Amy,

As you know I haven’t been practicing yoga nor blogging because of flu-like symptoms.  Strangely enough, my Twitter following (@garykahn) has increased.

A yoga teacher said that while I’m getting better I should take care of myself and be okay with not practicing yoga and not writing.  How bad was my yoga?  Would my wheel pose cause a permanent yoga flat tire?  Would practicing warrior pose get me dishonorably discharged for fear of friendly fire?  Would the continuation of child’s pose force family services to issue a restraining order against me?

Perhaps the signs are there and the public has spoken:  I should stop participating in yoga and stop writing.

Gary

Tammy,

Tropical Storm Sandy, who changed her name to Frankenstorm for Halloween, left the South Florida coast somewhat submerged so yesterday’s beach yoga class was washed away.

Beach yoga classes are important to my psyche.  After a long week, I, like most, look forward to doing fun stuff during the weekend.  When friends won’t call me back about our plans (maybe I call them friends but they probably call me “nothing-else-to-do guy”), the Monday-through-Friday stuff has me so exhausted I nearly sleep away the weekend, or when it’s a must-do-laundry weekend, I hanker for beach yoga.  Beach yoga is weekend salvation.  I love the thick, cottony clouds mixed in with the warm, orange and pink colors of the sunset.  My entire body feels like nothing matters as the hypnotizing sounds of the waves rush in and out.  The rocks that bookend our beach “studio” inspire dreams of being in a vacation fortress.  Did I mention that at beach yoga I can do full wheel pose?  On the beach, the sand is forgiving so I can even do crow pose.  Indoor yoga forces me to wear a helmet for crow attempts; surely that’s not how I like to style in yoga class.  On the sandy shores I successfully flip the dog, well, most of the time.  But if I were you, I wouldn’t get anywhere near my oddly raised canine leg.

Somehow at beach yoga I even seem to overlook a couple of, shall we say, peeves.  Like the senior citizen who runs through our class every week and hits on our young teacher in broken English.  Did I mention that his shorts are barely bigger than a speedo?  How about the drunk dude who walked by our class and insisted he could do the inverted poses?  I thought it might be funny but the resulting sloppiness almost made him toss some pretty, pretty nasty cookies.

With the clocks rolling back an hour next week, I fear my last beach yoga class of 2012 was cancelled.

Gary

Tammy,

The other day I went to yoga at a gym.  After class started the teacher said that later on we would be going to the bar.  “Cool,” I thought.  The class and teacher would chat and get to know each other.  That would build the yoga community.  This was the first class I ever had with this teacher and I was pretty psyched.  No other yoga teacher of mine had ever encouraged a class of students to go for a brew after class.

We did the usual sun salutations and started to get into some more sophisticated poses.  I was getting sweaty.  I like this as it means I’m getting a workout.

The end of class was approaching and the teacher told us to go to the back of the room.  She told us to raise one leg and put it on a wooden beam that extended six inches from the wall and ran the entire width of the wall.  “This,” she announced “is  the bar.”  What?  What about the post-class coldness to relax muscles?  Uh, not after this yoga class.

Apparently the upper levels of yoga involve a ballet bar.  Ballet!  Ballet!   I’ve looked at an issue or two of Yoga Journal and I don’t remember seeing anything about ballet.  What’s going on?  Did I just spend almost two years getting into something that would end up with me wearing slippers with tassles on them?  Would I be expected to wear tutus and pink tops?  What kind of Crying Game is yoga?  Maybe I should do some research before I start something new.  I think I’m going to the bar and figure out what to do with all of the free time I will now have.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

This week I watched some videos online  about yoga on a bicycle (click here to view).  Yoga teacher Kelli Refer, who lived in Colorado (a US mecca for cyclists) and now hails from Seattle, demonstrates some super yoga poses for cyclists.

Side stretching while riding works on the torso and tests balance as you take one hand off the bicycle.  Not that I ever do, but, I definitely wouldn’t recommend drinking and riding for this one.

Being a guy, pyramid pose on the still bicycle is a sensitive one; a little too aggressive and any future kids I have may end up, well, a little disturbed.

Cat and cow poses on the moving bicycle benefit the spine.  I’ve just got to give up caring that people will think I’m having convulsions while riding on the streets.

