Tag: yoga

I got dem old-school yoga blues again, mama (apologies to Janis Joplin)

by L. Valdez Karl

There was an article in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend about how blues clubs in Chicago are struggling.  That is, not so much the blues clubs in the white, tourist areas of Chicago, but the clubs on the mostly black West and South sides:  “The official Chicago blues scene — a magnet for tourists from around the globe — prospers downtown and on the North Side, catering to a predominantly white audience in a homogenized, unabashedly commercial setting.  The unofficial scene — drawing mostly locals and a few foreign cognoscenti — barely flickers on the South and West sides, attracting a mostly black, older crowd to more homespun, decidedly less profitable locales.”  [emphasis supplied.]

The more I read this article I couldn’t help but think that what I was reading was analagous in certain respects to the modern yoga scene, especially when I read this:

  “So what happens when an indigenous music . . . gets repackaged for sale . . . ?  An art form starts to die.”

Much has been written about how yoga changed when it came West.  I was in a workshop with Paul Grilley when he said that in order for yoga to be palatable for Western tastes the spirituality had to be stripped out of it.   Sure there are many teachers who teach a classical or as I call it, an old-school style of yoga, but how filled are those classes compared to the ones where the teacher dazzles you with a one-armed handstand, kicks your ass, and sends you home with a two minute savasana and no meditation?  From my own experience when I taught at a studio my “modern” vinyasa flow class had a lot more students in it than my classical vinyasa krama class where I usually had three or four or none at all.

Naming themselves after a Muddy Waters song, the Rolling Stones visited the South side of Chicago, home of the urban blues, to pay homage to  Chess Records.   That was the rock and roll version of going to India to see where it all started, to experience the undiluted roots of their music.

Times and tastes naturally change in both music and  yoga.  Even vintage country music has faded away to the sanitized pop version of what it is now.  As the article points out the nature and purpose of the newer blues clubs is different from the old clubs.  At best, the newer clubs are filled; at worst, the bands serve up an endless repetition of songs like “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”  In those clubs where blues music is watered down and branded, no one expects the music to develop to the next level.

The newer clubs give the people what they want in order to fill the place whether it’s selling T shirts or having the bands play the same old tired songs.   Just like the clubs, yoga studios give their students what they think they want in order to keep drawing them in — yogalates, yoga with weights, whatever it takes.

In comparing yoga and art, one of my students said that art is always difficult to describe or explain, but you know it when you find it.  Great art, like yoga, has soul.  Yoga has morphed and changed since it has come to the West and while nothing can stay the same, I wonder, like the musicians wondered in the Tribune article, what is lost when the infrastructure of the yoga music is shattered.

As one of the musicians said in the article, there will always be the tourist clubs that sell the blues “brand” but “you can’t look to the clubs and the club owners to pursue blues as a culture.  It is to them purely a commodity, nothing more than a bottle of whiskey, and how much money you can make off of it.”

Not an ideal way for preserving an art form, whether it’s music or yoga.

“Working Out My Karma: Struggling to Find My Dharma On and Off the Yoga Mat”

by L. Valdez Karl

Here is another guest post by writer, friend, and yoga student Sarah Militz-Frielink.  You can read the first post she wrote for LYJ entitled The Illusion of When.

Sarah was inspired to write this post after becoming disillusioned with the corporatized yoga that is currently playing in the modern American yoga scene.

If you like Sarah’s style, contact her at sarah (at) leavingdark (dot) com if you need a writer.  Sarah said that she is finally getting back into spiritual writing and is thinking of starting her own online non-profit magazine.

Enjoy, and comments welcome!

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It seems like just yesterday, I signed up for my first yoga class at the local park district down the street from my house.  That was eight years ago, and I have been practicing pretty much regularly to this day.  At the time, I had no idea what I signed up for or what a genuine yoga practice should look like.  I never anticipated all the challenges I would encounter along the way.  Probably motivated by the wrong reasons to try yoga, my underlying goal was to shed 30 pounds of baby weight that still clung to my body.  I had just given birth to my third child.  I was definitely lacking the spiritual discipline a true practice actually involved.  I just wanted results.  I did not know that a beautiful path lie before me where I would have to confront my own karma and struggle to find my dharma.

I guess I bought into the corporatized version of yoga: hot, sweaty, skinny, bodies on a mat glowing with a renewed sense of beauty, a calmer demeanor, and a compulsion to eat vegan.  When I use the term “corporatized yoga”, I am referencing the images that dominate all things yoga in magazines, commercials, DVDs, props, mats, and books.  Media and pop culture bombards us with a plethora of images—pictures of hot, upper-middle class blond females, doing handstands with ease.  And then there are the magazine photos boasting post-practice smiles plastered on flawless porcelain faces as the “model” promotes a new sport drink or yoga pants line. These images do not reflect a genuine yoga practice, one that seeks to unite the “human with the divine—all within the self” as the ancient yogis instruct us to do.

