Yes, yes, you think, my hair has grayed. People I’ve known have died, some quite suddenly. Sickness, age, death, and impermanence: Got it. But while it’s great to intellectually understand the Buddha’s teachings, experiencing them viscerally is quite another order of business. My recent dance with impermanence taught me a lot more than any amount of reading and meditation could, and not just that you don’t ever want to go to a certain emergency room in Encino because their doctors are incompetent and they’ll overcharge you.

It started about five weeks ago, at my sister’s house in the San Fernando Valley. We’d gone there for the fourth night of Chanukah. Already, this paragraph is sounding too Jewish for my tastes, but gird yourself, because it’s about to go mega-Jew. After we lit the candles and drank the wine and ate the brisket, I sat down on the couch to complain to my uncle about my financial problems.  I began to feel some discomfort on the upper right side of my chest, like I’d swallowed a couple of pieces out of a weights and measures set. A different order of complaining followed. My sister gave me some Gas-X. It didn’t help.  I slumped on the couch, moaning with discomfort. Finally, my sister rolled her eyes, as she’s been doing at me for more than 30 years, and said,

“Do you need to use my toilet?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do not tell me it was my brisket.”

“It probably was.”

But when I got to the bathroom, I began to eliminate brisket from the risk of culprits. My chest hurt, a lot. I feared that I was going to die there, my pants around my ankles, reading a three-week-old issue of Rolling Stone. After managing to pull up my pants, I staggered around the back end of my sister’s house like Bruce Banner in the early stages of hulking out, huffing, sweating, deep pressure in my chest, my pulse through the roof, my chest pressing with pain.

Maybe yoga could save me, I thought. If only I could just see the present moment for what it was, as something temporary. If I could neither avoid reality or become attached to my perception of reality, then…Oh my god, I realized. I can’t do my ujayii breath!

“Somebody…help…me…” I moaned.

Four hours, one ambulance ride, two squirts of nitroglycerine, two EKG’s, one IV, one public jug-urination, a raft of bills and one unforgivable non-diagnosis later, I was home in bed, thinking that maybe I’d just strained a pectoral muscle or something. I’d been hitting the mat pretty hard lately, and I’d injured pretty much every other part of my body doing yoga in the last seven years. Why not the pec, too? But I had full range of motion, not to mention chills, aches, a 100-degree fever, and the general feeling that something was slowly sucking away my soul. In my experience, those aren’t the symptoms of a muscle strain.

First thing Monday morning, I went to the clinic. Within a minute, they’d diagnosed me with pneumonia. How I’d contracted it, no one could be sure. I hadn’t been sick lately, but the air here is nothing but toxic gunk. I could have inhaled a spore. Regardless, there it sat in my lung, the sinister bacterial infection that my doctor buddy calls “the old man’s friend.” Sure enough, as I lay on the couch for a week, unable to do much more than watch Turner Classic Movies and shuffle my fantasy-football roster, both Leslie Nielsen and Blake Edwards, together responsible for a decent percentage of my life’s laughter, died in their 80s from pneumonia-related complications.

I sit here today healthy and fully functional, the episode already fading, other than the ER bills, into the occasional reminiscence.  Remember when I had pneumonia? That was gnarly.

I’ll remember well. It was the sickest I’ve been in nearly 30 years. Though I’ve suffered my share of minor biomechanical problems as an adult, I rarely get a cold or the flu, and never for more than 24 hours. Before the old man’s friend paid me a visit, I’d taken to cockily trumpeting my sound constitution and judging everyone, adult or child, who seemed to be sick all the time. I considered it a kind of weakness, or a feeble excuse.

But now I’ve experienced impermanence, first-hand, and it was no fun. I’m going to get sick, I’m going to get old, and I’m going to die. And when those things finally happen, no amount of pranayama practice will save me.

None of which means I should stop the yoga. Practicing has helped me see reality clearly, or at least more clearly than I would have otherwise. The activity, or at least the discipline attached to it, serves as its own reward. Besides, I’m probably going to go ahead and blame my sister’s brisket for making me sick. Just because I know it pisses her off so much.

Neal Pollack is the author of Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude

Photo by lululemon athletica

Bernie has been taking morning yoga at his gym twice a week for two years. He considers it part of his workout routine. Sometimes he runs on the treadmill, sometimes he lifts weights, and sometimes he does yoga. “My trainer said it’d help my back,” he told me.

“But there must be all kinds of other benefits,” I said.

My dad, possessed of the least-troubled mind in all existence, said, “Eh. I just feel good when it’s done.”

Usually, when I’m in Phoenix, I take yoga classes at a studio near my parents’ house, expensive, sweaty numbers full of snotty people, pretentious flow, and overloud music of the type favored by new-money pseudo-spiritualists. The classes are at my physical level, sometimes even above. Therefore, I sweat acceptably, but I’ve never had a moment of decent conversation or authentic human connection during or after. Meanwhile, my dad goes off to yoga at the gym and arrives home calm and happy while I’m still sitting at the kitchen table in my boxers, staring glumly at my can of Diet Coke.

This time, I thought I’d try it his way.  At dinner the night before, I said,  “Hey, dad, will you take me to yoga tomorrow?”

He looked pleased, as though I’d asked if I could go to the office with him to see how he spent his day. But since I’d never actually asked for that, this was a fresh experience for both of us. It would be a genuine father-son outing.

“Of course,” he said.

“Do you need a mat?” I asked. “I’ve got an extra in the car.”

“I’ve got one,” he said. “I’ve got two.”

“Really?” I said, as though I couldn’t believe it. “Where did you get them?”

“They sell them at TJ Maxx,” my mom said.

The mainstreaming of yoga was complete.

*****

My dad does his yoga in the workout room of a large chain fitness center near the intersection of Tatum and Shea, halfway between the Paradise Valley Mall and the Barry Goldwater Memorial. The aerobics steps and spinning cycles get moved to the side for the hour. Through the floor-to-ceiling rear glass wall, you can see dozens of people going through their morning workouts while watching Fox And Friends. But yoga cares not about politics and cares even less about notions of authenticity. This gym reminded me where I’d begun my own practice, nearly eight years ago now.

My dad got to class almost 15 minutes early. Just like I do, I thought. He put down his mat near the back left corner of the room. Just like me. He motioned for me to unroll my mat to his left.

“The other side’s for Alice,” he said.

“Who’s Alice?” I asked.

“Oh, just someone who takes yoga,” he said.

Aw, how cute, I thought. My dad has a yoga friend!

