Yoga’s ascension into the realm of the hip-and-famous continues with its inclusion to the iconic Los Angeles fashion emporium Fred Segal.

Fred Segal, the iconic Santa Monica, California, clothing store, has always been at the cutting edge of hip and fashionable. It was the first department store in the nation to offer a Jean Bar, back in 1960, and set the pace of celebrity-fueled trendsetting fashion that endures five decades later.

Over the years, Fred Segal morphed into a high-end fashion emporium, with multiple specialty sub-stores, a see-and-be-seen cafe, and acclaimed Oscar-aligned full service salon. And earlier this year, the salon expanded to include Fred Segal Yoga (with the logo “Meditation meets beautification”), a community gathering space for hip, yogi-minded Angelenos, with classes, events and fundraisers, and book signings. ”We’re interested in the promotion of a good life and happy souls,” says Fred Segal Salon manager Jill Vasky.

Last week, Fred Segal Yoga merged with another Los Angeles hipster spot, YogaPoser, owned by James Brown, a former DJ who has taught yoga to the Red Hot Chili Peppers among other celebs. YogaPoser @ Fred Segal will now manage and run the location’s yoga classes. In an interview with MindBodyGreen, Brown explained the merger. “Fred Segal is an uber-trendy LA institution. It’s a funny marriage for a yoga company. Funny good,” he said. “I love it because it is different and so is YogaPoser. We work hard to present yoga in a pure form without blind adherence to tradition or doctrine. In our case, we use work with the body as the platform for improving all the aspects of your life. While we honor all the other things that get mixed with yoga – from waterfalls, bamboo and flutes to religious Hindu practices, we choose to pare it down to good, simple asana practice and nothing else.”

Like yoga’s premiere at New York Fashion Week in September and its inclusion at this year’s Art Basel in Miami, yoga at Fred Segal speaks volumes about the trend of yoga’s VIP status in the world of fashion and celebrity.  Is it sustainable, or will it will be replaced in a few years with the next best thing?  What are your predictions?

Since I heard from Seane about this last week, I have been trying to square the Occupy mission with the system of yoga philosophy that I try to live my life by. I, like many, have found the movement to be exciting but diffuse in its message. I love the hyper-democratic way that it has grown without leaders but to really throw my support behind it, I need to know what it’s about in a way that makes sense. I feel like I’ve got it now and, once again, I found the answers in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that have become for me both a guidebook that shows me where to point my energy and a scrapbook that gives a vocabulary to where my yoga mat has taken my life.

Although it manifests in hundreds of seemingly disparate demands for specific changes to the US  financial system, the thing that Occupiers are rallying against is greed. I agree with Seane that what we as yogis can bring to the conversation is more about what we are for than what we are against. But, to get to the positive, it helps to look at the source of that greed that leaves so many people in need while a few have much more than they’ll ever need.

Simply, Patanjali defines yoga practices as any effort that makes the mind still enough to see who we really are. Part of the human condition- the part that can only lead to pain, is that we are blinded by the things around us and that we can’t see our true, divine and blissful nature. This is avidya- lack of vision. We forget who we are.

Because we need some kind of identity, we start to make things up. We create a new self-image.  We attach to the material instead of to the spiritual. Then we divide the world up into the things that support our manmade ego self and the things that don’t support it. Finally, Patanjali says that because we all know that this material self will die with the body- we live in fear of the inevitable end to bodily life that is so beautifully articulated by Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita. All together, these are what Patanjali called the kleshas- the obstacles that are created by and rooted in the disease of avidya- ignorance of true self.

Similarly, Patanjali’s lists the yamas, the five human traits that we learn to tame through yoga and whose taming symbiotically helps us move into awareness of yoga. The yamas are about things that humans have to do a little of to stay alive. Like it or not, it’s human nature to cause harm, to be dishonest, to steal, to waste energy and to be greedy. All of these are forms of harming. They are all kinds of himsa. What I find fascinating and instructive, and what is so current with regard to the Occupy movement and what we as yogis can lend to it, is the source of the harm. It’s the same thing that blocks our path to happiness- avidya. Lack of clear vision. When we forget that we are divine and blissful beings, it becomes easy to hurt ourselves and each other.

This is where all of the many voices of the Occupy movement share common ground. We see that we, as a society, have forgotten who we are. America grew strong by conceiving new ideas, making new things and selling them to each other and the world. Somewhere along the way the things themselves came to define us on a societal level and on an individual level and we forgot about our own perfect souls. We’ve all been complicit in creating a world that glorifies consumption and over-achievement to the detriment of our own well-being.