During my journey, I realized that these images conveyed a false sense of hope, one based in consumerism, vanity, and prejudice.  As if all bodies on yoga mats should look the same, as if all people who do yoga are skinny, blond, vegan, and Zen-like.  What’s worse is that these images brainwash Americans into thinking what yogis should look like or act like. If someone does not fit the norm, they are questioned along the way.  This is what I call a “yogaism”— a belief that those who practice yoga should conform to the norms of the corporatized yogi image and a discrimination against those who do not.

For example, I was once asked why I didn’t act enlightened all the time.  My coworker thought people who do yoga and meditate were like Buddha every second of the day.  “How come you aren’t calm all the time? I don’t get why you do yoga and are not in a continuous state of serenity.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I do yoga now,” I told him. “Because I have recognized over the years how much anxiety I had that I wasn’t even aware of; I know I’m not calm all the time.  Enlightenment is a process; it ebbs and flows.”

My coworker then responded that he disagreed with my statement about enlightenment. The people he knew who had a true yoga practice were always that way.  They were never anxious and always enlightened.  My practice then must be a sham.

I laugh now looking back on this. Who were these yogis he knew who were in a constant state of enlightenment?  Maybe he confused the ones in yoga magazine for real people in the flesh.  Maybe he knew yoga masters who practice in a monastery on a mountaintop because last time I checked we were all human and subject to moments of fallibility.

Yet on and off the mat, I am still working out my karma, struggling to find my dharma as I continue to question what a genuine practice should look like.  I now know a bit about what a genuine practice does not look like.   A genuine practice is not limited to hot, skinny, blond females, who are in a semi-drugged state of yoga bliss.   A genuine practice does not come easily.  It isn’t about increased flexibility or weight-loss.  There are times when you confront your own demons on the mat.  You realize that you have unforgiveness stored in your heart chakra.  You learn to love yourself and in the process love others as you slowly release pain from this life and (at times) the pain from previous lives.

A genuine practice does not boost your self-esteem.  You are humbled at the limitations of the human condition as you practice your poses.  You become aware of how you sell yourself out every day as a consumer in cultural capitalism.  How small acts of kindness (i.e. donating a pair of shoes to an impoverished child in Guatemala) do not change the system (i.e. the child still lives in hideous poverty).

You develop an increased sense of social responsibility as you come to grips with the excesses of the American lifestyle. The eco-friendly mat and water bottle no longer seems to compensate for the size your carbon footprint.

This is what I have learned about a genuine yoga practice.  It should not be based in a “yogaism”—one that excludes overweight individuals, persons of color, or working class individuals. Yoga should embrace all kinds of people who are different shapes, sizes, and colors.  Yoga is about making peace with self and others and embracing who we are—both on and off the mat.

my vinyasa root guru

by L. Valdez Karl

In Mahayana Buddhism there is the tradition of the “root guru”, someone from whom we receive the teachings directly.  My root guru in Mahayana Buddhism is Gelek Rimpoche.  I will always consider Srivatsa Ramaswami my root guru in vinyasa krama yoga.

I first met Ramaswamiji in 2003 or 2004 at the Chicago studio where I certified as a teacher.  I was a very newbie teacher and he was teaching a weekend workshop, his first time in Chicago.  The Friday night was the “Yoga of Sound” and it was advertised that over the weekend he would teach special vinyasa sequences that had not been taught in America.  I was intrigued because even that early in my teaching I had started to research places to study yoga in India.

Ramaswamiji is considered a chant master in India and the Friday night Yoga of Sound was all about chanting.  It was the first time I heard vedic chants sung in the traditional way and it cracked open my heart in a way that Krishna Das or Jai Uttal could never do, and still don’t.  I drove home weeping all the way.  I knew I had found my teacher and Ramaswamiji put me on the path to study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Madiram.   When I saw my name in the Acknowledgement of his book The Complete Book of Vinyasa Yoga  I cried again because I did not even think he knew my name,

For me, Ramaswamiji is a true yogi, nothing more needs to be said.  In 2011 he is much more well known than he was when I first met him when barely anyone knew the name of the student who studied the longest with Krishnamacharya.  He now teaches a 200 hour teacher training at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles and the video below is about the training.  In the beginning you will hear his wonderful chanting and there is a short interview with him.  The rest of the video consists of students giving their impressions of Ramaswami and the training.