As it turned out, he had several, mostly around his age. The pre-class conversation covered turkey and grandkids and college football, quite different than the conversations at my usual classes, which are usually about auditions and cats. By the time the teacher showed up, nearly 50 people had claimed their yoga acre. There are definitely some challenges to teaching classes that size, but most of the teachers I know would stand on their head for hours to get a class of four-dozen people because it would mean that they might actually be able to pay their rent through yoga.

The teacher carried a photo from the recent local Bikram-sponsored yoga championships, of which she’s an aficionado. She showed it to a few students, who murmured that they’d never be able to do the pose shown in the picture. Other than the fact that she wore pink sweatpants with the word “PURE” written across the butt in black letters, this was the only thing for which I could criticize my dad’s yoga teacher. Yoga isn’t about perfecting poses. It’s about living intelligently and kindly in the present moment. Poses, whatever the result, are just a byproduct of the effort and concentration you put into them.

But once the class started, she said pretty much the same thing, having people focus on their breath, calling yoga a “beautiful gift,” leading her mostly-late Boomer crowd through a slow, mindful flow, respectful of their needs and not condescending to them. I made a conscious effort to mind my own practice and not care about what was going on around me. At one point, though I glanced at my dad. He was rolling on his back, knees drawn into his chest, with a look of extreme pleasure on his face like a dog getting its belly rubbed.

I didn’t ever want to see that again.

The only other time I became aware of him was when the teacher called for bow pose, and dad said, “I don’t do that one.” That’s a very excusable admission for a man who’s had rotator-cuff surgery and who once broke his shoulder in a skiing accident. He doesn’t need to do bow pose.

When the teacher said namaste after a short savasana, most of the class applauded. I’ve taken yoga classes all over the world, from a great variety of master teachers. Rarely have I heard such enthusiasm. These people were never going to attend an anusara Grand Gathering or Wanderlust, buy tickets to a “trance dance,” or download an MC Yogi song. They probably didn’t know, and probably didn’t care, about the difference between Ashtanga, Iyengar, or kundalini yoga. None of them would sign up as Lululemon ambassadors. But they’d arrived that day at the gym stiff, or feeling stressed out, or bloated from Thanksgiving dinner, and now they were a little better. Yoga serves no more important purpose. The rest of what we call “yoga” in the West is often just sickly-sweet frosting atop a delicious cake that needs no extra flavor.

Then the 9:45 aerobics people came barging in, as they’re wont to do during gym yoga, and the spell broke. My dad and I drove home, sipping on our Costco-bought plastic water bottles that he keeps cold in the garage mini-fridge.

“So was that different than usual?” I asked him.

“Eh, maybe a little more rushed,” he said. “Big class because of the holidays. Good, though.”

“How was the class for you?”

“I can do some of the poses,” he said. “Some of the poses, I can’t do. It’s fine for me.”

My dad, the yogi.

Photo by Scrap Pile

Perhaps it’s apt that Siddhartha has entered my life now. The last time that it was demographically appropriate for me to read this book, around 1993, was also the last time that I had this little money in the bank. But in my youth, I disdained the hippie literature of would-be spiritual questers—Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, the novels of Tom Robbins, Be Here Now, and, most prominently, Siddhartha—as the intellectually weak reading choices of puerile minds that were afraid to confront true reality. I made occasional exceptions for Kurt Vonnegut’s books, but had even discarded those by my 18th birthday as too simplistic, too reductive, too pandering. Instead, I chose a more realistic-looking and –sounding reader’s path, heavy on the Mencken and the boring Jews, a collection easily cut down by someone who came over to my apartment for a party, looked at my bookshelves, and said, “someone sure does have a lot of books by guys named John.” Cheever, Irving, Updike, Barth: Mine was not the seeker’s path.

But now, after seven years of practicing yoga, of publishing a book about practicing yoga, of going through a rigorous yoga teacher’s training, and, to a few unfortunate souls, actually teaching yoga myself, I felt ready to receive whatever Siddhartha had to offer. I began the book with an open mind and a clear heart, without any preconceptions of what I’d encounter. Though I assumed, from the title, that it would have some sort of philosophical relevance to my recent study and practice, I knew almost nothing of what was between the covers, or, in this case, inside the machine. My reading would be fresh and direct, like the grocery delivery service.

Much to my great surprise and partial disappointment, the book isn’t a novelistic retelling of the life of the Buddha, though it does take place during the time of the Buddha and the Buddha makes a strange cameo appearance about a third of the way through, similar to Deepak Chopra’s appearance in The Love Guru. Instead, it’s a story about the spiritual quest of a man who, like the Buddha, is also named Siddhartha as a youth and who also grows up in cosseted bliss under the overprotectively watchful eye of a devoted Brahmin father. Then, also like the Buddha, this fictional Siddhartha leaves his father’s house and becomes a beggarly renunciate, growing his hair and fingernails long and practicing all manner of austerities, like fasting and doing yoga postures in 105-degree rooms next to neurotic yuppies wearing Spandex diapers. At the point in the book where Siddhartha meets the actual Buddha, the paths diverge and it becomes clear that a European intellectual wrote this in the 1920s.  Whereas the Buddha Siddhartha escaped his renunciate period after accepting some delicious food from a kindly guileless little girl, sat down under the Bodhi tree, remembered a time where his mind was clear and untroubled, spent a night fighting off various temptations presented to him by demons, calmly rose, and began teaching the four noble truths, the life of the book’s Siddhartha experiences a more pretentious turn.

Our hero respectfully rejects the Buddha’s teachings, leaves behind his devoted manservant Govinda, takes a bath, takes a beautiful courtesan as his lover, takes a job at some sort of import/export house, and gradually transforms into a rich asshole devoted to wine, orgies and gambling. He becomes a shell of empty human desires. But a few pages later, he manages to reanimate his dry, dusty soul by leaving all his possessions behind to share a hut with a simple river ferryman who manifests a sweet, trusting smile of pure acceptance. By the time Siddhartha’s illegitimate son made a late third-act appearance, causing yet another round of “why am I here” handwringing, I wanted to throw the Kindle across the room, but didn’t, because I know I can’t afford to replace it right now.

At the same time, I found something deeply resonant in the book. It illuminates the feelings of many Westerners upon first encountering Eastern philosophy. Our tendency toward existential thinking and romanticized selfhood doesn’t melt away overnight upon yogic exposure; the tensions between Western individualism and Eastern values of karmic unity are, to my feeble mind, the book’s true subject. Siddhartha spends the last five interminable pages gazing at the waters of his ferry-river and thinking about how all is one. At last, he’s rid himself of the structures of his ego, unlashed himself from samsara, the great wheel of conditioned existence, and has accepted reality in its pure, luminous, transcendent, ever-changing nature. Or has he?

