Tammy,

I’m confused about something I’ve never done before:  Bikram yoga.  I grouponed a set of 10 classes.

I understand there is a person named Bikram; how did this dude get a yoga named after him?  Did he pay the yoga gods a lot of money?  Are Patanjali and Pattabhi Jois rolling over in their graves?  How does Iyengar feel about these naming rights; was he part of the bidding process?  Was Bikram trying to keep up with Pilates by self naming a form of fitness?  Is this considered the beginning of yoga’s commercialization?

Why 26 poses?  When you’re crazy they say you’re playing with a half of a deck of cards (26)?  One pose to match each letter of the alphabet; if that’s the case, why don’t they give each pose a letter instead of a name?  Or one pose for each bone in the foot and ankle; so you can brake one bone for each pose.

Why so hot?  To make us feel as hot as it gets in India?  To test the human spirit when there is no air conditioning?  To ensure that people do yoga with the least amount of clothing (don’t blame me if your mind is in the gutter, I didn’t say it had to be 105 degrees)?

Should I sweat out these questions in 26 hours or just enjoy, I mean suffer through, the classes?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

So I’ve had some sort of virus for a while now.  It has forced the cancellation of a trip to New York, interfered with work, and halted yoga classes.  I’ve resorted to looking online at yoga things; one might call me a yoga lurker.  No, not dirty stuff, just compelling like a crack addict needs a fix.  I know reading about the experience of others and how they do things is not good for me.  It’s supposed to be about me.  For once, it is all about me.  Alas, I have figured it out; yoga is an activity for narcissists.   After all, I’m not supposed to worry about the way others practice.

Do you think this sickness has messed with my brain or am I more enlightened?

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,

I’m sick again.  It may be that I was just doing too many activities and burning the yoga candle at both ends.  Actually, it was probably the close-talking woman at the networking party who told me she had been sick on and off for 4 months but that she wasn’t contagious.  Maybe I should bottle up some of my sickness and send it to her so her malaise lasts a little longer.  I know this isn’t a yogi’s way of looking at life but recently I seem to get sick for four to six weeks now, rather than the normal week.

You’d be proud of me.  I looked at my intention of getting better and enjoying the world.  I can’t do any cycling nor yoga. So what can I do?  Hey, how about meditation?  Well, I sat in the official position for 15 minutes and the pressure of sitting up straight made the chest congestion feel worse.  Then I thought about your classes.  When we do shivasana in your classes, we lay down on our mats and put our hands to our side.  Hey, I can do that.  So, I decided to put my mat down in the house and just as you say “float into space.”  For some reason it wasn’t that comfy so I climbed onto my bed.  I concentrated on listening to the ins and outs of my breathing.  My back was on the bed and my arms were out to the side, face up.  After a while, I was sleeping.  The dream was better than usual.  I seem to recall you saying that relaxation is the ultimate goal of yoga.  Mission accomplished.

If the goal of yoga is relaxation, why do we do all the poses?  Shouldn’t we just learn to sleep better?  I think I might be missing something here, but this revelation might just take down the whole yoga industry.  Maybe we can reformat yoga as a sleep tool, build a start-up, grow it, have an IPO and sell our shares for millions.  Then, we will have the time to actually practice what we created.  Sickness yoga may have solved life’s problems.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I was going to your yoga class yesterday and saw a hot twenty-something woman hanging out after her yoga class.  She was talking with a friend and then I noticed it.  Not a nose ring, nor a pierced eye brow, nor a belly button ring.  A stream of lightly colored air started flowing out of her mouth.  She propped her left hand up in a beautiful feminine gesture as she looked at her friend.   I saw the white stick we know as a cigarette.  She was old school defiance.

After an hour and fifteen minutes in your class I left in a dreamy yoga afterglow.  My mind flashed back to the woman I saw before class.   No I wasn’t getting all hot and bothered over her.  It seems she was smoking to elevate the post-yoga high.   Maybe something that causes cancer isn’t all bad.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Today I wanted to take a mid-morning yoga class at a local gym.