I thought it interesting towards the end of the video when a student said that she had been doing yoga for a few years but had never done yoga that had such a complete emphasis on the breath.  When a new student comes to me that is also usually the first thing they say to me after the first class, how emphasis on the breath totally changed their practice.  I have studied in this lineage for a long time so comments like that always make me go hmmmmmmm…….because what exactly is being taught in teacher trainings nowadays?  Is emphasis on the breath considered an “advanced” practice to be taught in a 300 hour training because if that is the case I have to wonder about that.  Breathing is basic, from Class #1, as soon as you step on the mat.  Every movement is initiated with an inhale or an exhale, mindfully, I don’t know any other way to teach.  Conscious breathing IS pranayama.  When I hear comments like that student’s it confirms my belief that yoga in American IS different compared to where I study in India.

Maybe I should try teaching my “Yoga of Krishnamacharya” workshop again.  Years ago when I taught at a studio I offered it for yoga teachers and well-seasoned practitioners only.  I was going to talk about the vinyasa krama method and offer a practice for shoulderstand.  I thought at least teachers would be interested in learning about the Source Scholar of Yoga, the teacher of Iyengar, Jois, and Desikachar.  No one signed up.

Just call me old-school.

“Asanas are yogic postures – stable and comfortable. Vinyasas are aesthetic breath oriented movements within those exquisite yoga poses.” — Srivatsa Ramaswami

“Asana will make the body light.
Pranayama strengthens prana.
Dharana purifies the intellect.
Meditation purifies the mind.” — Sri T. Krishnamacharya

“Nowadays, the practice of yoga stops with just asanas.  Very few even attempt dharana and dhyana [deeper meditation] with seriousness.  There is a need to search once more and reestablish the practice and value of yoga in modern times.” — Sri T. Krishnamacharya (excerpt from “Krishnamacharya: His Life and Teachings” by A. G. Mohan)

karma yoga and yoga community

by L. Valdez Karl

October is Domestic Violence Awareness month and before it ends I want to make you aware of statistics on domestic violence.  This is a post I wrote last year with things that may shock you.  Or not.

The yoga fundraiser on Saturday was a success in that a dozen people attended (mostly my students and others who know me) and once the cash is doubled by a private charitable trust, the shelter will receive a little over $1,000.  Included in that amount is a check for $300 sent by a woman who took a few classes with me a long time ago because she could not attend the fundraiser but she would “be there in spirit.”  Nice!

I met with the shelter director during the summer and we talked about starting a weekly yoga program, but at this point in time there is no money for it (I only teach one night a month.)  People always ask me, “why don’t they just apply for a grant so they can pay you?”  The shelter recently received a $20,000 grant from the Mary Kay Foundation and this is what the director told me about that:

“The $20,000 is general operating money that is really just filling a hole we had where we had lost funding over the last couple of years.  We are still running with a skeleton crew that are stretched way too thin.  On top of that, they have not gotten even a cost of living increase in over 3 years.  So that is my first priority as far as funding goes…then I can start thinking about new projects and expanding different projects.  The grant writer is still looking for money specific to a new and innovative way to help victims.”

“A new and innovative way to help victims” means my yoga program.  And so it goes.  And that’s why I do a fundraiser for the shelter.

For about a month before the fundraiser I busted my asana trying to get the word out — emails to local papers, emails to local yoga peeps, tweeting, Facebook, posting flyers in health food stores and coffeehouses, etc.  I understand now how people working for non-profits get burned out.  The owner of the dance studio where the fundraiser was held did a great job getting the word out, she put a flyer into everyone’s hand who came into the studio.  The Nia and dance community also helped spread the the word.  But one group was conspicuous by their absence, in fact, their silence was  deafening.  Need I say it?  The local community of yoga teachers.

I’m beginning to think that use of the phrase “yoga community” should be banned because it’s basically meaningless — at least where I live, but your mileage may vary.  The phrase is used (overused?) in the yoga blogosphere when people write about a group of teachers and/or students getting together for a cause.  My own “yoga community” (which will forever be placed in quotes) is relatively small and most teachers know of or personally know each other.  Hell, me and 7 other yoga teachers use the same massage therapist so every month I get the local yoga 411.

But it never fails to amaze me when a group of people that speaks so much about seva and karma yoga, and who think Seane Corn and Russell Simmons are so cool to occupy Wall Street, can be silent about something going on in their own locale, for a local cause.  To quote two yoga teacher friends (one who attended and one who helped spread the word every week, both who also consider themselves yoga outsiders), they were “amazed” and “horrified” that despite knowing about a yoga fundraiser for a local women’s issue, there was little interest shown by local teachers.  I did hear from two (out of the 20+ teachers who got my email blast) who told me they were sorry they could not attend.

Why is this so-called “yoga community” that is coveted so much so elusive?

Believe me, I get the fact that everyone has their own favorite cause that they donate to, my cause isn’t your cause, but that’s not the point at all.  I don’t care if someone donates $1.00 or $100, support is given in ways other than money.  Sometimes time and interest are more precious than dollar bills.  Don’t support someone expecting to get something in return.  I mean, really?  Read the Gita.  That does not even karmically compute.  Sometimes you do things to help, unasked.  Just ’cause it’s the right thing to do.