My first thought, upon finishing the book, was: What a sucker. Ease of mind is nearly impossible. Perhaps it’s my tendency to see everything through the cloudy lens of satirical cynicism, but I wasn’t sure I bought into his transformation. It occurs to me that Hesse might have deliberately put that last bit in there as something extra for us to discard, yet another mind-construct that Siddhartha throws up to perpetuate maya, or the great illusion, as part of his futile quest for self.

I’ve been practicing yoga for many years, with a reasonable amount of dedication. And yet sometimes it feels like my life hasn’t improved at all. All the meditation in the world isn’t going to stop my health insurance from shutting off in January, or make it any easier to pay my bills. My problems are slender compared to those which many people face, but at times they still feel like they’re going to crush my bones.  At the same time, I have access to an ancient spiritual and intellectual tradition that promises at least the possibility of transcendence of earthly worries. Some days, I know that if I practice hard enough, things will seem a little bit clearer and better and I’ll be able to see my stupid little struggles as temporary afflictions, blips in the endless progression of an ever-changing universe.

Of course, I also occasionally have the same thoughts after watching an episode of In Treatment. But last night, it was Siddhartha that brought them on, and they linger still. If I’d read the book when I was supposed to, at age 23, I would have finished it in a short afternoon and gone for a long walk, thinking great thoughts, before heading off to get drunk. Now, I don’t really drink, and I realize that my thoughts don’t matter very much. Maybe that represents spiritual progress.

“For anyone who’s interested,” he said, “starting tonight we’re offering a supplemental course in Sanskrit, taught by Marcia.” Learning Sanskrit would help us in our yoga practice, he said. It would be a four-week course, offered on Thursdays, from 6:15 to 7:45 PM. For students in the yoga workshop, it would only cost nine dollars a class, but we had to sign up for all four classes at once. Marcia, he said, would explain more.

We were sitting on cushions in a circle, our chanting and philosophy texts arranged in front of us along with our many snacks and beverages. Richard called these our “nests.” Marcia sat among us; she, among several other teachers and devotees, came to hear Richard’s daily lectures even though she hadn’t paid for them. He was that good.

“We’re going to learn devanagari, which is the ancient script of Sanskrit,” she said. “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to distinguish all the letters, write compound verbs and consonants, and read basic chants without looking at the transliteration on the page. It really should be quite valuable.”

This routine sounded familiar to me. The fact that Marcia’s last name was Solomon made it seem doubly familiar. I had to comment, because I always do.

“Sounds a lot like Hebrew School,” I said.

“You know, I hadn’t thought of it,” she said, “but it’s almost exactly like Hebrew School.”

“I got Bar Mitzvahed,” I said, as though that were some sort of unique accomplishment.

In general, I’d been looking for something that I could do at yoga school. An unfortunately timed hamstring injury had left me at half-strength. My plans of moving to Colorado and hiking five miles a day and biking ten had given way to a less-strenuous physical agenda of limping home through the trailer park after class and smoking a strong bowl of Summit County homegrown before taking a very long shower. While many of my fellow students were throwing their legs behind their heads and walking around on their hands, I squatted forward, hands on my knees, in what my teacher called “Camper’s Pose,” so named because when you’re in it, you look like a camper taking a dump in the woods. I wanted to find something to display that unique Pollack yoga proficiency. This Sanskrit elective seemed like just the thing. But still, 36 bucks?  I needed to consult the wife. I called her at home.

“I’m thinking about taking a Sanskrit class,” I said.

“So why are you asking me?” she said.

“Because it costs money.”

“How much money?”

“Like nine dollars a week.”

“That’s not much money.”

“I know.”

“So, again, why are you asking me?”

“I just want to know if I should do it?”

“Do you have anything else to do?”

“Not really, since I can’t walk and all.”

“Well, Pollack,” she said. “You’re there already. You might as well go all in.”

I’d reached a point in my life where “going all in” means taking a Sanskrit course.  It wasn’t exactly on most people’s Bucket Lists. But it seemed right for me at the time, so I plunged forward, into the sacred, ancient mists.

*****

Only in Boulder, and only during a yoga-teacher training, could an elective class in beginning Sanskrit, held at an obscure neighborhood studio, draw nearly 20 people: About eight of my fellow students from the course signed up, as did about eight people who’d taken the previous teacher training, and a small handful of people whose motivations remained unclear, but they probably had something do to with yoga, because you don’t study Sanskrit unless you’re interested in yoga.

Marcia sat in front of the class with a dry-erase board, on which she’d written some Sanskrit letters in extremely light-colored marker, perhaps as a gambit to get us to draw closer toward her. She was a woman of slight build, excellent posture, and Canadian descent. Her clothing tended toward the comfortable and she tied her long, graying hair back into a ponytail. Her voice tended toward, if not a stutter, then at least a stutter-step, of the kind people develop when their intellect is strong but their attitude laid-back. It was high, almost squeaky, and it tended to crack or fade off at the end of a sentence. At times, it would break into little peals of laughter, accompanied by snorting, even though she hadn’t really just told a joke. She just enjoyed Sanskrit that much, and therefore we enjoyed it as well. Marcia seemed to resemble the mama bird from the child’s book Are You My Mother? She had a sharp but kindly beak that suited her quite well.

Devanagari, she explained, is an ancient script, but is also used by contemporary Hindi culture, thereby making it one of the world’s most widely used alphabets. But the script has very different uses in Sanskrit, which isn’t, technically, supposed to exist for conversational purposes. It’s a sound language, originally meant to be chanted by Brahmins; other castes weren’t supposed to learn it, or study yoga. Still, it’s not entirely dead, but only about 140,000 people in hard-to-reach villages in rural India speak it, and that number doesn’t seem to be growing any time soon.

So for our purposes, Sanskrit serves as a sacred language, its devanagari script used mostly in the study of esoteric yoga texts. The prefix deva means “god-like.” Devas is one word used to describe Indian gods. It’s also the word from which we derive the English word “divine.” The suffix nagari is an abode, or city, or place where people live. Therefore, it literally means “the abode of the divine.” Some ancient mystics who had a lot of time on their hands, therefore, deliberately constructed Sanskrit to be difficult and inscrutable, as all holy things should be. Countless thousands of generations of yoga students have hated them ever since.

Learning Sanskrit isn’t like learning a language that people actually speak. A regular conversational language primer approach wouldn’t work. Imagine this conversation:

Vishnu: I bow to the two lotus feet of the plurality of Gurus which awaken insight into the happiness of pure being.

Shiva: I prostrate before the sage Pantanjali who has thousands of radiant, white heads.

Vishnu: You are truly the most perceptible Brahman.

Shiva: May the great noble lords protect the earth in all ways by the path of just virtue.