I was a guest of a friend and we got to the parking lot ten minutes before the class was supposed to start.  Cars galore.  What’s with that?  Well, there was a fitness class prior to the yoga class and there are a lot of retirees in South Florida.  We had to really scurry for a parking spot.  Saying my friend was nervous as I backed up past 15 cars through the only lane of travel would be an understatement; I thought there were going to be ½ inch finger divots in the passenger door handle.  Then, as we got into the place, the previous class was letting out; within a minute the entire floor was completely covered with mats.  Are you kidding?  What’s the Sanskrit phrase for turnaround and leave?  Yep, adios before we even started a single pose.

Somehow I don’t get the idea of massive yoga classes.  They’ve had yoga classes in Times Square, the National Mall in DC, and Millennium Park in Chicago.  I’m not trying to be negative but I like to have space for my poses.  I know you’re supposed to accept your neighbor, but touch your sweaty neighbor more than once and I get a little skeeved.  I know if they touch me, I’ll be quarantined for sliminess.  Am I missing something?  In a setting where the space is filled mat to mat, can you, or any teacher, make it around to each and every person for adjustments?  Did I miss a tweet saying only yoga teachers or perfect yoga students are invited to yoga love fests?  Is there supposed to be some sort of cosmic group connection or yoga wave in the colossal sessions?  Perhaps the best person for these classes would be the shivasana robbers as they stand to make some extra loot.

Can you let me know what the appeal is to enormous yoga classes and public displays of yoga affection?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

At work, there is a woman who goes to a yoga class from 12-1. She leaves the office and changes in the yoga studio bathroom. After class, she changes in the studio bathroom, bypasses the shower which is adjoined to same bathroom, and returns to our office in her professional clothes. She tells me that she doesn’t sweat at the yoga class and therefore she is clean. I tell her that by putting on the yoga clothes and moving around she is getting sweaty and dirty. Would you agree with me or her that she is officially less than clean and should be sent home from work by reason of being less than sanitary?

If a guy were to take his lunch hour to work out and return to work in the same clothes, without showering, he would never hear the end of it.  The Women’s Viral Guide to Hot Men would forever list him as undateable, despite how good looking he is, how much money he has, how nice he is, or even if he writes a crazy, mildly entertaining blog about, say, yoga.

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 was on my way to the beach recently.  Being that we are in South Florida and it was the holiday season, a lot of tourists from cold weather states had the same idea.  The traffic was heavy but not quite reaching LA Freeway levels.  Rather than inch my way forward at every stop, several times I allowed cars from side streets to move in front of me in line.

This is not like me.   Normally I ignore them.  After all, I am from the Northeast.    In the past, I would occasionally make up a story about how drivers on side streets are late for an important meeting or how they are going to the doctor for an urgent medical problem.  Not letting them cut in would bring a smile to my face.  After all, I plan ahead and so should they.  Do I go as far as road rage?  Nope.  I learn from my elders. You see, I have an octogenarian neighbor who got three months in jail for brandishing a gun at another vehicle.

Why did these out-of-body experiences occur?  Are you rubbing Zoloft into my system when you message my head during shivasana?  Is the shoulder stand calming my nervous system (pun intended).  Have I been sweating so much in your yoga class that my aggressive impulses are transforming into good kharma?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I signed up for a class which was going to be held right next to the Intracoastal Waterway.  I was psyched as it had promise to be euphoric.

Upon arrival, I parked in the lot near where I thought the class would be.  Nobody was going to the grassy area where the internet showed the location of the class.  So I waited outside my car.  A woman who had apparently gone for a run suddenly arrived at a neighboring car.  I stared at her for quite a while and finally asked if I was in the right place for the yoga class.  Hesitatingly she said yes and that she was the teacher.  She pulled out her mat and other stuff from the trunk of her car.  We walked over to the serene spot where the sun was shining.  The water was close by and the gigantic houses were easily visible across the water.

Nobody else showed up so I was excited for my first private class.  How cool!

It wasn’t quite a flow class.  We started doing poses but they didn’t connect to each other.  I was right in front of her but quickly realized that she wasn’t really talking to me during the poses.  She was speaking as if it was a large class and just letting me know what the next pose was and how to get into it.  She only looked at me twice during the entire hour.  She didn’t adjust any of my poses; not even Warrior I or II.

What happened?  Was the teacher upset that I arrived?  If I didn’t show up, she could have gone home.  Is it possible I freaked her out and she thought I was a stalker?  Maybe I was in the zone and did the perfect yoga class.  Does this mean I will soon have my own yoga dvd for sale?  After all, I was wearing my rock star sunglasses.

Gary Kahn