This is where yogis can help. I’ve been privileged to experience and witness what yoga practice does. Along with so many other benefits, yoga opens eyes. It restores vision to clarity.  Before I practiced, I was a misanthrope. I needed people, but I didn’t love them. I had no problem with causing harm or being greedy. And I know now that the reason for all that was because I didn’t know who I was. When yoga showed me the way to my self, it instantly showed me the hearts of fellow humans as well. That’s when the ability to easily hurt others started to weaken. That’s when I started to care more about people and less about things.

My experience is that all you need is a few little glimpses of what lies at the human heart to learn to dissolve attachment to things and to start to direct your resources to the places where they are needed. So, if avidya- lack of clear vision- is at the root of harm, fear and greed; then clarity is the source of healing and love.

Yogis these days often get caught up in telling everybody else to just be nice. You may have noticed that it doesn’t work. Before I tried yoga, believe me, plenty of people told me to be nice. It did nothing but annoy me. They went onto my list of things  to avoid.

Instead of finger-pointing, name-calling and preaching, what we can do as a community is to show people what happens when we really look at each other and at our selves. We open our eyes and we see each other. What yogis know is that when you really see what we are all made of- you just get nicer. The greed is replaced by generosity. Where there was harm, there is help. “Me” and “I” become “Us” and “We”.

The Occupiers are shouting at us. They’re saying that the world is suffering from a tyrannical occupation of the human heart that has its seeds in blindness and mistaken identity. They see that greed has its roots in ignorance.  With yoga, we end the reign of greed and fear and make room to welcome back the refugee kindness as the true inheritor of the non-property that is the human soul.

* * *

Maybe taking a look at our own attitude toward acquiring will help us find some common ground with the so-called 1%. One-hundred percent of us have these issues. It’s not about us and them- it’s about us.

When I need clarity, I very often find it on my mat. Lately I’ve been able to see in my own approach to asana that there are times that I get greedy. I know it’s not what I want so when I see it I stop. The result has been a much more even (and blissful) thread of practice- instead of one that is a list of acquisitions of poses.

You can’t live or practice without taking something but when  and why do you cross the line, if ever?  I am curious to hear from other asana practitioners about if and how their practice has taught them about the difference between healthy acquisition and greed. And if you get greedy, why do you do it? Can that awareness educate you about the source of the societal manifestation of greed?

My fascination with teaching and yoga has kept me keenly aware of what I hear teachers of all experience levels say when they teach classes. The way that we say things matter. When you are teaching with words, the words must be chosen carefully or you may steer your students away from their best practice. As my teacher and mentor, Maty Ezraty said in my own teacher training, “Assume that all yoga teachers have the best intentions”. In observing teachers, I have heard a million amazingly helpful and powerful instructions that surely benefit the practitioners who follow them. But I have also heard a short list of cringe-worthy instructions, the discussion of which inevitably weaves its way into all of the teacher training I lead. Here are four of them:

1. “Feel the stretch” … (or feel almost anything else).

Have you ever heard a teacher say that in a certain pose we are stretching some part or that we are having some particular experience? For example, in a forward bend one might say that we’ll feel a hamstring stretch or that in a hip opener, we might feel emotional or that in a backbend we might feel less depressed. While these sensations may very well be likely in many practitioners, they are not sure things.

If we’re trying to teach people to be present, and I think we all are, we have to teach them to observe the present on their own. Let them see what they feel, not what you feel or what you think they should feel. Telling a student what they are feeling defeats much of the purpose of yoga practice. I was somehow very fortunate in finding my most important teachers in that they never told me what was happening inside of me. Instead, they taught me how to practice and left the observation, the svadhyaya, up to me.

What if a student doesn’t feel what you are saying they feel or should feel? Doing an asana guided by a desire for a particular sensation might lead to injurious or aggressive practice. Or, if a student doesn’t feel what you are saying they should feel, they might think that they are doing it wrong. Or they might just think you don’t know what you are talking about. And if you are telling other people what they feel, it is probable that you actually don’t know what you are talking about, since you are not them. You can avoid all these pitfalls by focusing on telling them how to practice well and by trusting that the good practice you are teaching them will show them the rest of what they have to learn.

2. When the arms are overhead: “Pull your shoulders down”

When we take our arms overhead alongside the ears (called shoulder flexion or abduction depending on how you get there), the entire shoulder-blade rotates like a spinning slice of pizza. Imagine two slices of pizza on your upper back with the pointy ends down and the crusts at the top. At the outer top corner of the slice is the shoulder joint, a very shallow little crater into which a small part of the humerus (arm bone) fits. As the arms lift, the arm bones and the scapulae (the pizza slices) move in sync with each other. This paired movement is called glenohumeral rhythm. We can’t really move our arms very much at all without having the shoulder-blades move also. It’s the way things naturally happen and it’s a good thing because it moves the shoulder joint through an arced path that promotes stability. The way the pizza slices move when we take the arms overhead is that the inner edges near the spine move away from the head, the pointy ends at the bottom move far outward around the side ribs under the armpits and the outer upper corner, the shoulder joint itself, moves up …. way way up. When we pull the shoulders away from the ears while moving the arms overhead, we aren’t letting that rotation of the shoulder blade happen and it leads to injury.