For clothing, I could try a little cross dressing and wear the women’s Specialized-lululemon team jersey and shorts.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

This is the one year anniversary of my blog.  I wonder what posts people have liked the best.

I guess yesterday was a good example of my yoga experience over the past year.  It was raining while I was driving to an outdoor yoga class and I was wondering why I was going.  I felt I would probably get sick and not be able to do yoga for a while.   I feared that my mat would become slippery and I would slip and fall and get injured.  When the class started the teacher immediately ran us through some sun salutations and warrior poses.  I felt drops of water on my mat and soon realized they were sweat, not rain drops.  The rain and everything else had evaporated from my mind except the pose we were doing.  Soon enough there was no rain from the sky.  The sun even came out.

As far as my progress in yoga, I show up every week.  I don’t do any homework.  Outside of  class, I don’t think much about yoga.   Is it possible I don’t really care much about yoga?  What’s the irony here?  I’m getting better at yoga.  I can now do the crow and full wheel poses.

Maybe I shouldn’t try or think about other things and they’ll get better.  Maybe I’ll start with relationships.  What do you think?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

For various reasons I didn’t go to my usual yoga classes this weekend.  It made me think  about habits and how to use them to change some of life’s patterns.  After all, one weekend away from yoga and I could abandon going at all.  If I don’t go to yoga next weekend, that’s no big deal.  Right?  Yoga teaches us that we are supposed to stay away from being self critical  so I can be okay with that.

Then I realized I could practice yoga on my own wherever and whenever I wanted.  There are classes online and available for downloading.  I could take yoga classes from thin air and “the cloud” and put them on my iPod, iPhone, iPad, iKitchen, iCar, iHouse, or iWhatever.  What has Steve Jobs done to i, I mean us?  Yoga teaches us to concentrate on ourselves, not compare ourselves to others, and modern yoga teaches us that one doesn’t need to be around others to practice, so I’m calling it iYoga.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I’m thinking that maybe I should take a yoga name.  What do you think of these?

From the bhujangasana pose I was thinking of the nickname bhuj.  It’s fun, different, cool, and people will remember something about me.

From the paschimottanasana pose I could call myself Paschi.  It rhymes with Kashi so maybe I can get sponsored by the cereal company.  People could even call me Pasch, but be aware that the spelling clearly indicates I am not related to Spice Girl Posh.

From the vashistasana pose, I could be called Vash.  I laugh a lot in yoga class and the French phrase la vache qui rit means laughing cow.  In Fact, that phrase is synonymous with a French cheese so maybe they can sponsor me.

What do you think?   Should I be cool or make some money while practicing yoga?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Today one celebrates Valentine’s Day and exchanges romantic gifts with his/her special person.

What does everybody do for his or her self?  No, I’m not referring to anything pornographic.  In class you generate an atmosphere of silliness, acceptance, and wacky places where we’re supposed to put our various body parts which you call poses.   You ask us to focus our mind.  You ask us to look into our souls and love the person in the mirror exactly the way we are, right?  Does it matter exactly how we do the pose?  I think you adjust us to make the body feel better, rather than worrying about whether the body looks perfect, right?  So by following your directions to breathe in the moment and be present, are you showing us how to give ourselves presents?  Does that make you Saint Valentine and us students your little cherubs?  Thank you.

If you don’t mind, I will not be wearing red for class today.  I may be in the present but I don’t think others would take me seriously as Cupid in warrior I or warrior junior, or as you say warrior II.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

In class recently I saw that one of the other students has a mat with diagrams of the poses on it.  Do you think I should get one of these cheat-sheet mats?  I was thinking about looking over at the teenage girl’s mat during class to see the pictures.  Then I realized this may entitle me to jail-house yoga lessons.  Do you teach in the big house?  Something tells me the poses I may need to  perfect for that studio are Warrior I and Warrior II.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I know something is different when I’m at the airport newsstand and I see the word Yogi on the front of Sports Illustrated.  I think to myself, what mainstream sport realizes that opening the hips may be good for player productivity?  Not so fast Raja.  The sports world isn’t openly that progressive.  It’s an article about former baseball player and word master Yogi Berra.

Gary Kahn