Tammy,

This week I took three yoga classes.  Is that too much?

I’m afraid if I practice yoga too much I may become severely depressed if I can’t get the poses right.  I wonder what kind of side effects the yoga Prozac presents.

I might start dreaming about doing yoga outdoors and end up severely crashing my head on the ground during tripod pose.  What’s wrong with a little yoga brain damage, right?

Or I might exit a restaurant after a couple of drinks and a good meal and look up and see a half moon in the sky.   I might then bend over and put one arm on the ground, the other hand in the air,  and put one leg in the air, spontaneously doing the half moon pose.  I then might fall over and pass out with undetermined injuries.  After witnessing such a display, I don’t think my friends  and other onlookers will be trying yoga any time soon.

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,

Sunday night I went to the beach for a yoga class.  Isn’t that a cool way to finish a weekend?

As I was driving to the beach I could see a big black cloud just north of where our class was going to be held.  It had been raining most of the afternoon around the area.  I was really not up for muddy beach yoga.  Once I placed my mat down on the beach, I looked into the ocean and saw what looked suspicious.  It was a black object that was floating on the top of the water.  My first thought was that a whale had too much to eat and deposited his/her waste in these waters.  Yuk!  My alternative theory:  it was someone’s head that was separated from the rest of his/her decomposed body.  Where is Mariska Hargitay when you need her?  Okay so I watch of lot of Law & Order SVU and I had just seen the movie The Love Guru.  As the class started I was looking to the horizon for a focus point and saw a big grey ship.  It looked like a battle ship.

Shortly after the class started, I went into corpse pose for the rest of the class to calm my mind down and avoid the madness.  After all, how could anybody properly think about yoga with all that stuff floating in his head?

It turns out none of the concerns came to fruition.  It threatened but never rained, the black object was some sort of seaweed clumped together, and the big grey vessel was some sort of commercial ship.  It just goes to show, the mind can come up with a few ways to take something fun and relaxing and make it into something horrendous.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Today I sat and meditated.  For fifteen minutes I thought about normal things; like the garlic festival I will be going to and how garlic is supposed to be great for your health.  I then pondered how many weeks it will take to get the smell out of my pores.  Next I remembered something in the liquor store; they actually sell tequila in bottles shaped like rifles and hand guns.  I know these might be cool at parties but what kind of message are they sending?  After all, how accurately can you shoot when drinking?  I started to think about the dinner I had with someone’s elderly mother.  The woman is in an assisted living facility but they don’t shave her face.  She has whiskers almost a half inch long but I don’t think she has a clue what the cat pose is.  Do the workers leave this grotesqueness there to spite her since she is mean to everyone?

What are you supposed to think about during meditation?  Is there a right and wrong? Am I twisted?  I pay attention to my breath but my mind wanders elsewhere pretty quickly.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

So I arrive in your class one day.  There is a guy there and he says he’s happy that another guy (me) will be in the class.  I don’t think much about it.  The guy then rattles off a whole bunch of maladies and how he is affected by them.  I quickly decide that I will place my mat as far from his mat as possible.  After a class wherein you had us try a bunch of different poses, in what seemed like slow motion, I heard the guy complaining about even more physical issues. 

I definitely avoided the guy on the way out.  I found myself thinking this guy was tremendously annoying.  Fortunately these thoughts did not come up during class.  He made it clear he was into women; so why was he happy when the room became more filled with testosterone?   Wouldn’t his odds with women be greater if there was less competition?  I don’t know what this guy was all about.  Why did he brag about his aches and pains?  Are women impressed by that?  Maybe I’m out of touch with picking up women but I still think they like masculine guys that appear to have their act together.  I don’t know.  Are women attracted to men who have negative game and claim insecurity as a strength?  Wow!  What cardboard box am I living in?  I guess I better get to a yoga class and start crying.  Wait a second.  What’s this blog all about? 

Hold on.  Maybe the real question is:  should I care about this dude and/or let him bother me?  After all, in class I didn’t think about him.  Am I judging the malingerer?  In yoga the aim appears to be voiding yourself of judgment.  Does yoga promote helping a fellow man or letting him/her be?  I’m probably not properly qualified to help the guy but I could tell him that women are rarely ever turned on by verbal self-mutilation.  As a teacher, do you try to loosen him up and tell him to take it easy or let him be and hope he figures things out?

Did you say this yoga thing is supposed to be relaxing and freeing of the mind?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I think I know why I go to your yoga class.

Your classes remind me of being in preschool.

We arrive with our own blankets, or in yoga terms, a mat. You greet us with a warm smile and some encouraging words.   We know that you will take care of us.

You then ask us to get down onto our mats for child’s pose.
Immediately my mind harkens back to the warm blankets I had in preschool when I was 4 years old.  I start to believe my mat is actually a magic carpet and that it will take me away into dream land.  In fact, you instruct us to do ujjayi breathing (some sort of back-of-the throat yoga breathing) and we are supposed to sound a little like Darth Vader.  Wow, I am supposed to be a character in Star Wars.

Actually I’m on an adult journey and I don’t know it.

You then ask us to put our bodies into various postures or poses; downward dog, upward dog, cobra, cat tilt, triangle pose, warrior I, etc.  You even come around to each one of us to make sure we are doing things right; in the parlance of yoga, you adjust us.

As we are moving our bodies, you tell us not to judge ourselves and that everybody is okay, exactly as they are.  We don’t need to look at our neighbors because everybody is different.  This is what we learned at the wee young age.

You gauge the class and see how well we are adapting to this new language; kind of like in preschool when we are being taught to tie shoes or beginning to read.  Little do we know that besides the opening up of our hip joints, you are opening up our minds to patience, to forgiveness, and to be in the present.  Of course you are teaching us lessons on how to be good people and succeed without us even knowing it.

As we go into pigeon pose you tell us that the feeling in our hips is good for us.  In the most sweetest of ways you tell us that this feeling is just an unused body part saying hello.  The more we visit again, the more friendly the feeling will be.  You whisper to us that if we practice every day, the pigeon will be a great friend and we will have lots of fun together.  Sounds like practice makes things easier to me, and even a lesson from Sun Tzu (keep your friends close and your enemies closer).  Also, if the pigeon is befriended, his/her kind may never make droppings on our heads.

After we’ve extended and contorted the body and stimulated the cortex, it is time for shavasana.  You smoothly say we should take this time to float into space.  Sounds to me like lay down on our mats, I mean carpets, and go to sleep.  You even come around and massage each one of our little heads.  The only thing missing is the milk and cookies.

We then hear a bell signaling the end.  Our last remnants of innocence is ending. You say Namaste, release us into the big bad world and tell us we’re on our own for life’s real problems.

Gary Kahn