Here is why: The shoulder joint is highly mobile and therefore prone to injurious instability. There are no ligaments in the shoulder joint that we can rely on for stability during movement. Therefore we must rely on a set of four small muscles that together make up the rotator cuff. Connecting parts of the shoulder blade with parts of the arm bone, their main purpose is to work together to prevent dislocation when the shoulder joint is moving. They pull in different directions at the same like the supporting cables of a circus tent’s central pole, thereby keeping the arm bone and the shoulder blade from moving too far away from each other. When we pull the shoulders away from the ears when taking the arms overhead, we are putting the joint into a position where these muscles can’t stabilize it. Because we pull the shoulders down with muscles much larger and stronger than those of the rotator cuff, the little guys don’t stand a chance and the joint is put into injurious instability.

This gets particularly dicey when we have the arms overhead in a weight-bearing position. Think Downward Dog, Upward Bow and Handstand. In the flow-style of yoga that is so popular today, with its emphasis on repeating many of these poses, the shoulder seems to have replaced the knee as the most commonly injured body part. I think this is happening because so many students think they should always be pulling their shoulders away from their ears. When you force the shoulder blade away from its natural position of rotation into this position of being pulled down the back, there is little support for joint stability.

Picture the pizza slices again, but this time in a handstand. Now the crusts are nearer the floor and the points are pointing up to the ceiling. When we allow the natural rotation of the blades to happen (about 75 degrees when in a handstand), the shoulder joint, the outer corner of the pizza slice, has arced around so that it is actually under the torso, which means that the arm bone is supporting the shoulder blade and the weight of the body well because the arms are under the blades. The arm supports the body’s weight well because it is under the shoulder joint and the arm bone stays seated in the socket.

When we pull the shoulders away from the ears we disallow the rotation of the blade to happen. When we deny the rotation of the shoulder blade, we are keeping the joint held at the side of the body- the arm bone is next to the body in this case. Therefore it can’t support weight and it is prone to dislocation. Imagine building a house. You’d want the supporting beams to be under the house, not next to it. If we put the beams for a house next to the house, the house falls down. When we need the arm to support weight while overhead, but we force the arm to stay next to the body, we dislocate the shoulder. Even tiny and quick dislocations lead to painful injury in the types of practice we do because we repeat the same movements so often. So, let the shoulder blades be free to move as is their birthright! Lift the shoulders!

While it’s true that many beginning students do take their shoulders way too far up along the head when they lift the arms, we need to learn to tell them to back off in a more sophisticated way than simply telling them to pull them down. One of the things that my teacher, Chuck Miller, used to always say was that we should give instructions that will always be true because the student may remember it forever. I find that people latch onto this instruction of pulling the shoulders down because it may have been the first instruction they got in a yoga class that they could actually do. While I definitely recommend against teaching each of your students the sophisticated (and beautiful) pattern of the shoulder joint’s movement in a yoga asana class, you, as a teacher, must know it very well before you tell people to do any version of standing on their hands. Which takes us back to the idea that underlying all of a yoga teachers’ instructions, no matter how simple, is a broad and detailed understanding of what exactly it is we are asking them to do.

3. “Soften your front ribs.”

This goes with the last one a bit. When the arms reach up along the ears, because so many bodies have tight shoulders, the arms pull the spine into an arc, usually in the flexible low back. This is not ideal for a couple reasons. First, if we move a flexible part (in this case it’s the lower back) so that we can create the illusion that a stiff part (the shoulders) is moving, we are avoiding the work and discomfort of positive change (the 3rd niyama: tapas). Further, we’re not being totally honest in our actions (the 2nd yama: satya). But most importantly in this case, by arcing the low back without intelligent support, we’re likely dropping into the lumbar discs and setting up or reinforcing a pattern that leads toward injury … we’re not practicing the first yama: ahimsa or non-injury.

So, with all of that in mind, teachers often say with the very best of intentions to soften the front ribs. There a couple reasons that this isn’t effective. First off, ribs are bones. They are hard and they are hopefully going to remain hard for as long as you live. Asking the student to soften ribs is asking them to do something impossible.

Second, when we instruct to soften here, the result is that the student drops the chest down, closing the space around the heart and lungs. To correct the drop in the low back, we’ve asked the student to drop the chest down to balance it. Much of yoga is about lifting up! And this is no exception. it is a sad sight indeed to see a student who is trying hard to push their chest down! It’s heart breaking!

