and more active cells equal faster recovery time– got it.

Having never received an ayurvedic massage, I thought a little rub-down would coincide nicely with the coming moonday. I was particularly excited for my session– I had heard great things about Ravi Kumar’s blend of traditional massage and ayurveda. For the price of 1000 rupees for a full session (nearly two hours for $20 American!) it seemed like a perfect no brainer.

Somewhere between the pleasure of the sandlewood’s scent and the opulence of it’s oil, things got a bit esoteric. As Ravi worked on my left leg, he identified something. He found a similar something in my right shoulder. “Emotion there,” Ravi said. “Old emotion.”

Lest I lose you in the new agey-ness of these notions, let me mention one Dr. Kelly McGonigal, PHD. A professor at Stanford, foxy buddhist, and a remarkable yoga teacher, she knows her shit. In her Google: Author’s talk about Yoga’s power to heal (well worth your time ) she points out that through yoga and mediation– not circus tricks and parlor poses– distinguishing between “useful” pain from “non-useful” pain becomes possible.

It’s a topic she know well, having suffered from once-delbilitating daily headaches for the past twenty years.

“People marvel at my aptitude for life saying things like ‘it doesn’t seem to be impacting your life’… because we have this idea that pain comes with suffering. Through yoga and mediation, it is possible to not have pain completely go away and still have your life back again. And sometimes the pain even goes away… even if you never knew what was causing the pain. And thats kind of the mystery of chronic pain.”

So it goes with pain. Perhaps it is as Ravi says: emotion there. He spent time working my left hip, moving my leg in a variety of patterns. I can remember feeling him draw patterns in the air with my knee like a child might with a sparkler at dusk. ‘Round and ’round, gently reminding me to “not tighten”. And then he found the painful spot. “Not tighten. Emotion there. Knee anticipates. Breathe.”

With a final rotation of my bent left leg in a poetic circle, Dr. McGonigal’s words lingered in stark contrast to the way that the pain did not. No pain. No holding. And yet, I had a fleeting feeling of expectation… anticipation. The memory of pain. Old patterns (on top of patterns).

Perhaps we can call these patterns samskaras?

And this brings us back to the Times article:

“Massage works quite differently from … anti-inflammatory drugs, which reduce inflammation and pain but may actually retard healing. Many people, for instance, pop an aspirin or Aleve at the first sign of muscle soreness. “There’s some theoretical concern that there is a maladaptive response in the long run if you’re constantly suppressing inflammation with drugs.”

Like the mystery pain in my hip, and the way my mind flinches before the pain actually registers,  I can’t help but wonder what other maladaptations swirl around. Physical and mental.

How many blackout drunk nights does someone need to have before they fix their shit? Emotion there.

The science of massage also reminds me to be grateful for the allies we have in this adventure towards our painless true nature– those that help guide us back towards healing instead of masking. Our body workers, our teachers, our trusted friends.

… and our scientists, for making me sound less new-age-section-crazy.

The Heat of Tapas

 ”I’m so stupid
‘Cause I used to live
In a fuzzy dream
and I used to believe
In  pretty pictures
That were all around me
But now I know for sure
That I was stupid
(stupider than stupid)”

– Madonna “I’m So Stupid”

You’ll have to forgive me for starting off what is to be a rumination on change with a quote from Madonna’s (*ahem* underrated) American Life album, but she’s been the backbeat for my Mysore trip. Something Madge seems to have fully wrapped her head around is, quite famously, transformation– she is defined by reinvention, no? Okay, perhaps she’s not such a bad place t0 start, as I can imagine the Material Girl saying that resistance to change is stupid… and I think she’s right.

First things first, lets get this out in the open right here and now: I have a really hard time with change.

It would be super easy for me to blame my own lust for permanence on being dealt raw hands– the loss of a close friend in early adulthood, troubling early romantic relationships, the normal stuff a post adolescent will undoubtedly run up against… perhaps you can relate? I mean, the circumstances are different, but c’mon: we’re all stuck with stuff that’s out of our control, and a damn common reaction is the urge to *hold on* even more tightly.

If my love for Ms. Ciccone didn’t clue you in, I’m no buddhist scholar. Over the years, I’ve explored some of the more pervasive overlaps of buddhist and yogic philosophies, specifically how the sankhya system often lines up quite nicely with the buddhist noble truths. The noble truths tell us that present suffering is rooted in our attachment to a false idea of permanence. And of course we know that nothing is permanent, right? We know everything is fleeting, changing: impermanent. And yet we still try our best to control. 

Why? Because change is fucking scary…

But not doing something simply because its scary is pretty fucking stupid, too.