The kicker was when a local teacher who was a Facebook “friend” deleted my comment about the fundraiser and defriended me.  Wow.  Didn’t know promoting seva is such an evil thing to do.  She had posted on her FB page about an event at the local studio that was in the evening on the same day as the fundraiser.  I commented something to the effect, “don’t forget about the yoga fundraiser: karma yoga, go out to dinner, then go to the event.”  That was it.  Innocuous.  The thing is, I’ve known this teacher for about 7 years, I’ve been in her class, she’s been in mine, not friends (as I don’t use that term loosely), but acquaintances, knowing the same local yoga peeps.  Delete.  Defriend.  Uh, what?!?  The irony was that she had sent me a message a few weeks earlier about how important domestic violence issues are to her and she wanted to donate money.  Guess I’m not getting that dough now.

With one of the themes being superficiality, I always loved the way Burl Ives’ character in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof spit out the word mendacity as something unacceptable.

When another blog reader posted this on my FB wall, I had to chuckle.  Good in theory, in practice, maybe not so much:  “hold a fundraising event for a local charity…the success of working and coming together to do something good close to home creates a perfect opportunity for students to connect with one another.”

Over the the past month I’ve had a good think about this whole “yoga community” idea/ideal that is perpetrated in the we’re-all-one-big-happy-kula, kumbaya.  It is something that some yoga person somewhere is always telling us to strive for, i.e., the collective yoga thang.  Buddhists refer to it as sangha.  The Universe must be sending me messages because just when I needed to hear it, I received another email from a relatively new reader in Canada.  The writer told me that while her yoga journey is not as seasoned as my own, she does know that “the ‘yoga community’ is the one you create, in your heart and in your space.  I only allow those that resonate my values into my space.”  Very wise.  And true.

I will also take the words of my Sister Kali Grrl, Svasti, to heart:  “work at defusing your road rage, and/or all those little things that niggle you in life. The stuff that makes you snarky, snippy or snappy at yourself/others on your bad days. Because my lovelies, THAT is all inflammation. And too much inflammation will make you sick.”   Because Svasti and others who resonate my values ARE my yoga community, my sangha, and it’s not necessarily where I live.  It was serendipitous to also read that “real communities live because of a passion that is shared by those who belong to it. And when it’s strong enough, that community can exist anywhere.”

I’m universal, and I forgot, for a short time, when I was at my lowest yet again, my passion all wrung out, that I am indeed swimming in grace.

In the end, does any of it really matter, that is, is it really important to me who gives a damn?  Maybe, maybe not, but a wise friend told me a long time ago, “stay passionate and keep holding that mirror up because somebody’s got to do it.”

But if you see Seane Corn, tell her to put her money where her mouth is and send a yoga sister some healthy bucks from her organization to start a weekly yoga program at the shelter.

Kumbaya, y’all.

yoga teacher training standards debate

by L. Valdez Karl

Lots of good discussion here expressing some of the reasons why my future teacher training program will be 300 hours and include modules that are not usually taught in a standard 200 hour training (i.e., in my area.)

re-inspired for #realyoga

by L. Valdez Karl

This year has been on-again, off-again for me insofar as yoga.  While I am always grateful for the small, group classes I teach out of my house, the private yoga biz, i.e,. one-on-one yoga/yoga therapy, sucks.  The highlight this summer was helping one of the top-ranked college hurdlers in the country rehab from hip surgeries.  Her mother found me online and the funny thing is she lives down the street from me.  Small world.  I worked with her twice a week and it was a joy.  But a consistent income from that?  A student increase in my small group classes?  No.  This is the first  year I’ve spent more money on my yoga biz (such as trainings) than I brought in.  Someone tell me again how popular and mainstream yoga is.

After 10 years of teaching I seriously considered quitting this year.  “My yoga” is not popular because I am not mainstream, status quo.  Because I have been burned by yoga studio owners and am tired of all the drama yoga studios generate — and I will add IN MY AREA, but from what I hear, it’s not that different in other parts of the country and sometimes even worse — I no longer teach weekly classes in studios.  The style of yoga that I teach is not about kicking your ass and making you sweat, and if you bust out a handstand when I say “child’s pose”, I’m going to call you out.  I love traveling to teach workshops but as for teaching weekly classes, no thanks.  I suppose I would return to teaching classes depending on the studio AND the owner, but I have to say that even thinking about it brings up a physical sensation that is similar to PTSD.  Seriously.  That’s how badly I’ve been abused treated.  Don’t even get me started about the “yoga community.”