Instead, let’s get them to keep the chest up! It’s beautiful and healthy to lift there. But let’s also teach to lift the low back. The integrated muscular actions that lengthen the lumbar spine in shoulder extension are way too complicated to be included in a regular asana class. But, the teacher should know how it all works. If you don’t know, find out! One tip: it won’t work to just tell your students to lift the low back. You have to teach them how to do it. And that means you have to know how it happens, which is why I include this in all of my teacher trainings.

4. “If you’re a beginner/advanced/flexible/tight … then do this”.

We often ask students to choose between two or more actions during a class. For example, we will have them choose whether to use a particular prop or the wall, whether to straighten the legs, whether to go up into a particular inversion or whether to use a wall. But I rarely hear teachers explain how to choose which action to take. Instead, it’s most common to hear something akin to: “Grab a block if you need to” or “If you’re tight, use a strap” or “Do this if it’s comfortable” or something similar.

For two reasons, I recommend being more clear in explaining how to make a choice when you offer it.

The first is that when we keep it vague, the student simply doesn’t know which one to choose. They might use a prop when they don’t need one or, more likely, not use one when they need one.

Second, and this one relates right back to the essential purpose of yoga practice as I understand it, when we say something like “If you’re a beginner/advanced, do this/that” or “If you’re tight/flexible do this/that”, we are directing the students to make a choice based on what they think about themselves instead of basing it on what is happening in that moment. If yoga is about being present in the now (The first yoga sutra is “Yoga is now.”), then we are directing students AWAY from the yogic path by asking them to rely on possibly outdated notions that they have about themselves.

When I started practicing yoga I was very tight in the hamstrings. So whenever a teacher said “Do this if you’re tight”, I would do that. After a lot of practice, my hamstrings did open up but for a long time after that, I was still telling myself that I was tight because it reinforced the old beliefs I had about myself. Eventually my ignorance of what was (This ignorance, called avidya, is said in yoga to be the root of all suffering), led me to pull my thighbone out of my hip socket- an injury that took several years to heal. My own practice hadn’t taught me to pay attention. Dislocating my hip did.

When we don’t observe what is actually happening in the now, we tend to base decisions on memories of the past or fears about the future … we’re not really learning what yoga feels like. If we can teach our students to base their choices on what is actually happening with concrete and indisputable observations like whether the knee is straight or whether one body part is in line with another, we teach them to be observant (svadhyaya: self-study). And when we teach them to do those things without attaching any value to either available choice, for example if one means your are open and one means you’re tight, we are teaching them to be content with what is (santosha: contentment).

So, whenever you give your students a choice between things, tell them how to choose so that they keep their practice safe, honest and effective. This will keep them practicing for a long time and will show them the way to their own yoga.

One of my friends recently spoke to me about a day she’d spent with other yoga practitioners. She said that if she heard another person say “That’s not very yogic” about anything, she’d scream or explode or something like that.

It’s something I hear sometimes and it always takes me back a little. I thought it’d make a nice little Facebook status update so I promptly posted “Saying ‘That’s not very yogic’ is so not yogic” then waited for the responses to come in. You can see them here.

Folks are responding with some variation of either “Yeah!” or “You’re wrong!”. Instead of getting mired in a Facebook comment war, I thought I’d weigh in right here.

I get my instructions for practice and teach instructions for practice from The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The reason I use that is that it details a system that has been very effective for me and my students. It’s not the only set of instructions, but it’s what I refer to, coupled with my own individual experience, when I need to get a question answered.

Patanjali states that yoga happens when we are absorbed in the present moment, unaffected by the mind’s chatter. There’s not much controversy or argument with that in the yoga community. What people seem to get all worked up over is this strange need to tell other people what an authentic practice is and what isn’t. The responses to the thing I posted on Facebook are a good example. The silliness of it all is why I named my company YogaPoser. The whole finger-pointing thing has no place in this practice or the culture that surrounds it. It’s ironic that saying “That’s not very yogic” reveals that the finger-pointer is misunderstanding something very important about yoga. The statement itself is, in all cases, less yogic than the thing they are talking about. Here’s why:

Patanjali defines practice as whatever the practitioner thinks they need to move to a less disturbed place:  It’s usually translated as: “Practice is any effort toward stillness”. What is or isn’t practice can only be decided by the one doing it. The thing that takes one person toward a less disturbed experience of life is different from the thing that takes others there. Whether motivated by a desire to meditate for a long time, to be compassionate, to get rid of a fat ass or to meet more chicks, the thing that any person needs to be happier is up to them. So, instead of saying that something isn’t yogic, maybe those critics can instead think, “Hmmm. This person is very different from me” and leave it at that. What is yogic and what isn’t is different from person to person.

