Tammy,

Little do you know but for the past month I’ve actually been doing the homework you assigned me some fourteen months ago.  That’s right, I’m doing child’s pose every day.  Woo hoo!  I’m completing your assignment, albeit a little late.  I know you’ve given up on expecting much from me.  But come on, what do yogis say?  When an unwanted thought pops up, go back to focusing on the breath and all is good.  So, now that we’re all good, you and me, do you think you can go back and alter the grade on my report card from last year?

In class today you were walking around the room and from a distance you could see if all of the students were properly aligned and breathing the pranayamic way.  Towards the end of class, I laid on my back, with my palms face up, the back of my head on the mat.  The music was barely audible.  All of a sudden my head nodded off to the left; I came to pretty quickly.  A minute later the same thing occurred.  Shortly thereafter the class was over.  While leaving the class you asked me what was going on and I couldn’t come up with anything.  Touche was all I had.  You were just toying with me.  You knew I had actually achieved the goal of shivasana which is sleep; though mine were only two brief narcoleptic-type episodes.

Today, right before you said namaste, you gave a homework assignment.  The only time I remember you giving howework was 14 months ago.  What can I say except that I reach a colossal milestone in class and you up the ante.  Can’t I just have a post-class celebration for one moment?  I was thinking about an end zone dance in the front of the room or a shot of Cabo Wabo.  Don’t yogis get excited over their long-awaited triumphs, no matter how small?  Come on, live in the moment.  Or does the seemingly accepting yoga always have to keep bending forward without even a second of partaying?  Didn’t the creators of yoga realize that all work and no play makes a yogi convert to pilates?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

I was the youngest member in tonight’s class and guess who was seeing a cardiologist for a possible sedated, invasive test, potential angioplasty, or impending heart attack?  Yep, that would be me.  Already things were a little off the yoga tree of balance.

First you had us put our butt up against the crown molding in the floorboard and our legs up the wall.  “Hold that for 2 minutes, please,” you said.  Isn’t it sweet to know that all of the blood from my legs will be draining into my ailing heart.

Next you asked us to put our butt up against the floorboard and fold our body over, with the goal being that our head touches our feet on the floor in front of us.  I don’t know how you were able to squeeze behind me so you could forcefully push my back over and my head closer to my feet.  I get it; the resulting back pain was supposed to take my mind off my allegedly faulty ticker.

How about the pose where you had us lie with our backs on the floor and our legs spread in a wide v on the wall.  I felt like a feeble boy trying to break the gender of high school cheerleaders but unable to achieve this rah rah routine.  Were you intentionally trying to destroy the male psyche and start an aortic aneurysm?

A number of times you had to step over a bunch of people and get in strange body positions to help adjust me.  All I could think the whole time was that you were going out of your way to break my heart.  I thought you liked me.

Gary Kahn

PS  The doctor said I’m fine and told me to enjoy living life.  Maybe you were sending me good karma after all.

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,

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

Tammy,

Today I went to your yin a/k/a happy hips class.

At the beginning of class you played a song that made us feel like we were in exotic Costa Rica.  Wow!  I remembered that you had scheduled a yoga trip there.  I had never heard of a commercial in a yoga class before and I am sure the creators of yoga were rolling over in their graves.  Those old guys; how were there hips?  I didn’t care about the subliminal message; I loved the music as my mind went on a scenic meditation that yoga hadn’t yet come close to delivering.

Then it came time to get hip and I’m not talking Edward Burns type hip.  You started with a three minute king pigeon.  My hips were hemorrhaging more than an alcoholic with the DTs.  A short time later it was the firefly pose.  The hips were burning and screaming like the towering inferno.  In the frog position I wanted to leap right the heck out the back door into a pool of soothing jello.  Why do you call it happy hips?

As far as your yoga vacation in Costa Rica, the water skiing, zip lining, and snorkeling, really sound like a dream.  For what we now know will be killer yoga, I am not yet ready to have my remains sent back to the States in a yoga body bag.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Recently I went to Daytona Beach for a yoga class with someone who is renowned for being a great teacher, does world-class inversions, is really sweet, and likes to have fun and laugh.  She’s a lot like you.

I took I-95 to get there and found the yoga studio which was pretty close to, but not quite on, the beach.  The studio was right next to an Irish bar.