I became certified in teaching Trauma Sensitive Yoga this year, a training that I consider one of the most influential that I’ve ever taken, but getting people such as counselors to even consider it has been like pulling teeth.  As I was with eco-garden design with native plants (I am also a garden designer and a certified horticulturist) and thai yoga massage, I am once again ahead of my time.Then I decided to to finally conduct a teacher training and went through the Yoga Alliance rigamaroll.  Instead of being energized about finally being annointed an EXPERIENCED REGISTERED YOGA TEACHER, I became even more depressed.  Finally seeing all my training hours in 10 years — literally 1000 hours — written down in black and white made me think, “what the fuck am I doing?  why bother?”   All my training doesn’t mean shit to a tree, as Grace Slick sang, when it seems that all people care about is getting their ass kicked in a hot yoga class.  It is a rare person in my area of far west suburban Chicago who is willing to pay for private yoga classes — and I live in an upper middle class area.

And please don’t tell me that I am “manifesting” this.  If I hear one more person tell me to “let go of negativity”, “be open”, “throw it out to the Universe”, or any other New Age Secret clap-trap, I’m going NeNe Leakes on your asana.

The fact of the matter is that when one is passionate about  yoga as a path of transformation and all you get are closed doors and little interest, it is very discouraging and frustrating.  My private students understand my frustration and are extremely supportive.  They know I need to go to India because it is there that I am renourished, it is there that real yoga renews me.  Yeah, you read it: “real yoga” — and I don’t care if you don’t like the phrase because I am sick of the political correctness of modern yoga, yoga blogs included.

In all this mix, when I was at my lowest, once again someone whom I’ve never met lifts me up.  A new blog reader — yoga student for 20 years, teacher for 5 — emailed me and told me her story of frustration and indeed, hate, of yoga as it is now taught.  She told me that my writing here is an answer to a prayer and she wanted to express her gratitude.  She told me how her yoga mojo vanished and she entered the dark night of the yoga soul….as what is happening with me now.  She wrote:

“…living in the land of the yoga OBscene, southern california, made matters much worse.  i began to loathe and even used the word hate in re: to yoga.  i officially declared DIVORCE in june of this year.  what had it become?  where are “they” taking it?  who are all these 200 hr YA stamped people who know nothing about, nor care less about, living the yoga??  a friend suggested i stop cursing the dark and light a candle. and lindasyoga.com arrived.”

Her email overwhelmed me.  I started to cry.  Maybe I am doing something right, I thought, if my writing about yoga can have such an effect.  Aside from my regular weekly students, the support that I receive from those near is practically nil.  Almost all the support in what I do comes from people whom I’ve never met, YOU, out there, globally.  And that amazes me.

This August I finally met a long-time blog reader from Texas and we are collaborating on a yoga project that is going to rock the yoga world, IMO.  I got an email from another reader with a yoga contact in Nova Scotia.  I have another contact for yoga in Cuba.

So should I be depressed that hardly anyone gets me where I live?  Don’t we all want validation, approval from our community, isn’t that human nature?  After I read the above email to my husband, even he said that my home is OUT THERE, NOT HERE.  I just reside here, but I live OUT THERE.  As my friend in Texas reminded me, a prophet is never appreciated in their homeland.  Not that I consider myself a prophet, but I get the analogy.  A long ago private student told me that it’s hard being a pioneer because the pioneers get the arrows shot up the ass.

Ouch.  That’s what that is.

yoga in OMerika: what $95 buys

by L. Valdez Karl
The Official Blessing

$95 bought that logo.

I don’t consider my posts about the Yoga Alliance as rants, although I am sure some would consider them as such.  I consider them a public yoga education.  I am reporting my own experience in order to help any newbie teachers make their own informed decisions.

I gave my reasons in this post as to why I renewed my registration with Yoga Alliance.  $150 later I am now officially an E-RYT 200 — “EXPERIENCED REGISTERED YOGA TEACHER.”  I know, I was such a hack before YA’s official blessing.  I can now conduct a 200 hour yoga teacher training after YA’s approval of my curriculum, of course.  After paying the requisite fees.  Of course.

I decided to upload more teaching and training hours to the YA site, so I pulled out my four inch thick folder with my teaching and training records.  I was amazed to finally see it all laid out in black and white, all the time and effort I’ve put into my yoga teaching since 2004 when I first registered with YA  — over 2000 hours of teaching and almost 900 hours of advanced training.  I did not even count each and every three hour workshop.

I thought what the hell, I will try to upgrade to E RYT 500 – 500 because one day I might want to conduct a 500 hour training.  The upgrade is another $95.  Piece of cake with all my hours, right?  Wrong, wrong, and WRONG.   This is the email I received from YA:

“In order to upgrade to an ERYT 500, one must first meet the criteria for an RYT 500, having graduated either from a YA registered advanced 300 or complete 500 hour program  (please see standards below).  

RYT 500-
A yoga teacher with a minimum of 500 hours of yoga teacher training, either:
o   500 hours from one school, or
o   200 hours plus 300 hours of advanced training from one school (training that requires participants to have a 200-Hour certification.