I say all this as a recovered asshole. I used to judge almost everybody’s practice but my own. When I got serious about things, I found that this open approach to allowing individuals to do their own thing not only fit with my own yoga better, it also felt better and made me happier.

There are many, may things that I think we should be discerning about. There are many times that I believe we must be critical of others. We judge or discern when choosing the people we spend time with, the people we have relationships with and do business with, for example. But, judging another person’s yoga is not yoga. It’s just wrong.

IN PREPARATION FOR VEGAS NEXT WEEKEND (MEMORIAL DAY), MISS THOMPSON VISITS JAMES BROWN, YOGA TEACHER, GURU 2011. HE IS A PRO. HEY, HE HELPED THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS GET OFF DRUGS!

(AND THE “STING” IS THAT STING AND TRUDY WENT TO SEE HIM TOO, AS WELL AS, YES, TIPPER GORE!)

James Brown looks incredibly good. No kiddin’! He lives in a Venice apartment with beach views and his Yoga Studio is called “Yoga Poser.”  Yeah, sure, I know what you’re thinking. But James is special. James is wise. James is a “happy yoga teacher” not a nasty yoga-nazi on a mat. (And he has tons of expresso at home, a good sign.)

He is a 2011 guru, The Master of Ashtanga Yoga. And, if I could park my car on his “no parking” street in Venice, I would go more often.  We drink espresso and his dog, Diane, watches us, or rather she looks me straight in the eyes, staring me down.  Diane is small and mysterious. (And named after Diane Sawyer from when she did the famous Whitney Huston “crack” interview…Witheny said “Show me the receipts, Diane! And that’s how Diane got her name.)

James, yes, has taken all sorts of drugs and he knows  “the Fear,” when you think you done the wrong stuff, boy, he knew about the shit!  He really knew cocaine and therefore James, a former DJ and “nightlife instructor,” was never to bed before sunrise. “I lived in Washington near the zoo. Early in the morning the monkeys began to cry when they woke up. I always wanted to be in bed before the monkeys were screaming but I never quite made it.” James has long been free from all that, and since then, his breathing is different. He went pro.

Then came Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore. In theory, if Gore had won, had become president, James would have been the yoga teacher to the First Lady. Then, the Red Hot Chili Peppers called (well Flea did, to be precise) and James toured with them. The Chili Peppers had fired tons of yoga teachers. If you got fired, you learned about it with a plane ticket.  They made it a little surprise slipped under the door in the morning. James knew the genetic code of rockstars and survived without a plane ticket. James taught yoga to the Chili Peppers for 10 years. (Obviously, before they were on heroin forever.) James is one of those magicians that do real tricks on you. Even if you’re a junkie, they work.

“Yoga for junkies, because…???”

“Because people who do drugs long for the same intensity all the time.”

(So with James yoga stuff you could channel your inner Las Vegas whenever you need it…)

Diane looks concerned. Did I get everything right about this?

“James, we need your wisdom, show me what special yoga exercise will keep people off drugs.”

“It’s the Sun Salutations,” says James.  (He seduced the Chilies with that one)

“What is so great about the Sun Salutations?”

“It’s a ritual. It reminds the addict of the ritual of taking drugs. The request, the waiting, not knowing whether the drugs arrive.”

James offers instead “The Calm. Instead of the hunt for …(Whatever)”

We do 50 salutations, Diane is ok with it.

“James, just one thing: do you think we can save CRYSTAL? The monkey from Hangover 2?  Since she shot the movie, she has become a drug addict.

James can’t make it. Maybe Diane? Can I take her?

I will be in touch and call, if we find CRYSTAL…. For sure.

——————————

Translation by

Bryson Strauss, Director, L.A. ART MACHINE.”

www.laartmachine.com

AND PLEASSSSE CHECK OUT YOGA POSER

http://www.rollingstone.de/magazin/features/article98493/Kein-Matten-Nazi-Miss-Thompson-trifft-den-Yoga-Lehrer-von-Sting-und-Flea.html

Miracle Workers: James Brown, yoga instructor, YogaPoser, Venice Beach, California. “It makes me sad when I go to a crowded yoga studio and the only people there are beautiful, skinny, wealthy white ladies,” says Brown (left), who recently opened an intimate studio called YogaPoser. With a kombucha urn in the kitchen and Diane, his chihuahua, running around, the studio is a welcome antidote to the “Brentwood mom”- style places that dominate Los Angeles. Sting, Tipper Gore and members of The Red Hot Chili Peppers have all sought Brown’s personalized method. Currently, he’s working on an interactive online platform so he can reach a wider audience. And while the name YogaPoser is obviously meant to elicit a laugh, Brown points out its literal side: “Yoga really is about poses.” (www.yogaposer.com). Martha McCully

It is oddly coincidental that one of the things I did there, which was to give a new four-hour lecture that dealt, in large part, with the stories of the New Testament, happened in a place called Bethlehem. I prepared for the talks for weeks. From my perspective it went well and I want to continue to improve it and present it at other venues.

