In high school, I was on the cross country running team. I loved being outside and the feeling of camaraderie and collective effort of a team sport. Although I wasn't very good at it, I made the effort.
In college, I started doing karate and advanced to mid-level belts in Shorin-ryu and then Wadoo ryu with a side venture into aikido. Upon moving to Greensboro, I found that there was no Japanese karate system for me to plug into. So, I started running again as my sole exercise. At 6'1" and blah blah pounds, unfortunately, I'm like a Clydesdale. Visions of running a marathon were always interrupted by some stress injury.
A sport's physiologist diagnosed my problem as "running on streets" and suggested that I run on trails. An easy fix! I stepped in a hole and broke my ankle.
Soon after, I'm wandering Barnes and Nobles and come across the book, Power Yoga, by Beryl Bender Birch. Beryl PROMISED me that if I did ashtanga vinyasa yoga that, like the New York Road Runners Club members she teaches, I could run injury free. Beryl didn't lie.
My first attempt at yoga was to follow an ashtanga-like sequence in a Bryan Kest video. When I tried to get into some of the postures, I found my body stiff, and the poses impossible. After 45 minutes, I was sweating bullets and exhausted as I laid down in rest pose, but I had this amazing endorphin rush. I've been addicted to yoga ever since. I've practiced and taken workshops by various ashtanga instructors since and eventually stopped running as I became more involved with yoga.
Today, my practice is still primarily ashtanga yoga modified for a 60 year-old body. I practice each weekday at 6am at the Clubs in Greensboro with a core group of tribe members. We practice for an hour and a half and then skip off to work which, in my case, is Medical Director of the Guilford County Department of Public Health.
I discovered Bikram yoga about 15 years ago when I would travel to Raleigh on business and stop at the Bikram studio on Wade Avenue. When the Bikram studio opened on Market Street in Greensboro, I was grateful for the chance to attend on a morning each weekend.
Rebecca (Jordan) was my favorite teacher at that studio. I had her teaching schedule on my calendar with the intent that, when possible, I'd attend her class. I was very disappointed when she disappeared from the teacher lineup, but happy to find her teaching at Revolution Hot Yoga (RHY) as well as many of my hot yoga friends.
With the intentional modifications in their sequence, I find the RHY experience more enjoyable. In Bikram yoga there is encouragement to feel pain. You can't hurt yourself less by hurting yourself more. There is enough suffering in the world. You don't need to practice yoga to make yourself suffer more. Yoga should make you suffer less. You should look forward to each day's practice, not dread it. RHY takes what is best from the Bikram practice while leaving out the dangerous stuff. The heat is more temperate which allows for safe stretching but avoids the vomit comet.
There's a video making the rounds entitled "Yoga will ruin your life" which is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how yoga changes your life which I find pretty accurate. David Williams, an esteemed ashtanga yoga teacher and friend, tells people just starting out, "You don't want to do yoga. Yoga will change your life. If you eat meat, you'll stop. You'll start spending money on yoga clothes. Your vacations will be spent in far away places doing yoga. If your girlfriend doesn't do yoga, you'll leave her. If your job interferes with your yoga practice, you'll quit. You'll want to teach yoga. Don't do yoga." Of course, he's right in many ways. Yoga changes your life.
The best definition of yoga I've seen is a translation of Patanjali's yoga sutra 1:2 "Yoga chitta vrrti nirodha." It's usually translated as "yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind." Which usually takes about six pages of explanation to begin to understand. A better definition is found in the stairwell of a dorm building at Kripalu: "Yoga is seeing life the way it is." I love that. Yoga leads you to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be, imagine it to be, or someone tells you it is.
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