Vishnu: Is this the bus stop?

But in other ways, learning Sanskrit felt like old times, and by that, I mean kindergarten. Yoga has a way of making you feel young and small. Just when you think you’ve mastered that tucking-your-ankles-behind-your-head trick, your teacher makes you sing the alphabet. Marcia began by leading us through a chanting round of the Sanskrit letters. Any of us who’d studied with Richard (which was just about all of us), had done this before.

You start with the vowel sounds, of which there are 12, plus a couple of others that sound like consonants and also one symbol that’s only used in one word, so you kind of skip that one. Then you go about combining the vowel sounds with the consonant sounds. Sanskrit has five categories of consonants, with five letters per category. They’re divided by where they originate in your mouth. The first two, guttural and palatal, come from different places on the roof, which is hard enough, but then the third, “cerebral,” essentially emerges from your sinuses and makes you sound like Corky from Life Goes On. The last two, dental and labial, come from the teeth and the lips, obviously, so they’re not really so hard. To add to the fun, each letter has an aspirant partner. In other words, a simple sound like “ka” must be matched with “kha,” which sounds like “ka” plus an expulsion of air which, when done properly, gives your voice the menacing air of a stereotypical alien overlord from a bad cartoon. In any case, we chanted “ta taaa, ti, tiiiiii, too tooooooo” for a while, and then we began to practice writing the letters.

Sanskrit letters are far less recognizable, in shape, than popular alphabets, like Hebrew, Arabic, or Cyrillic, which appear obscure yet somehow familiar to our eyes. They’re essentially ancient runes, of the type that Nicolas Cage would be able to interpret in the National Treasure movies. Yet they do have an organizing principle. Everything revolves around a “danda”, or staff, a straight line that runs through the letter at some point. The rest is all bars and loops and hooks and curlicues. As Marcia told us, “an acceptable letter is one that looks more like what it’s supposed to be than any other letter.” Most of you, therefore, will have no way of knowing whether or not my Sanskrit handwriting is acceptable. Here’s a sample alphabet sheet I did:

The symbols in the third column, on the right side, are the “anusuara” and the “visarga,” super-important in knowing Sanskrit. “Anusuara” translates as “little flow,” and it’s essentially the “ummm” sound when you chant “OM.” When you see the anusuara, you know that the consonant sound is supposed to flow up through the back of your head, out into infinity. There’s no correlation to that in, say, Portuguese. The visarga, only slightly less sacred, means “projection,” is represented by two little dots like a vampire bite, and makes the sound “a-ha.”

These are the kinds of things you learn in Sanskrit class.

*****

For our week-one homework, we had a list of sight words, mostly simple two-syllable numbers that could easily be sounded out. All the syllables ended in the “a” sound, because those didn’t require any extra swoops or loops or swirls. It was just straight letters. Marcia encouraged us to have the alphabet sheets by our sides. “Speaking and looking at the same time,” she said. “There’s a correlation in the brain. This is how you learned to read as a child.”

At night, after I read my 100 English translation pages of the Upanisads, enough to put the most ardent sufferer of night terrors to permanent sleep, I got out my sheet and sounded out my sight words: “Ka….” Hunt and peck…”Ga.” “Pha….la.” “Va….na” “E…ka…pa…da.” I could now read “My lotus foot” in fewer than ten minutes.

In week two, we learned how to combine consonants with other vowels besides “a,” which proved hard because every person’s Sanskrit handwriting is different and one man’s “ai” is another man’s “o.” Marcia had us attempt to write out our names in devanagari, and then give that writing to another student, who then attempted to transliterate. My partner managed to divine “Ne-uh-la Pau-li-kah,” which is more or less what I wrote,” and I decoded “Liza bita”, which I guess is Sanskrit for “Elizabeth.” And that’s why Hindu gods and heroes have relatively simple names like Indra and Rama.

Week three brought us compound consonants, which were really confusing and difficult, all the more so because after 21 days of yoga school, including up to five hours a day of physical practice, we were all starting to feel pretty wrung-out. The last thing I wanted to do was attempt to sound out Verse 2.14 of the Bhagavad Gita in the original text. Did you know that in the Gita, each verse has four lines of eight syllables apiece? I do, now. In any case, after class I went home and lay on my bed, my mind crusty and my muscles screaming, and read, “Matra sparshas, Kounteya,” which somehow means “physical sensations, truly Arjuna;” because Arjuna, like every Hindu epic character, has something like a thousand names, one of which, apparently, is Kounteya. I proceeded: “Shetosha sukha dukha daha…”

“Causing cold, heat, pleasure or pain,” I read, “Come and go and are impermanent. Therefore, manage to endure them, Arjuna.”

In this case, Krishna, our narrator and charioteer, could easily have been referring to yoga school, and to studying Sanskrit. This was definitely something to endure. My brain felt puréed, but there was no question that I could now tell my “pa” from my “ma” in Sanskrit. That’s the first sign of acquisition in any language.

By the fourth week, we were all very, very tired, and mostly lay insensate on bolsters as Marcia tried to lead us through the reading of some of Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras. As I’d often been in Hebrew School, I was bored out of my wits. Yet I also felt kind of invigorated. Despite my total exhaustion, my mind felt more active than it had in a long time. I love languages, I realize, even ones that I can’t speak to other people.

That said, we did pick up some useful tips. In the course of the month, Richard taught us how to say “shit” in Sanskrit (sesa, a pretty direct antecedent of the English word) and “how’s it going,” which transliterates as svasti ho, but is also one of those awesome multipurpose words, like aloha and shalom, that can be used in multiple situations and contexts.

If we wanted to learn further, Marcia told us as our class clock ran out, we could order a Study Guide from the American Sanskrit Institute. One of the guys had already subscribed. The folder was thick and imposing, hundreds of pages and possibly a little evil. It appealed to me. If I was going to teach yoga, and it increasingly looked like I was, I would have to have something in my arsenal other than the physical stuff. Because of the hamstring, I hadn’t touched my toes in about two months. The path of intellect awaited me. Therefore, I’d push ahead with my Sanskrit by contacting the American Sanskrit Institute. They’d sent me the folder of death. And then I’d vocalize compound consonants from ancient Vedic texts until my eyes bled.

Svasti ho.

Neal Pollack’s new book, Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude, is out today. Check it out.

I recently had a guy get in touch with me on Twitter, telling me that I should start a “Dear Abby for the sarcastic yoga set.” Though not the least appealing idea I’ve ever encountered, it seemed to be based on a faulty premise. Dear Abby, at her sensible height, reflected the moral aspirations of millions of Americans, whereas “the sarcastic yoga set” is a pretty small crowd. They exist in the same way that, say, weeknight bowlers who don’t drink beer exist, but I wouldn’t exactly go about trying to peg them as a target market.