In the basic teacher trainings that I lead, the text that we study is The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. If you are reading this blog, you probably know that they are a collection of brilliantly sequenced, highly interpretable terse statements about the science of the mind that is Patanjali’s take on yoga. It’s almost like a recipe book- there is not much personality in the recipe for happiness that it lays out. The user makes it an actual thing by doing it. As a recipe for cake could never convey what it is like to eat a piece of it, and a map can’t truly represent the territory, so the sutras describe various processes for experiencing what lies beyond thoughts. You can read about it but to know it firsthand, you have to do it. You have to make the cake and eat it.

In the advanced teacher trainings that I lead, we’re going to study the Bhagavad Gita. Considered the bible of Hinduism, it is the most popular book in India. Inserted at some point into The Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic and world’s longest poem that contains many of the important myths of ancient India, it is unlike the Sutras in one striking way. Although, similarly to the Sutras, it describes many of the paths of yoga, it does so in the form of a story. This story has characters. One of them is a manifestation of the Hindu deity, Krishna. To use the book as a learning tool for yoga, and it is has been a very valuable one for me and many others from Einstein to Gandhi, one must have some grasp of the Indian worldview in which Krishna and the other symbols of the story reside.

Borne into yoga after rejecting the rituals and belief system of my Catholic upbringing, a story with characters resembling anything like a god felt like shaky ground to me at first. From childhood until I left the church, I didn’t do well with unbelievable stories meant to teach about real life. It seemed silly.

Before finding The Bhagavad Gita I spent a little time getting to know what some of the other Hindu deities were about. For years I’ve had a deep appreciation for the stories about Ganesh, the little boy with an elephant head. First off he’s very cute. His belly, his appreciation for sweets and his mischief are pretty hard to resist. Like most of the deities revered in the huge population of India, he means different things in different places. But what I heard about him and what resonated with me is that he represents obstacles- our power to create them and dissolve them and, most importantly, the concept that when we encounter an obstacle, we can transform it into a direct experience of the mystery of creation.

The way the great American yoga teacher, Richard Freeman, tells it, when we encounter what we identify as an obstacle in life, we are, by calling it a problem, putting an ideal on the other side of the obstacle. Nd when we are doing that, we are not residing in the present moment. Instead, we are trying to live (impossibly) in our future or past. If, when we find ourselves wanting to be over whatever barrier is at hand, we instead let the thing pull our focus into the present, we can see the barrier as an invitation to the present. We experience the divine mystery of life, according to yoga, simply by being present in whatever is. When you keep repeating the experience of re-purposing obstacles you get very good at it.

So, I came to appreciate Ganesha. What makes Ganesh’s story so different from the stories of the Christ bible is that I didn’t feel like anybody was expecting me to really think that this elephant was hiding behind the curtains, choosing obstacles for me. I understood from the beginning that Ganesh simply represented part of me- the part that deals with barriers and impossible ideals.

Another of the stories that changed my life is one about Hanuman, the monkey. I resisted learning anything about him for years because he looked too much like the Wizard of Oz flying monkeys that scared me as a kid and still do. He really does look like them. Instead of seeking out his meaning, I was educated about him accidentally.

My friend, the great Iyengar yoga teacher, Chris Stein, was heading to India and I asked her to get me a medal of Ganesh to wear around my neck. I missed wearing a St. Christopher medal like I had when I was a little boy and through my time in the Navy. Even after leaving Catholicism, I loved my St, Christopher medals because they reminded me of my mother and grandfather. She gave me all of the ones I ever had and he wore one until he died. But I wanted Ganesh, I had moved on. Chris said she’d be happy to oblige and that she knew just where to get it.

A month or so later she got back and I went to see her at one of her amazing restorative classes. After one of her incredibly heartwarmingly huge hugs, she told me she had my medal, But she said it was a Hanuman medal! She thought I had asked for scary Hanuman, not cute Ganesh! I acted delighted and thanked her with a new kitchen knife- she is well-known as a cook and cooks for Mr. Iyengar when he is in Los Angeles. In addition to the medal, she also gave me a big book about Hanuman and what he means. She told me that the Iyengar family is devoted to Hanuman and that she took a boat out to a little island where a 100-year old blind man had made the medal according to her specs. How could I not love it? And if the story of its making wasn’t enough, it is also very beautiful. On it Hanuman stands as a warrior in uniform. He looks fearless

I got home and looked through the book. Hanuman means a lot of things but what spoke to me the loudest was the story that he flew over the ocean to get medicine for a sick family member. Without telling the whole story, I’ll say that its moral is that through true devotion to something greater than our own worldly desires, we can overcome the limitations of an ego-driven life. When we see the divine in others as worthy of devotion, we recognize it in ourselves, too, and we cease to be limited.