As you have not completed a YA registered training, but  have spent many hours of in depth study with Sri Desikachar, I would recommend that you complete the “graduate of a non-registered school”  application (attached) for your RYT 500 upgrade.”

Out of my 800+ hours of training, my three intensives at KYM plus private classes with Desikachar’s senior teachers total 300 hours of advanced training.  Apparently the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram is NOT a registered school with YA.  AS IF that would stop me from studying there.

I am sure Sri Desikachar stays up at night wondering whether the school he started to honor his father, the Source Scholar of Yoga, the Grandfather of Modern Yoga, should be registered with the Yoga Alliance.  Please.  Really?  The YA can’t cut KYM any slack?  Let them “grandfather” in as a registered school?  Seriously?  By the way, someone who certifies you in “Goddess Yoga” IS an approved school of the YA.  Right.

Here’s the kicker:  in order for me to upgrade to a 500 level teacher, the “graduate of a non-registered school” application costs $150 together with the $95 to upgrade to E RYT 500.  So another $245 over and above the $150 I already paid to renew and upgrade to E RYT 200.

Oh my Goddess, I am in the wrong business.  I need to be in the certification game.  And can someone tell me why YA is officially a non-profit organization?  I said “no thanks.”  I don’t want to pay another dime to YA especially considering all that dough is a lot of rupees in India which I will need starting in January.  But eventually I will have to pay it if I ever want to conduct a 500 hour level training in the future.  AS IF I could not do that RIGHT NOW.

Of course I can conduct teacher trainings without being “Yoga Alliance approved” but how realistic is that?  With the current mentality of yoga in OMerika, would anyone sign up for my trainings?  I doubt it, because even the most staunchly anti-YA teachers (Ganga White – a must read; Lex Gillan; and my teacher in Chicago, to name a few), ALL ended up registering their schools with YA.  Because that is what people look for.

So here is my question, good readers:  the curriculum being equal, if you had a choice of a non-YA approved 200 hour teacher training with someone like me, with all my hours, 5 times at KYM OR with someone who is YA approved but does not have the hours of training and teaching experience that I have, which would you pick?

And I will say this before anyone else does:  yes, I know hours of training does not automatically make one a “good” teacher, the same way inexperience does not automatically make one a “bad” teacher.  There are always variables.

Yoga in OMerika.  Travel at your own risk.

in my humble opinion

by L. Valdez Karl

Sergio DiazGranados of the Yoga Teacher Training website contacted me for an interview when I wrote the “babies teaching babies” post.  He also published an interview with David Frawley so I am in good company!  Maybe my thoughts will benefit someone out there so I am posting a few of my pithier answers.  You can read the entire interview on his site next week.

Sergio also has an opportunity for someone to win a yoga scholarship for a 2012 teacher training program by teachers such as Rod Stryker, Rolf Gates, Shiva Rea, or David Swenson, among others.  The deadline to apply is November 18.

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What was your biggest challenge during your teacher training process?
I think my biggest challenge during my first yoga teacher training was doing chatarunga dandasana!  I had never done that pose in a beginning yoga class and I felt intimidated by the younger students (I did not become a certified teacher until I was 48) who could do it without thinking twice.  Fortunately I’ve come to realize that real yoga is not about the asana!

What has been your biggest challenge in continuing your craft as a yoga teacher?
I think my biggest challenge is teaching the style of yoga that I teach.  I must qualify this by saying “in my geographic area.”  My yoga is informed by my spiritually which is Buddhism and by my vipassana practice.  The yoga that I teach is grounded in the Krishnamacharya lineage and mindfulness practice.  My style of yoga is not what you would call mainstream.  I call it the Yoga of Awareness and many times it seems that people are only interested in yoga as a workout.  My yoga will make you sweat but not because you’re doing 100 chatarungas.  It’s one of the reasons I no longer teach in yoga studios, only privately.  I let students find me.

What do you think makes a good yoga teacher?
Someone who is always a student first and a teacher second, no matter how long they have been teaching.  Authenticity.  Walking your yoga talk even if you stumble.  And if you stumble, then owning it instead of making excuses.   Practicing what you preach, especially meditation.  Compassion and empathy.  Constant self-inquiry.  The ability to say “I don’t know” if a student asks you a question instead of letting your ego answer for you.  And the ability to laugh and not take yourself too seriously.  We are always laughing in my classes.  I tell my students that laughter is the best pranayama!  Notice I said nothing about asana — because asana knowledge is a given!

Do you feel that teachers are doing a disservice to the Yoga community if they only focus on the physical asana practice and leave out the spiritual component?
I used to think it was a disservice, but I now believe “you do your yoga and I’ll do mine.”   I only know what’s right for me and most of the students to whom I teach have been with me since Day One of my teaching, 10 years ago.  If someone comes to me and doesn’t like what I teach, that’s fine, they will find a teacher better suited for them.  I would not exactly call it a “disservice” because any type of movement is beneficial for the body.  