Lets play with some yogic stuff for a second. In yoga, we have this idea of tapas,  which literally means heat. In the yoga sutras, we use it to mean discipline. In actual practice, its when we pay attention  Pay attention to what you might ask? Well, to everything from the little labels to the big preconceived notions– something as seemingly small as our left hamstrings flexibility, to something seemingly huge: like our personal identification as an addict.

This awareness is what can be considered the practicing of tapas, and the uncomfortable feelings running against the inertia of our notions can be viewed as a sort of heat. Our ability to return to the observance in the face of the ever growing heat  is our discipline.

This internal heat leaves little nonpainful (though often uncomfortable) burnmarks, little singed fingerprints, on the mind (and sometimes the body). This allows for the recognition of patterns.

The mind slowly begins to wake up to these fingerprints, the patterns, identifying them again when they come up. When we practice an awareness of our attachment to these artificial constructs, these little false permanences, we allow ourselves to become aware of their (and our!) true nature: everything is impermanent.

This is where we are given an opportunity for betterment! This shit is all temporary! By applying tapas we can slowly burn the patterns away with the heat of our own awareness. Sure, it can be scary, but after watching my Daddy work in the shed enough, I know that even the hardest metal melts when you get ‘em hot enough.

This can be at once thrilling and terrifying, but man, this is where things really start to get goooood! This is the begining of change– the not at all scary kind.

Through tapas, we’re capable of forging ourselves. This implicitly promises that you are not your bullshit– and man, just think how much freedom that offers you!

Don’t freak out, but I gotta tell ya: people die. Life goes to shit. People act like royal assholes. Within us all is a capacity for indescribable awfulness, just as there is an equally and diametrically opposed space for impossibly unlaudable depths of magnanimity and goodness…

And every single person on this planet will likely participate in both. Repeatedly. Its to be expected, and its okay.

We are all in the same circumstance, and I can’t help but think that this realization is beautiful. Impermanence is the great unifier.

When we relax, let go, and give permission for change, both in ourselves and others, it allows space for love, compassion, and understanding.

Is it terrifying? Yes. But embracing change is the starting point that we can create the space for both unconditional love and forgiveness. It allows the mind to step outside itself and become something else. It makes a “grudge” obsolete. It can turn a penchant for self hate into an opportunity for growth and enrichment.

But you have to put the work in. You have to stoke the fire. You have to burn away the bullshit.

This is why being resistant to change is so stupid– and some might even say dangerous– because becoming attached to our reductive labels, identifying with those aforementioned disembodied theories of self and otherness, locks us into the past and falsely appropriates a future…

…and this keeps us from appreciating the present. It keeps us from love. It keeps us from forgiveness. And it keeps us from ourselves.

I know how I want to go about things.

Man up. Fearing change is stupid.

(even if it is a little scary)

Who You Callin' A Cow? Moooooove it!

Have you ever noticed how many postures are named after animals?

Gomukasana? Cow-face pose (who you calling a cow?). Vatyasana? Horse pose. Lets not forget sleeping turtle, crow, nor rooster.

My dear friends, my trip to Mysore has reminded me of the humans connection to the animal world. Truly, our animal nature. When practicing with Sharath in the main shala, a led practice is held on Friday and Sunday morning. In order to ensure a relatively decent spot (ie: not on an overlapping piece of rug, or in the bathroom of the changing room [true story, me]), everyone tries to enter the queue early by arriving anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half early so as to “line up” for practice.

“Line up” is a dodgey term, because in reality we sit in a cascade of bodies down from the foyer (or, if you have a 4:30am start time, outside the shala gate) and into the street.

When it arrives at the auspicious hour, and it is time for class to start, we make moves into the main floor of the shala. What you might expect/want is for the group to move kindly and smoothly from the doors and into the foyer, graciously smiling as all of the ashtangis gingerly lay down mats in the main room, ready to engage in sacred sadhana.

What you actually get is 70% the aforementioned, and about 30% Pamplona Bull-Run Style Other. The other, in other terms: monstrous little PVC Mat wielding linebackers gunning for a quarterback named Sharath. Animalistic in their enthusiasm for a “good spot” in the room, they push, shove, tear and grind their way into the shala. Honeybadgers, the lot of them. They don’t care.

It rubs me the wrong, it strikes me as a little quiet violence. I’d far rather post pictures of animals.

So, here we are:

“For the full post: http://midcityyoga.com/michael-in-mysore-ashtanga-animals/”

From Michael in Mysore: Animals!, posted by Michael Joel Hall on 1/28/2012 (25 items)

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Bisibele Powder

My new favorite bit of deliciousness is bisibele powder– you can find at darn near any streetfood cart or stand around Mysore. The signature dish of Karnataka, Bisibele Bath, is a delight.