In any case, my correspondent posed a Dear Abby-like yoga conundrum:  “I had a yoga teacher start chanting during the end of class.” He added, in a subsequent tweet, “and I wanted to scream at her to shut the fuck up, but I didn’t think that would be appropriate.”

A few hours later, I replied (in 140 characters or less) that “there’s nothing wrong with chanting in yoga class, but if the teacher doesn’t explain the chants, then she’s not doing her job.”

“Oh, there was no explanation,” he wrote back. “She just started singing out of the blue while the class was in corpse pose.”

“Bad teacher!” I tweeted. “Bad, bad teacher!”

The conversation ended with him saying, “That’s what I thought. Especially with a bunch of beginners.”

We all have stories about encountering incompetent yoga teachers: They natter neurotically about their relationships, give screechy political diatribes, or just present a general picture of incompetence and insecurity. But most yoga-teacher sins are understandable and forgivable, peccadilloes at best. Teaching yoga properly is really challenging for even the most experienced professionals. But, to me, bad chanting in class is a real sticking point, because chanting has a way of turning people off yoga forever.

*****

For many members of yogaland, chanting is the thing. These are devotees of kirtan, or sacred Indian singing. Kirtan concerts go on for hours, and popular artists like Jai Uttal can draw hundreds or more. This September, for the second year in a row, Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California, will feature non-stop kirtan, along with yoga classes, for four consecutive days. Many people will attend. I won’t be one of them.

When I started practicing yoga, I often said that I “wasn’t into the chanting.” Anytime I encountered a class that featured anything more than a few “ohms,” I made sure not to return to that teacher. Chanting freaked me out; it smacked of religion or even the occult; I figured it was the yoga domain of hippies, theater majors, or kooky old ladies. I didn’t even like singing along at concerts. Why in the world would I chant Sanskrit devotionals in a small candlelit room with 20 skimpily dressed strangers?

Over my years of practice, though, I’ve come to understand yogic chanting in a different context, thanks almost entirely to the tutelage of my teacher Richard Freeman. When I did his teacher training in June, the daily schedule went as follows: Physical yoga torture, for two hours in the morning, followed by a nice savasana, ten minutes of meditation, 15 minutes to drink coffee and eat disgusting vegan snacks, and then, before the daily philosophy lecture, about 15 minutes of traditional chanting.

This was tolerable because we didn’t have to lock arms and sway, and because no one, except for on the last day of training when Richard finally busted out the harmonium, played musical instruments. He sat at the front of the room in his nest of books and other yoga supplies, and we sat in a semi-circle around him, our chanting books in front of us. He did a verse. We did a verse. Sometimes, if we did a verse wrong, he’d repeat the verse, and we’d have to do the verse again. Certain tricky verses contained Sanskrit words rife with compound consonants. These, we’d often have to repeat four or five times, and he would look vaguely annoyed.

I started to enjoy the chanting part of my day. It felt like Hebrew School, only without the rich assholes throwing spitwads at me from the back of the room. We learned how to chant in the Vedic style, and also in the classical style. I’ll explain the difference between the two sometime when you feel like passing out from boredom. When Richard told us, on the second-to-last day of class, that our chanting was “sounding better,” we all felt relieved. Learning how to chant properly felt like an accomplishment.

Partly, this was because Richard put chanting into a proper yogic context. It serves several purposes, he said. First, it acts, literally, as a palate cleanser. Certain Sanskrit syllables, chanted properly and in the right order, actually create vibrations in the back of the palate that then travel up into the brain, providing a soothing sensation that relaxes the chattering of the mind. Whether this is a biochemical reaction, some sort of spiritual magic, or both, it definitely works if you’re guided properly.

Second, yogic chants actually have content. There’s a lot of chanting out there that basically goes “God is love, God is love,” which is fine if you’re naturally cheerful or a religious simpleton. But chanting has also been used, throughout the yoga tradition, as a way of helping students to memorize and understand endlessly dull sacred texts. We had a bit of that at yoga school, too, and we would have had a lot more if we’d had more time, and also if we’d been nine-year-old Brahmin boys attending chanting class in the 13^th century.

Finally, Richard explained to us, chants are used to consecrate a “sacred” space. According to yoga philosophy, he said, no space is actually sacred, because all space is actually the same. Temples come and go, and their existence, therefore, should be taken with a grain of sea salt. The word shala, used to describe a traditional yoga room, actually means “barn” in Sanskrit. As a potent example, Richard used his own studio, The Yoga Workshop. In a previous incarnation, the very room in which we were learning yoga had been used as a cold-storage facility for slaughterhouse meat, the least yogic function for a space imaginable. Therefore, you chant so that you can briefly consecrate the space, to establish a sort of social yoga contract to use a particular patch of floor and wall, or earth and sky, as a temporary foundation for a practice. Then, when you’re done, you chant something along the lines of, “we all did yoga together, and now we’re a little happier than we were before.”

I’m still not “into the chanting.” If I hear kirtan playing anywhere near me at a yoga studio, I run for the exit, or at least for the smoothie bar. But at least now I respect chanting’s context and its place in the tradition. Now, when I practice yoga in a space in my house that I use, at various times, to write, get stoned, play video games, nap, stare out the window, or masturbate, I chant a little bit before I start, so I can consecrate it for the hour and five minutes during which I’ll grunt, contort, and try to focus my mind.

Still, not all chanting is appropriate. If any teacher tries to sing to you while you’re in corpse pose, then you should, when they’re not looking after class, go fart on their mat. It might not be what Dear Abby would suggest, but it’ll work just fine.

During the first three weeks of yoga school, I could feel the frustration building among my classmates. Here they were, people who’d been doing yoga for years, who’d studied with great masters in India, and Richard Freeman was spending time teaching about the “internal forms” of triangle pose. We’d practice for 60 or 70 minutes, and then Richard would stop the practice cold to give detailed, specific instructions about something that they already knew. It just wasn’t enough of a workout, some of the other students said. So they practiced at night, on weekends, or very early in the morning, hard, long practices full of sweat and self-righteous sacrifice. This was yoga school, and they were getting it done.

Richard’s plan worked for me, though. I couldn’t abide much more than an hour of practice that wasn’t really practice. Not only were my physical abilities at the bottom quarter of the class, but I was also trying to do it on one leg. In the afternoons, while my classmates went for delightful hikes in the Flatirons or on Boulder bike rides, I limped home through a trailer park to ice my ailing hamstring. One rigorous Wednesday morning, while everyone adjusted one another’s backbends, I instead took my throbbing gam to the emergency room, where they determined that I had a grade-two strain. I received a prescription of rest and athletic compression shorts. At last, I had a medical excuse to sit on my mat and mope.