But I also do not believe what many teachers believe that everyone will come to know what “real yoga” is, i.e., with the spiritual components, if they practice long enough.  Yes, of course that happens with some people, but I don’t believe that’s true for everyone who starts out with yoga as a purely physical practice because not everyone is on the same path.  That is like saying everyone who runs a marathon is on equal footing.  They’re not.  There will always be someone in front, running with you, and behind you.  Again, everyone is different and we all have our karma to work through in this lifetime.

For me, yoga is ALWAYS asana + pranayama + meditation and yoga always was a spiritual practice.  I’ve heard Desikachar say that yoga contains X, Y and Z, and anything else is acrobatics.  The bottom line is that you can call a dog a cat all you want to, but that doesn’t make it a cat.  Calling your morning stretches yoga without having X, Y and Z doesn’t make it yoga.  Would you still call it a chocolate cake if you left out the chocolate?  It might still be good, but it’s not a chocolate cake.

What is Yoga to you?
Yoga to me is about personal transformation.  You can only change the world by changing yourself, a day, a moment, a breath at a time.  Through our inner work and self-inquiry, yoga teaches us to treat each moment as brand new, to be present with whatever arises in our lives, pleasant and unpleasant.  It teaches us to observe and listen to the inner voice that bubbles up that is our connection to whatever it is we believe to be greater outside ourselves.

WITH METTA…..

yoga chick lit: Downward Dog, Upward Fog

by L. Valdez Karl

I know some might not like the term “chick lit”, but I place Meryl Davids Landau’s first book Downward Dog, Upward Fog in that genre because it reminded me of a yoga version of Sex and The City.   Not that there’s a lot sex, but because the main character Lorna is a young woman with a great job and a hunky boyfriend, but finds herself questioning “is that all there is?” after she gets involved in yoga.  It’s a sweet story about a woman’s transformation after drinking the yoga kool-aid.

A woman with a great marketing job, Lorna realizes that what she really wants is to stay on the spiritual path she keeps falling off of.  Landau’s depiction of Lorna is realistic because she depicts Lorna as a person who loves what yoga and meditation can do for her, but she questions how to successfully walk the talk, especially when it comes to her not-so-spiritual boyfriend and co-workers.  Lorna jump-starts her efforts at a silent yoga retreat, but like many of us — maybe all of us — she quickly loses her yoga mojo when dealing with daily life and especially in dealing with her negative and cruelly critical mother.   Lorna wrestles over her future with her seemingly perfect boyfriend, but the more she gets into yoga, the more she realizes that she wants something more out of her man, something more than great sex and dinners at fancy restaurants.  She wants a soul-mate.

Lorna’s ultimate test of her yoga path is when her sister, the perfect New Age spiritual teacher in Lorna’s eyes, suffers a tragic car accident.  By the end of the book Lorna comes to understand that yoga is not about the pretzel poses but is about how you deal with the pretzel twists of daily life, mindfully and with joy.

The best thing about this book is that many women will be able to relate to it.  As someone who travels to India to study  yoga, I actually found it refreshing that the main character did NOT go to India.  I am bored with angst filled white women in yoga lit books going to India to find themselves.  In my opinion, that’s become cliche.  Rather than running off to India in an attempt to find herself, Landau has Lorna find herself at home, working at her job, going out with her girlfriends, getting on the mat every day, and reading spiritual books by familiar New Age writers such as Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra.

Landau’s Lorna is a “regular” person attempting to live a yogic life in a non-yogic world.  Yoga practitioners in Modern America will relate to Lorna who realizes that she is plowing “through my days unmindfully.  Nine o’clock morphs into six o’clock without much awareness of what’s happened in between.”  Sound familiar?

I think every reader will find a little bit of themselves in Lorna as she tries to meld her yoga life with her daily life, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, as only an imperfect perfect yogi can try to do.

the further adventures of yoga in OMerika

by L. Valdez Karl
photo credit: Diane Arbus

Yoga in OMerika. Things here always get curiouser and curiouser.

Over the years I have written a lot about yoga teacher trainings, babies teaching babies, and registering with the Yoga Alliance.  As of today I am officially an RYT…again.

I did two teacher trainings in 2002 and 2003 and at that time my teacher was not Yoga Alliance approved.  Suddha was one of the first yoga studios to open in Chicago in the mid-1980s.  He brought astanga yoga to Chicago.  He lived and studied with his guru Swami Narayanananda for years, studied with Pattabhi Jois three times, studied at an Iyengar institute, did his own teacher trainings, and he was never YA registered.  He later grandfathered into the Yoga Alliance after I trained with him because he said that’s what people started looking for in teacher trainings.  But he still thought YA was a bunch of horse manure.