I haven’t taken the medal off since she gave it to me several years ago. It is my favorite possession. It reminds me of Chris and of my students and my teachers. It reminds me that we are all from a source that can’t be named or described and that we will all be okay because we are all god. Somehow Chris knew that I needed to be reminded of that. Since I first met Chris, I have felt such love for her and from her and now I keep her, in the form of my reminder of life’s most important lesson, resting on my heart all the time.

So, what does this all have to do with Bethlehem? When I started to find real meaning in these foreign symbols, it made me begin to look at Jesus differently. As I began to study the Bhagavad Gita, I saw undeniable parallels between Krishna and Christ. Krishna is the god who restores order when things get off kilter. He is all about love. His character is one of a loving and infinitely attractive man. He is often symbolized with blue skin to represent that his beauty is beyond anything else that we’re used to. This is important, because he represents attraction itself. In the Gita he says, “I am desire itself when that desire is for the spiritual life”.

Put another way: in all of us there is a caretaker. When I was trying to get off drugs, the thing that finally worked after years of failing was to stop hating the drug user in me and to start to treat him like a lost little kid. I remembered that there was once an innocent person where that lying and thieving addict now lived. The part of me that took care of him, that got him a job in California and packed his bags, that got him onto a yoga mat every day and ushered him into a happy life, was that caretaker. That is what Krishna represents. He is the part of the self that draws it to the Self. Krishna is love. So is Jesus.

Knowing about the thing that Krishna represents and having experiencing it firsthand, it was easy to remember and re-define for myself the things that Jesus said. Particularly important to me were his words, “Whoever believes in me will never die.” That is what yoga is about. But it’s not about believing in Jesus, it’s about believing in your real self, which is divine- no less divine than that famous virgin-born martyr himself.

In preparing for my talk in Bethlehem, I took a new look at the stories whose meanings had eluded me since childhood. I remember as soon as I started going to Sunday school that I had real problems with what was being taught. What did I have to do with the crucifixion and why was I constantly being told that it was my fault? Good lord, I didn’t do anything! And I had no idea why I should be so happy that Jesus was born. Looking back, I can honestly say that nobody tried to explain the meaning of the stories. My family and teachers didn’t seem to know. But they believed because they were scared not to … even though believing didn’t seem to make any of them happy.

I’ve long appreciated Joseph Campbell’s teaching. He died years ago but he still sells a ton of books because he masterfully and accessibly drew parallels in the world’s religions and makes it all make sense. What he says about metaphor and religion really changed my life. He says that most of the world is divided into two halves when it comes to religion. There are those that read the stories as historical fact and they call themselves believers. That’s where I grew up. Then the other half says that science has proven that the stories can’t have been true and they call themselves atheists or non-believers. That’s where I was as an adult. I never stopped believing in the divine, but I fully discarded religion as something for stupid people.

The Scopes Monkey trial in the 1920’s, where science was pitted against religion, is a great example of the divide that misunderstanding metaphor created. (Science lost, by the way. The Butler Act that outlawed teaching evolution and/or denying the creation story of Genesis in public schools wasn’t taken off the books until 1967!) Metaphor, Campbell says, is powerful when it is treated as neither history accurate nor scientifically impossible. Instead, it is meant to evoke a sense of awe in us, to teach us about ourselves and to help us make choices about life. His explanations of things has almost made me feel like I could sit in a Catholic church again, if necessary, without sweating.

When we view the stories as metaphors they take on a very practical meaning. Stories exist because they convey in us a feeling. We can relate to the situations we read about and feel things that can’t be otherwise described or conveyed. The sheer terror of a soldier surveying a battle with friends on both sides, as in the Bhagavad Gita, becomes a palpable reminder of the fear that comes when we inevitably face our human choices about how to live and with what to identify. And, finally for me, after decades of alienation from Christianity, I get that Jesus’s crucifixion isn’t necessarily about historical accuracy- it is about our ability to choose to deny the house of cards that is the human ego, created out of necessity when we forget that we are god. Jesus chose to get nailed to a cross to show the disposability of the human body and with his eyes lifted up to his father, he was in fact looking inward at his soul, my soul, every body’s soul. When we’re told he did it for us, it’s not to make us feel like asses- it’s meant to teach us that we can do it, too.

