Monthly Archives: December 2011

Speaking of my daughter – Lili, age 11 – here are two things that she has said in the past week that I think are particularly excellent. The first is ad-copy worthy, the second, maybe the title of a book?

1. On Saturday, Lili and I were walking to Candle Cafe with her cousin Maisie.

Maise said to Lili: Do you know how far we have to walk? (it was cold out).

Lili: I have no idea. Then about 30 seconds, Oh! We’re almost there!

Maisie: How do you know, you just said you didn’t know where we were going.

Lili: Because there’s Duane Reade, and Duane Reade is close to everything!

2. A couple of days before that, Lili and I were walking back from Candle Cafe (we eat there a lot), discussing karma, and how if you throw an action out into the world it will eventually come back to you. “I get it”, she exclaimed, “karma is action gravity!” Dig it. Perfect definition. Well said, Lili.

Funny cat videos, of course.

Here are two yoga endeavors that I find very inspiring. The first is a story about three brothers from Baltimore, Andy Gonzales, Atman and Ali Smith, whose father taught them yoga when they were kids. They came back to Baltimore as adults after finishing college, and found their suburb of Baltimore vastly changed – the community feeling they had when they were growing up had been replaced by violence, open-air drug markets and vandalism. When approached by a local school to coach football, they asked if they could teach yoga instead. The results were astoundingly positive. MSNBC has three video segments devoted to the story of these brothers, and are worth watching. I have included the one here that focuses on the studies that are being done on their program.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The second is a story about two women, Emily Holick and Heather Mason, who have created a yoga class for Medical students at Boston University. The class has a very interesting set-up (from the course description):

*One-hour of yoga/mindfulness practice with a specific theme
*15-minute discussion between lecturer and students
*15-minute lecture on the neurophysiological and psychological mechanisms underlying the practice of the day, tracing relevant and up-to-date research on the theme of the evening, and its potential relevance for doctors and their patients.

All the students enrolled in the course will become part of a study on yogas effect on their psychological and physical well-being.

The class sounds like it is a very balanced mix of yoga science and modern science – Holick credits yoga with transforming her life as a stressed out Med student – and Mason, a yoga therapist, has an abiding interest in the neuroscience of yoga. She understands that yogic principles of practice, like slowing down ones breathing rate, cannot help but have both physical, mental and emotional benefits:

Mason asks them to count their breaths per minute. She knows that the ideal count of five or six has been shown to increase heart rate variability, which can ameliorate problems like depression, epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder, and cardiac disease.

Also, as she embarked on her project, she saw the greater implications of teaching yoga to Med students:

… the first goal of MED Yoga was to let doctors know how yoga could help their patients, but then she realized how it could help the doctors themselves.

This is something that Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Initiative is working towards, too. The strength of these programs are in sync with the Medical maxim: physician, heal thyself. Why? Because after one has understood their own nature, and worked to bring oneself into a state of health and balance, the ability to help others heal comes with a much greater efficacy, level of compassion, and understanding.

It is clear from these two examples that there are indeed yogis who have embedded themselves in the world of science and education, and are making a difference from the inside out. The mind-body connection is not lost on them. Sometimes we need to know what it is that we are studying before we can make an honest appraisal of its benefits, or lack thereof.

I have read several very thoughtful responses to Deb Schoeneman’s NYT article that have been sent to me over the past few days. Deb was kind enough to send me a letter of apology if her article caused any hurt – which, truthfully, it did not. What it did was give us (the yoga community) an opportunity to try to turn the conversations about yoga in the mainstream in a different direction, to widen the dialogue and test ourselves to see where we really want to go with all of this. Yoga, as we all know, is infinitely lampoon-able. There are so many things that invite ridicule in the yoga world, in America and in India. And while we should be honest about these aspects, we also should be aware that by our own behavior we can drive the presentation of yoga in West in a different direction – away from the Fashion & Style pages, and towards pages that reflect its greater relevance.

In regards to the letter from Bryan Shull that Robbie sent to me, I completely neglected to link to Robbie’s website site: I apologize, Robbie! You can find him, and the work he does in the Richmond City Prison, here.

So, before I move away from this article and write about other things I find interesting, I wanted to mention two pieces written by my friends. One is from my fall-back blogger, Sheetal Shah, the Senior Director of the Hindu American Foundation. Apparently I blew all the political clout I built up with her on my NYT response by posting the Coldplay video (“Poor Ganesh!”, she said). But she does work out at, like, Equinox or something, so whatever – there is probably some great contradiction between posting a Coldplay video and pondering the presentation of Yoga in the West, but what can I say, it made me laugh.

Here is her response to the article. You can also see the HAF yoga stance here.

The second is from my friend Blake, who sent me a lengthy and highly thoughtful letter, of which I will quote just a little:

I think that a problem remains for those of us who have put this method into practice, and who have begun to experience its beneficial effects -clarity of mind, healthy body, strength of spirit; our work cannot be ‘finished’ with just ourselves, and not only for the reason that this method of practice opens into a continual process of refinement…  The problem that confronts us once our own personal relationships with this practice are ‘underway’ is the problem of our culture itself.  We simply cannot afford to sit back on our Zafus and watch as this whole shithouse of a society goes up in flames!  If what is at stake in Yoga is the non-apparent possibility of making intelligent decisions on a personal level, then what is at stake in contemporary culture is the apparent impossibility of making intelligent decisions collectively.  Beneath this veneer all manner of personal-scale pathologies are able to proliferate freely at the ‘highest’ levels of social responsibility, including government, civil service, ‘the media’ (apparatuses of mass communication), the family, schools (cruelty to children), the private sector (executive malfeasance), etc.  It seems to me that the delusional nature of power (power as a delusion!) that’s implicated in all of this is an extremely dangerous adversary.  It very clearly threatens to extinguish legitimate cultural, spiritual, and practical traditions not only among human beings worldwide, but among many, if not all, forms of biological life on this planet (through resource liquidation, global warming, pollution, nuclear catastrophe, chemical weaponry, etc.); yoga very much included.  

I feel that these problems do need to be addressed explicitly, and that doing so will necessitate the taking of strong positions vis a vis yoga’s (and our personal) identities in the pseudo-commons of a largely corporate-engineered and dominated ‘popular culture’.  It is certainly safer and simpler to avoid the Eye of Mordor that is the ‘media spotlight’; our work as Yoga teachers and practitioners remains rooted in the local, specific, personal conditions of our ‘actual’ (as opposed to virtual) lives and communities.  But the capacities for intelligent discernment (siddhis) that our methods deliver unto us confer with them the responsibility to take up strong public positions on and in what remains of our culture, safeguarding thereby what small chance remains of our survival past this ‘massively-globalizing’ phase in our species’ very peculiar evolution.  

Clearly, we have work to do…