I registered with the YA in 2004 just because.  I started studying with Paul Grilley and Sarah Powers and Srivatsa Ramaswami in 2004 and in 2005 I started going to India and studying with Desikachar and his senior teachers at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram.  After my first month long intensive at KYM, I returned to India exactly 6 months later and have been blessed to be able to return every year.  Right now in 2011 I can say that I have over 1000 hours of training and about 2000 hours of teaching experience — but I stopped counting the exact number of hours years ago.

After my first few trips to India people started suggesting I should train teachers so one day I called YA and inquired as to whether I could apply for E-RYT 500 before being at the 500 level.  I was told no, I had to be a 500 level for a certain amount of time.  I said, yeah, but according to your own standards I am ALREADY an E-RYT 500, why should I pay FIRST for 500 level then pay AGAIN for E-RYT 500?  Sorry, no go.  That’s when I let my registration lapse.

I’ve gone back and forth on the YA registration for years.  The only reason I started exploring registration again this year was because two studios where I teach workshops wanted to include my workshops into their YA registered teacher training programs.  I guess technically they can’t if I’m not YA registered.  This yoga iconoclast had never thought about that stuff before.

Then I had two conversations with teachers who train teachers.  One said that I would not be compromising my personal yoga morals if I was YA registered, it’s only a formality — just renew and I can do my own thing like she does.  I would still be a yoga outlaw, just one who’s registered with YA.  She said if I was YA registered I could train teachers anywhere in the world, and isn’t that what I want to do, travel and teach?

Another teacher whom I met during the Erich Schiffmann weekend put it to me this way over dinner:  she considers teacher training as a way of spreading yoga dharma, putting it out into the world.  She told me she registered at only the E-RYT 200 level just to train teachers, she’s not interested in giving YA any more money merely for the privilege of having a higher designation.  I recalled the words of a KYM teacher:  teach what you learn here or else we are nothing more than thieves.   Besides, she said, what’s wrong with the picture that “people with not even half your training are training teachers?”   Babies teaching babies.  She said if I was YA approved my TT program would draw more students than without it.  She told me that where she lives the first thing people ask is whether her TT program is YA approved.

Valid arguments.  So I called YA today and officially reinstated my registration at the 200 level.  Now the studios can include my workshops into their TTs.  I was told I could do teacher trainings at the E-RYT 200 level, after my TT program is approved, of course.  I again asked about the 500 level telling the YA rep that I’ve studied in India five times, I have over 1000 hours, etc.  Now here’s where it starts getting stupid.  I mean, real stupid.

I can not register at the 500 hour level without having an “advanced training” 300 hour certificate from an approved yoga school.  All my time with Desikachar and his senior teachers (including private classes), Paul Grilley and Sarah Powers (being one of the first certified yin yoga teachers in the Chicago area), Srivatsa Ramaswami, Mark Whitwell, my Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Training at Spirit Rock, the Trauma Sensitive Yoga training, and every workshop I’ve taken since 2004 does not “officially” count.  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking because I’m thinking the same thing.

No more piecing together trainings to add up to the required hours, no more being grandfathered in, and letters from people (like if Ramaswami wrote a letter saying I’ve studied with him since 2004) don’t count.   “I’m in the wrong business,” my husband said.  “I need to be in the certification racket.”

A yoga teacher friend called me not more than five minutes after posting my complaint on my Facebook page.    “THAT SUCKS!”, was the first thing she said after I said hello.  She said, “You of all people?!?  Someone who has spent all that time not to mention money in your training?”  Yup.  I know.  The irony is that with the right design software I could print up my own “official” certificate for that 500 hour designation and submit it because YA does not check credentials.  But would I?  Of course not.  Yoga morals indeed.

Why does something that is supposed to be right feel so damn wrong?

From the original Karate Kid:

Daniel-san:  Hey, what kind of belt do you have?
Mr. Miyagi:  Canvas. JC Penney, $3.98. You like?
Daniel-san:  No, I meant…
Mr. Miyagi:  In Okinawa, belt mean no need rope to hold up pants.

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Addendum: Comment from Facebook:

“When are they going to go after the charlatans?  We had a woman show up at our studio, recently released of her corporate duties due to cutbacks, very saleswomany and self-promotional, wanted to know how to open a yoga studio cuz she thought it was a good way to make money but had never done yoga, and didn’t have “time” to do a full training.  In the wink of an eye she had opened a studio, was promoting herself as an E200RYT (don’t even know how that is possible after a weekend workshop training) and get this: was offering teacher trainings at $3000/per.  Checked her out on the Alliance and she was there, E200RYT.  BULLSHIT is all I can say.  I don’t think they check anything.  It’s not worth a damn thing and its too bad that it seems to set the industry standard.”