Likewise, the virgin Mary isn’t about how dirty sex is. Great news! It is about being born into a spiritual life as Jesus was. He needed no coupling to take place because he was always there and still is, he just needed a womb to grow in for a few months. But, unfortunately, Mary is remembered in churches as statues that cry real tears and in the Hail Mary prayer as a woman beg to we need to pray for us because we are sinners above all. She has a direct line to a god that doesn’t really want to talk to us because we’re naughty. That’s crap. Sorry, Mom. (My beautiful half-Spanish all-Catholic mother’s name is Maria Concepcion. She is named after the lady herself!)

So this past week I got to talk about all of this to a group that had practicing Catholics, non-believers and a couple of undecideds. And it went very well! Everybody was heard and I think everybody got it. Instead of rejecting anything, this point of view allowed openness. Thank you, Bethlehem, for making me dig around my self enough to get interested in Bethlehem again. I’ll be back!

Their studio is called Stroga and its mission is to teach yoga with an emphasis on physical fitness. They derive their name from combining the word strength with the word yoga. It’ll be a good fit for my company’s content, which emphasizes an individualized approach to practice. Stroga caters to a student base who thinks they need physical fitness as part of their practice and our customized approach honors and supports all intentions for practice. We have a What you want is what you get mentality so I think it’ll work out great.

In talking to Travis and Olga, they mentioned a new mandate to their teachers that they want all of their classes to start with five sun salutations. Makes perfect sense to me. Obviously their student base wants to work. Otherwise, they’d not have chosen a studio with strength in the name. They told me that they got some feedback from teachers there that class should start with a few minutes of centering and intention-setting. I wasn’t at all surprised that some teachers would insist on starting with a short meditation of some sort. It’s how a lot of classes start and it’s a great practice for students who like that. There are a lot of those students out there.

But in a place called Stroga, I think the students more likely want to start by working and use every available minute to challenge and develop their physical abilities.

This whole discussion takes me back to why I call my company YogaPoser. Satirically, I am poking fun at the whole mindset that yoga must be a, b and c. I expect that those fundamentalist teachers who are rigid in what they think constitutes a practice will call my approach that of a poser as in poseur. But, I also know that there is no room in authentic yoga for telling other people what their practice should be. And I happen to practice and teach a very physical approach to practice. Doing the poses with focus is a perfect practice of centering the mind and is every bit as advanced and authentic as sitting still for hours or being of service or worshipping a deity or repeating a mantra. This isn’t my opinion; it’s all directly from the ancient philosophy that I’ve been studying for a while now. The practitioner does what the practitioner needs. That is true yoga practice.

I have heard teachers say there has to be stillness at the beginning of class, others say you must start with a breathing meditation, there are many who start with a particular physical effort or with some kind of intention setting. All of those things are fine ways to start a practice. But I bristle when I hear teachers say that class MUST have this or that to be a real practice. There is room in the world of yoga for infinite possibilities in what comprises a practice. It’s all there in the old books. So, teaching a workout isn’t a modern take on yoga or a hybrid of gym and shala. It’s totally authentic yoga if that’s what the practitioner thinks they need.

Yoga happens when you make your mind still enough to see what lies beneath the mental chatter that defines the human mind. While it is recognized that we all have different things going on in our heads, it is also recognized in the yogic worldview that what lies beneath the chatter is the same for all of us. It’s wide open bliss. What lies between one’s current identity and that blissful state is an identification with the chatter. In yogic terms, that misidentification of the self is called avidya, ignorance of self, and it’s believed to be the root cause of all human suffering. We think we are our mind’s noises, when in fact our real self is that infinite bliss that lies beneath the ego that we create out of ignorance of our true selves. How we best cross the gulf between the noise and the bliss is different for every human being.

Now, back to the idea of allowing some practitioners to call a full-on workout a yoga practice. Yoga practice is defined as whatever the practitioner thinks they need to feel better. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the most important yoga philosophy texts, practice, called abhyasa in Sanskrit, is defined as any effort that one chooses to make the mind more still. So if a person’s mind is more at ease after a workout, let’s give them a workout. Many people are upset when they don’t exercise. Let’s give those people exercise. For many of these fitness-oriented types, sitting still disturbs them. It provides the opposite effect that yoga practice is defined as necessarily providing. It makes the mind noisier.

Hats off to the owners and managers at Stroga who are saying their facility provides a workout in the context of a yoga practice. To me catering to a fitness crowd’s desire for exercise aligns much more closely with a perfect practice of yoga, which is a science of the mind, and not a science of pretending to be Indian or acting like what you think a yogi should act like. Give the people what they want.

The mind moves in different ways for each of us. And we need different practices to get it more clear so we can see what lies beneath the clutter. Stroga is saying to those whose minds feel better when the body works hard that they have a place to come where they will get just that: their practice as they see fit.