Tammy,

Recently I went to yoga class and there were people hanging out chatting before, during, and afterward.  I started to  wonder why I don’t chat with others when I go to class.

Let’s see, first, most of the students are women and they seem to know each other.  What would I say?  Where did you get those yoga pants?  That might be odd coming out of my mouth and perhaps an unintentional, unwanted, flirtatious, pre-class gesture.  During class I don’t talk with anybody but once in a great while I hear some discussions in a corner of class.  Maybe  I should flip my dog a number  of times to get over there and join the chat.  Say, this might even provide some laughter for the talkers and be a great ice breaker.  After class, I like to be in solitude in the glow of my mind cleansing; maybe I could hug everybody and we could share our sweat together.

What do you think of these ideas for a start at socializing with my fellow yogis?

Gary Kahn

Tammy,

You know the swimming pool game Marco Polo?  What if yoga teachers played a similar game called pada gustasana?  I kinda like the rhythm, pada        gustasana                              pada        gustasana.

How ’bout Whispering Down the Lane sahaja bhujangasana and see what the last person has to say?

How ’bout singing 100 downward dogs on the mat, 100 downward dogs, take 1 down plank it to the ground, 99 dogs on the mat.  Wait a second, it’s yoga.  It’s supposed to be relaxing.  How ‘bout singing, 2 yogis sitting in meditation, 2 yogis sitting in meditation, one loses focus and they both go grab a beer, they both go grab a beer.  Now that’s what a real man likes to hear.

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,

So I arrive in your class one day.  There is a guy there and I hear him happy that another guy (me) will be in the class.  I don’t think about it much.  Then the guy 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 him 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 his maladies even more now that the class was over.

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?  Would the women be impressed by that?  Maybe I am out of touch with picking up women as I’m in a relationship, but I still think they like masculine guys that appear to have their act together.  I don’t know.  Are women attracted to insecurity these days?  Are they into skinny guys who can’t fix anything or maybe they fancy guys who cower late at night when there’s a strange noise outside your house?

Maybe my real question is:  should I care about this dude and/or let him bother me?  After all, in class I don’t think about him.  I am judging the malingerer, right?  In yoga the aim appears to be void 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 more than likely rarely ever turned on by his 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,

The other day you caught me grimacing during a pose and told me to breathe and smile.  Why is breathing given such a big focus in yoga?

When you’re concentrating on your breath, you fail to take life for granted.  You fail to worry that you’re doing triangle pose wrong and you fail to care that your shorts are riding down and someone might see a small part of your butt.

Right now I’m in your level one class so I’m just concentrating on achieving some semblance of the basic poses and simultaneously breathing smoothly.

In the advanced yoga classes do they teach multi-tasking like breathing and thinking?  How can I grow into a mature yogi if we continue to do the happy baby pose?  Let’s start practicing the snotty teenager pose; my sense of humor might fit in better.

Is it possible we concentrate our thoughts on each breath so we live life in the moment, here and now?

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,

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

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