But then the fourth week arrived, and our morning practice turned “Mysore style,” named after Mysore, India, where Sri. K. Patthabi Jois hatched the punishing and possibly evil Ashtanga vinyasa system. This involves several series of challenging poses, learned progressively, that need to be practiced in the same order every day in order to reach their full effectiveness. It’s yoga for anal-retentive type-A obsessives, which may explain why many German-speaking people love it so.

My fellow classmates’ eyes glowed with excitement. They practically frothed and stomped their hooves at the possibility of finally cutting loose after having been held back for so long. I, on the other hand, moaned with dread foreboding. The field had been given the illusion of equality, but now everyone else would be roostering and alligatoring it up while I bumbled in pain, vainly attempting to fold forward. The rubber was about to meet the road, and I had a deflated tire.

*****

I’d been in Mysore-inspired rooms before. About 15 minutes after practice starts, they become really sweaty and disgusting, which is fine if you’re in the mix, but not fine if you’re sitting around sucking your fingers. I prefer to breathe my oxygen untrammeled by a putrid mix of four-continent hippie b.o. and chest-sweat. Therefore, I hatched my escape strategy. On Monday morning, I set my mat as close to the exit as I possibly could without actually being outside.

But Richard and Mary had a different plan. They’d spent time over the weekend devising my “therapeutic loop”. Mary presented it to me, typed: Some sun salutations, some warrior poses, a few seated marichiasanas, simple backbends, lots of squatting, and several repetitions of what Richard calls “Camper’s Pose,” because when you get into it, you look like a camper taking a dump in the woods. This was, they’d determined, the ideal sequence for my problem. I’d keep pressure off my hams while strengthening the muscles around them; it was therapy, it was rehab, and it was a hell of a lot easier than what the other students had to do. I called it my “Special Needs Program.”

And what a program it was! While everyone else in the room grunted and strained and focused their attention in a very focused, attentive way, I squatted in Camper’s Pose, concentrating on my breath but also looking around at the people twisting their legs behind their heads and realizing, with much satisfaction, that they weren’t necessarily any closer to enlightenment than me. The classical texts all say that a good yoga pose should exemplify both effort and ease. Well, I was certainly sweating in Camper’s Pose, at least a little, but I also felt totally at ease. Ergo, yoga.

When I finished my upward-facing bow and my shoulder-stand sequence (minus plow pose) and my fish poses and my headstand, I looked at the clock. It was 9 AM. Practice still had an hour to go, and I was already done. The therapeutic loop felt like magic.

I sauntered across the studio, went into the bathroom, and sat down on the toilet, not because I actually had to take a dump, but because I had plenty of time to do so. Five minutes passed thusly until I got bored, and then I went back to my mat, only to realize, once I got there, that I’d forgotten to blow my nose. So it was back across the studio I went to the tissue box, while the world around me strained in a series of insanely difficult poses designed to be practiced by 13-year-old Brahmin boys with an eye on overthrowing the Raj. Finally, Richard noticed my lackadaisical ways.

He squatted beside me.

“Would you like to see the dessert menu?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Did you do your finishing poses?”

“Yep.”

“Could you do them again?”

“If you insist,” I said.

“I do,” he said.

So I did another headstand, holding it for at least 30 breaths. Then I came down, and then it was still 25 minutes before the group savasana. How glorious.

The next day, I repeated the same pattern. Richard came over to me again. My special needs were proving special indeed.

“We need to find something for you to do,” he said.

Richard got a blanket, and a couple of blocks, and a strap, and began to manipulate them. He didn’t put in 10 years studying with BKS Iyengar for nothing. Before I knew it, he’d trussed me like a Christmas goose. There he left me, for almost half an hour, in baddakonasana. I felt so comfortable that I wanted to whistle. Instead, I looked pityingly at my classmates, who were struggling so, while I got all the personal attention I needed from my beloved teacher, and I wasn’t even going to have to change my shirt after class.

*****

By the end of the course, Richard and Mary had come to realize, as all my yoga teachers eventually do, that they couldn’t push me very hard. During a Thursday afternoon asana class, while the rest of the students attempted to kick up into handstand and its variations, I snored happily while twitching on my mat. Richard didn’t bother me. The next morning, I finished my practice with 45 minutes to spare, rolled up my mat, and pulled a book off the Yoga Workshop shelf. Mary walked by and said,

“That book is interesting, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Very interesting.”

I was reading a book in yoga class, and nobody had said a word, but of course they hadn’t. Once again, I’d learned the most important yoga lesson: That the poses don’t really matter. They’re merely an avenue to deeper realms of exploration about human behavior, the mysteries of the universe, and the true nature of the mind. Whether or not I’d actually traveled down that avenue during my teacher training remained to be seen. But I’d started out in pain, and, by the end, I was in a little less pain, and I felt relatively happy. I’d been grouchy and whiny and depressed, but people had shown me kindness anyway. Yoga had healed me, at least temporarily.

When the day’s activities ended, I went up to Richard and Mary and thanked them for everything. They seemed exceedingly pleased. I couldn’t begin to express my gratitude for their hard work.

“I’ll just do my special-needs program at home for a few weeks,” I said.

“And then you can get back to normal,” said Richard.

“Probably,” I said.

“It’s impressive,” he said. “A lot of people give up forever when they get hurt.”

“Eh,” I said. “I’m too far down the road to quit.”

The next day, they gave me my diploma. I’d graduated from the toughest yoga school in North America, bad hamstring, bad attitude, and all. Some things are just worth doing, even if you have special needs.

Photo by gbSk

Though I’d rather scrape my anus with a carrot peeler than do even more yoga, I also tend to move pretty fast once I finally do get out of bed. I’m usually one of the first people to arrive at any event, class, or function. Therefore, while I’m not part of the go-go morning meditation bunch at yoga school, I’ve tended to get there while they’re still at the end of their inward bliss of solitude. I sit on the front step and receive visitors.

The meditators have apparently noticed. On Friday morning, one of them came up to me as I sat on my mat, not stretching.

“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said.

“For some reason,” he said, “your voice is the only one all of us hear while we’re meditating, and we were wondering if you could keep it down.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re meditating, so…”

“I know,” he said. “Trucks go by and all. But still. You’re really loud.”

I was too stunned to tell him to go stuff his recycled-metal water bottle up his bum, so I agreed. All morning, I fumed silently. Sure, it’s easy to meditate while everything is quiet and peaceful, but if you can’t handle one loud, fat Jew squatting on your stoop for just a couple of minutes, well, let’s just say the Buddha would be ashamed of you.