The class started with the routine warm-up poses.   The pose changes then came quicker and quicker.  I’m asthmatically challenged so intervals and fast aerobic activities are not my strong suit.  It soon came to me that “my colleagues” on the mat were teachers and veteran yoga practitioners.  Not a problem, I would do things at my own pace.  I soon drifted a few poses behind everybody else.  My heart was pounding out of my body and my shirt and mat were full of sweat.  Whoever says yoga makes you look great has obviously never tried yoga.   Anyway, the teacher then started going into some of the poses with our legs off the ground.  I tried a couple and then it got too complicated.  My brain recognizes the left from the right but converting that to my body and occasionally there’s an issue; add some inverted positions and my mind-body coordination inverts and then flatlines.  So I backed off and started watching  what the teacher was displaying and asking the students to try.  They did zoological animal poses that I didn’t know were even part of yoga:  scorpion, grasshopper, and side crow.  It looked so cool I should have been the class photographer.   All the while I was laughing.   What was so funny about all of this?  Was it that 50 other human beings could do things with their body that I was incapable of?   Was it the realization that the other participants would not appreciate me calling them “colleagues”?   Was it that yoga allowed me to constantly laugh at failure?  Whatever it was that day or in your classes, yoga is a big laugh (to me).  Who cares why I laugh?  I’m going back to your class for more!

Gary Kahn

P.S.  After class I went to the Irish bar hoping to hang with all of the other yogis and talk about the class; like people do with friends after you play softball or football.  Nobody else from the class showed up.  Perhaps there’s something else to I need to learn about the yoga world besides the poses.

Tammy a/k/a today’s Hero Poser,

May your happy baby pose cry out with silly laughter.  May your child strike a great pose for you.  May the pranayama breath you take to blow out the cake candles inspire all your wishes to come true.  May your mountain pose be the highest in the world.   May your head and shoulder stands be above all others.

Have a ROCKIN’ and TRIANGLE KICKIN’ birthday!

Namasbirthday!

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

For the second time I went to visit my father and step mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  They moved there about 3 years ago.

They picked me up from the airport.  It was night when my dad’s car was about a mile from his house.   I was pretty tired from a long day of travel and having a mild allergy problem.  In my oozy state I looked out the window and saw something I didn’t see the first time I visited.  A street sign indicated that the next turn signal would be the split between Western Trail and Namaste Road.  I didn’t see this sign on the first trip.

They say when the student is ready the teacher will appear.  Am I ready?  Was I born again the second I saw this momentous sign?  I’ve been doing yoga for many months with you and my quads are still weak.  My body isn’t lined up along a single plane in Warrior II pose.  I find the Sanskrit and English names of the poses pretty wacky and laugh at them in class.  Was this the sign that you and yoga are telling me that I should do a life-long meditation along the Western Trail?  Along Namaste Road there is a STOP sign right below the street sign; did I pass this anti-yoga sign so that I would get the hint and stop going to your classes?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Recently I went on a bicycle ride right next to the beach.  This is something I do often.   It was the middle of the day and extremely hot.

A couple of miles up the road, my bicycle computer indicated that I was cruising.  In fact, I was going a full 3 miles faster than my average speed.  It was a little weird.  I wasn’t pushing any harder than normal on the pedals.  There was almost no wind.  I was riding alone and wasn’t in anybody’s “slipstream.”  I wondered what I had been doing differently that was making me ride quicker.  I was sweating profusely and started having either a daydream, or perhaps a hallucination.  I thought I saw a big parade float in the sky pulling me forward.  As I drew nearer I realized that the float was not a cartoon character but a person doing a yoga pose with the head and back bent over in an aerodynamic position.  The phantom character was smiling down at me.  Then I realized I was actually picturing, you, my yoga teacher, in Warrior III, a pose I’ve never been able to master.

At first I was a little confused as to why I would be daydreaming about yoga during my ride.   Then it struck me.  I realized my head was tucked down and my back was parallel to the ground.  I was as close as I’d ever come to Warrior III and I was pretty satisfied.  My subconscious had put me in a pose that helped my cycling without me even realizing it.  Three cheers for yoga!

I also realized I was relaxed enough to follow the vision in my head.  What’s that old cliché?  When the student is ready, the teacher will appear in a strange place.  In my case, the old cliché might actually be that if you see parade floats in your head, the little men with the white suits will soon be tying you up.

I guess the next question is how can I relax like this in class so I can do all of the poses and skip to the advanced level classes?

This week is Thanksgiving so thank you Tammy for being my teacher and for the apparition on the bicycle.

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

Today was kind of interesting at your yoga class.  As you are aware, there were enough teachers in training that pretty much each one of us students had their own.  After a while I noticed that these young, soon-to-be gurus, could have some fun of their own, at my expense.  During shoulder stand my personal teacher put her foot in my rear end.  I don’t know whether she was trying to adjust me or punish me; all the while she was smiling.  I didn’t know how to diplomatically inquire about this after class.  Should I have asked:  “What is the Sanskrit word for the old foot in the tush pose?”  Or:  “Were you just telling me I’m your bitch?”

Gary Kahn