Being generally Paleo at home (and in my kitchen in my apartment here in Mysore), I’ve been experimenting with the lovely amalgamation of flavors in as many combinations as possible… except perhaps for the dish it was intended.

The combo is fantastic in everything (and makes the very best deviled eggs, ever). Feel free to modify, explore, and bastardize!

Courtesy of Indian Food from About.com

Enjoy!

The Cobbler's Creation

Growing up in rural Virginia, I was barefoot alot. *ALOT*

We had to be! Would you wanna get a hollarin’ thats louder than a dogfight at midnight for losin’  your best friend’s father’s wader in the woods again? I think not.

Back then, I could easily walk all the way from the Indian creek to the frog pond stepping over, atop, and through all manner of debris, stone, and grit. And even if we popped out of the woods, its not as though the roads were paved– in those days, the bottoms of our feet needed to be good and strong. Delicate, they were not.

But oh, how I hated putting on shoes.

And if I thought those shoes were an assault to my good ways, you hadn’t heard anything ’till it was time to put on socks. “But they *huuuuuuurt*,” I would cry, as though the fabric were made of sandpaper, and the aforementioned hollarin’s had become whoopin’s.

“I’m not gonna wear ‘em!” was a frequent impotent declaration in the Hall household, stubborn brat that I was. Woe, the battles of a nine-year old. My mama, as you can probably imagine, was always more than a little flummoxed, the poor woman, by this ridiculousness.  Patience of saints though they had,  neither mom nor dad humored these tantrums; yet, it didn’t stop me from wailing and threatening: “I’m never goin’ to school again!”

Picked on in grade school, clearly the best way to handle bullies was to exclusively wear black dress socks with your dollar store shoes. Unfortunately for the lunch time social encounters of a pre-tween Michael, the little stiched part of the forefoot would never stay put with typical white athletic socks, yet always seemed to with the black socks. Which do you think I wore?

Truth is true: the stupid socks really would give me blisters, melodrama aside. Thankfully, here I am, pushin’ thirty, and I’ve learned how to manage (if not mitigate) the discomfort of all sorts of shoe-nundrums: mostly, by virtue of the fact that I’m professionally barefoot (foreshadow much?).

Enter: India, the land of men’s shoes no larger than size 10…. and yours truly, ogre (or at least post lilipution Gulliver) that I am, wears a size or three bigger. What’s a boy to do?

Welp, me being a product of my parents, I bought the cheap 100 rupee plastic thongs (flip-flops), and hoped that the plastic would stretch out. This sterlingly stellar solution lasted less time than a game of tic-tac-toe, a unit of measure in line with the length of a sock-tantrum.

My feet started to look like half peeled sweet potatoes in short order. Megan suggested I get some shoes made, and my veracity towards all things non-western kicked in. For about the price of two omelettes here (and half the price of one in the States) a cobbler would construct sandels for me. Not unlike the street food, this is one of the best values I’ve found in India.

Dealing with Krishna the cobbler was an exercise in patience on both ends. In India, colors are generally not gender normative. Boys can wear pink, and girls can wear whatever they damn well please (my favorite, thus far: the little boy in a multicolor  ”I puke rainbows and shit lasers” shirt).

What does toe the gender line, however, is sparkle and shine. It was my turn to be a bit fluxxomed. To paint a less opaque picture, I should probably tell you that before leaving the states my toes got a coat of see-through sparkles so as to make my foreward folds more inviting. That said, it’ll come as no great shock that my favorite color is shiny. This was not agreeable to Krishna.

When I requested the most brilliant chunks of metal for the band, I was summarily told that it my selection was: “Awkward.”

Rude (not really, he was just trying to help).

Lest it be a black socks situation at the lunch table of Mysore, Krishna put up a good fight. I was not, however, prepared to fold. Finding some middle ground (after threatening to take my rupees elsewhere), Krishna and I settled on some ahem simple gold trim.

Less sparkle, more shiny, and we were all tickeled pink (a perfectly masculine color here!!).

Getting to watch my shoe’s construction has been one of my favorite experiences yet. By the by, they’re fabulously comfortable, too. I love India.

If you happen to be in Mysore and would like a pair of your own shoes made, Krishna is easy to find! Walking from the Shala towards 9th Cross, Make a left on 9th Cross. Krishna has the yellow stall on the right hand side before you reach the next road. He’s lovely, if a little biased against boys and shiny

Enjoy the pictures of my time with Krisha:

From Michael in Mysore: Cobbler Story, posted by Michael Joel Hall on 1/18/2012 (13 items)

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