I continued to brood while everyone else leapt and bent and rolled around on the floor like lunatics. Of course, he’d had every right to tell me my voice was too loud, and that I was bothering him. He’d been man enough to confront me face-to-face. Plus, people have been telling me to shut up for decades. That’s an insult I can bear.

After my “practice,” we meditated as a class for 10 minutes. Then I went up to him and said, “was I quiet enough for you?” He said, “you were perfect,” and then we were friends again.

A few minutes later, as I arranged my little nest in the front row so I could listen to Richard Freeman’s daily words of wisdom, Richard’s wife Mary, the real motor behind the operation, came up to me.

“I hate to do this,” she said, “but a couple of the morning group have been complaining to me that you’re being too loud.”

“But…” I said.

“They’re professional meditators,” she said. “Still…they asked me to tell you, so I did.”

I gurgled out an “OK.” As soon as she walked away, I picked up my bag and prepared to leave yoga school forever. It’s one thing to have someone confront you face-to-face, but it’s another to have a silent tattletale call you into the principal’s office. I huffed out the front door like a Real Housewife having a tantrum for the camera.

If no one had stopped me, I would have left, too, for good, but a couple of guys did, and they persuaded me to stay. Fine, I thought, I will. But I sat in the back, by the door, my legs splayed out, my mouth in a show-me-what-you-got sneer, no longer the eager student. The bloom had been removed and I was throwing mental spitwads.

Later, I complained to Mary, while acknowledging the near-impossible difficulty of her position, about the “passive aggression” of the students. But she disagreed with me, saying they were probably just “shy.” No way, I thought. Why would anyone be afraid to confront me? I was all sweetness and posies.

*****

Twenty hours and several massive bong hits later, I arrived at the Boulder Shambala Center for the first morning of our two-day “meditation retreat.” Now I, too, could show off the full extent of my quietness. The retreat, held in a gorgeously-decorated fourth-floor temple, would be led by a professor named Jules Levinson, a leading American expert on Tibetan culture, who’s been translating sacred Buddhist texts for more than 35 years. Levinson has studied with many prominent rinpoches, including one who was widely believed to be the rebirth of the great sage Milarepa. He knows way more about Buddhism than you’d expect from someone who looks like a fairly hip accountant.

Before we began our course, Richard referred to Levinson as the “Woody Allen of meditation,” though I think he looks more like the actor David Straithairn. But the Woody Allen comparison is still pretty apt, as Levinson is bespectacled, quite nervously disposed, deeply intellectual, and totally obsessed with death. He told us that he’d started meditation as a young man because if he hadn’t, he would have committed some sort of horribly violent act that would left him spending the rest of his life either in a mental asylum or a high-security prison. From that moment, we all feared him.

We started our retreat later than planned on Saturday morning because Jules couldn’t figure out how to unlock the building. Then he told us that he’d nearly died of dehydration during the week, even though he’s lived in Colorado for several decades. This was a guy after my own heart.

We’d been training for this retreat all month, and I found sitting silently for eight hours much easier than I thought I would, particularly given that we had an hour-and-a-half lunch break. Also, we didn’t sit the whole time. Jules broke up the day with regular “walking meditations,” wherein we all crossed our hands in the traditional way and loped around the room in a circle like a bunch of vampire brides wearing Bali vacation shawls.

In addition, my friend Bill had given me a mantra, which I’d promised him I’d use. Technically, Buddhist vipassana meditation doesn’t use mantras, but who the hell was going to know? The mantra was excerpted from a popular 80′s dance song. As the day wore on, I sung it to myself over and over gain: No parking baby/No parking on the dance floor. It really helped.

Meditation, according to a classic Buddhist saying that Richard quoted to us, is like “washing a ball of mud.” Your thoughts come and go as though they were chirping birds, which also come and go while you’re meditating. All sensations and weird mental manias exist to be observed objectively. External and internal stimuli exist on the same plane. Or at least they do ideally.

By the end of the day, I’d managed to perfect an amazing new technique wherein I could take a 20-minute nap while sitting up and staying perfectly still. This left me feeling perfectly refreshed when the gong sounded for our walking meditation. All the time, I pretended not to look around the room, thinking, which one of you buttheads snitched on me yesterday? Then, in true meditative fashion, I let that thought go, until it came up again five minutes later.

Our meditation ended at 5:30 PM, at which point Jules sat down in front of a microphone, wrapped himself in a black shawl, and began to talk at great length about misery, torture, and insanity. When he’d started, I’d felt pretty good. During my meditation, I’d come into some pretty great insights and thought that maybe I could now avoid certain mental patterns that kept me from achieving full enlightenment. What a fool I was!

After 15 minutes of listening to Jules tell stories about Buddhist masters instructing their pupils to jump off a cliff, I felt nothing but despair. All was death. All was destruction. Everything was about teachers torturing their students. Then it occurred to me that Jules was doing this on purpose, that he knew nimrods like me were just waiting to get the hell out of there so they could take a bong hit and enter the realm of the mega-stoned.

Jules had no interest in our pathetic desires for ephemeral sense-pleasures.  We were going to sit there and listen to him translate, very slowly, a Tibetan song about something called “The Three Nails” whether we wanted to or not. I loathed him at that moment, but I definitely respected him, too. At the end, he said, “I’m really sorry to have kept you so long…actually, you know what? I’m not sorry at all!” Meanwhile, I continued to steam silently about the anonymous injustices committed against me by my fellow yoga students. Like a particularly encrusted hull-side barnacle, this thought just wouldn’t let go of my consciousness.

*****

By the morning of day two, we all looked like we’d spent the night trying to sleep on a pile of wet socks. That hour-long lecture on death and human misery, after an eight-hour meditation, had really sucked out the juice. But we got through the second day somehow. I kept repeating my mantra: No parking baby/No parking on the dance floor; I listed as many World Series winners as I could in my head; I continued to perfect my 20-minute sitting sleep; and I even, during one boring 10-minute thought-stretch, thought very sexy thoughts, and then thought very unsexy thoughts, just to see what happened below the belt. That’s a meditation I’ve done many times before.

I found myself going in and out of trances. Time felt very slippery to me. I began to see some of the tricks that my mind played on me, but then when I tried to remember those tricks, they vanished, like everything else does. I was definitely in a meditative zone. When the gong rang at 5 PM, I returned to full awareness. My hangover had gone away. I felt calm and centered. My thoughts had traveled beyond thoughts. For a bit, maybe, I’d even partially blown through the brain-fog that prevents us from seeing reality in its true, gloriously luminescent nature. O happy meditation day!

Jules then gave an insightful lecture, during which he posed many challenges. The world we lived in wasn’t real, he said, not in the way we think of it as real, anyway, and nothing was less real than our thoughts. After all, where did the thoughts you’re having right now come from? Or the thoughts you just had two minutes ago? What about the thoughts you’re about to have? Where are they now? All this was worth meditating about, he said.

He was right. But I had some questions of my own. What was I going to have for dinner? How much was I going to spend? Most importantly, who’d snitched on me at yoga school? Reveal yourself, traitor, I thought. I promise I won’t yell; I just want to talk to you. In fact, I want to give you a mantra. I’ve got it right here:

No parking baby.

No parking on the dance floor.

Dear Mom:

Well, here I am in yoga camp, and I’m in extremely good hands. Richard Freeman, though he’d never dream of calling himself this, is the most knowledgeable and experienced yoga teacher in America. He believes that yoga can and should make you a sharper, more intelligent, more discriminating person, and he has little tolerance for spacey New Age platitudes. For instance, here’s a story he told us the other day about his guru, the late Patthabi Jois:

“We need teachers to help keep us grounded,” he said. “When students would go to Guruji and say things like, ‘Oooh Guruji, I feel the kundalini energy rising through my throat chakra blah blah blah,’ Guruji would respond: “Go get me six pounds of carrots and a bucket of water.’ Or if a student said, ‘Ooh Guruji, every time I close my eyes I see this amazing ball of light,’ Guruji would say, ‘Don’t worry, it will go away.’”

Richard has been training yoga teachers for decades, and he’s designed his intellectually-rigorous curriculum with great precision. We’re reading the Upanishads, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika,the Bhagvadgita, other classical texts, and various philosophical essays. Many of these readings are quite hilarious. Our edition of the Pradipika (originally written somewhere between 1350 and 1550, which, Richard says, makes it “hot off the presses” as far as yoga texts go) was translated in India in 1915. Though it’s still quite a good practical guidebook, it also advises you, as part of your practice, to keep women out of your life by smearing the walls of your home with cow dung. I’m about as likely to do that as I am to ritualistically detach my tongue from the floor of my mouth, a practice the Pradipika also recommends, though Richard doesn’t.

When it comes to the headier reading material, I’m fine. Homework has never been my downfall. However, when it comes to the physical portion of the program, I feel completely out of my depth, an ogre invited to a debutante ball. It’s not that the practices themselves have been particularly hard thus far. Richard is taking great care to teach us the basic internal forms of hatha yoga so none of us hurt ourselves or, by extension, our future students.

This would be great if I hadn’t already entered the program on one leg.

*****

As I wrote last week, despite having taken every precaution possible to prevent getting hurt before my training, I started with a reasonably severe hamstring injury. By the end of the week, thanks to an enormous amount of kind attention from Richard’s wife and Yoga Workshop co-owner Mary Taylor, who treated me like the special-needs student that I am, I was feeling a lot better. Then at a Saturday afternoon barbecue at my aunt’s house in Denver, I felt something snap horribly in my upper left thigh as I was coming out of the bathroom. Since then I’ve been unable to walk totally upright. This placed me at an extreme disadvantage during Monday’s practice, which I mostly spent massaging the back of my leg on a hard square block.

Also, perhaps I should have read the fine print and realized that yoga teacher training might actually exist to teach you how to teach yoga. We’ve been getting excellent and detailed instruction on how to give “adjustments,” helpful assists when your students are out of alignment, out of their depth, or otherwise at risk of injuring themselves, situations I know all too well. I feel thoroughly unqualified to receive adjustments, much less give them. One injury more, and I’m going to have to do the rest of this program from a wheelchair, like a yoga version of Ironside.

For part of the day, we pair up with other students, so we can, yes, adjust one another. Since most, though not all, of the people in the program are already yoga teachers, they pounce on these opportunities like puppies on a Milk-Bone. I view such moments with dread unknowing.

Generally, we’re assigned to someone who’s about our size and shape. My partners have been giving me better and stronger adjustments than I’ve received from most chiropractors I’ve visited. When it’s my turn, I poke their bodies aimlessly, trying not to accidentally touch their butts while asking questions like “so where’s the sacrum again?” Once I arrive at the adjustable body part, I quiver uncertainly, like a palsied widow trying to peel the wrapper off a store-bought bran muffin.

*****

For now, I’ve accepted general incompetence, total confusion, and physical pain as my lot, but I’m still having a good time. Making friends is always the best part of any yoga venture. There are 40 other students from 15 different countries, and they’re all lovely, interesting people, though I must admit that I feel pangs of jealousy when I watch them zip to and fro The Yoga Workshop on their rented mountain bikes while I lurch down the street like Quasimodo coming off a Xanax bender.

But Richard’s daily philosophical talks are what really drew me to the proceedings. I’m continually astonished by the breadth of his learning, and by the depth of his insight. I’ve learned that the word shala, which is generally what traditional yoga practice spaces are called, is Sanskrit for “barn,” that the three shantis in traditional chants represent three different kinds of suffering (self-suffering, suffering imposed upon you from other beings, and suffering, like genetic tendencies and large weather patterns, that seem to come from mysterious cosmic forces), and how to say, “How’s it going?” in Sanskrit (svasti ho).

On Monday, among myriad other things, Richard discussed the gunas, or the three basic properties of matter in yogic philosophy. They are: tamas, which is sluggish and stationary; rajas, fiery and energetic, and sattva, calm and illumined, which occurs at the intersection of the first two. Yoga, he said, is about developing the quality of “discriminating awareness,” of watching the properties of matter in a constant state of transformation, and in delighting at and observing that change without judgment or ego.

When this happens properly, Richard said, “the mind becomes sattvic,” but, he added,  “then you think ‘I am so sattvic, and then the sattva rots. The ego takes over, and you float back to tamas. Many things look sattvic but are, in fact, tamasic, and that’s the state of contemporary yoga. And it’s all b.s.”

You don’t hear that at YogaWorks. Rather than feel sorry for myself because of my injury, though I’m doing plenty of that, I’m trying to take his advice and look at the situation objectively, as something that just happened, not something that happened to me in particular. It’s simply part of what the Buddha called one of the “five heaps” of matter, all of which are empty. As Richard said today, “it’s all just a pile of sensations.”

While I was squirming around on my mat this morning, fiddling with my thigh-compression bandage, making pained faces, and emitting little sighs, Richard walked by and gave me a wink.

“It’s good material,” he said.

The sneaky devil, I thought. He knows. He knows.

And that’s why he’s my teacher.

Svasti ho,

NP

Photo by dawgbyte7

I took great care preparing for yoga school. For months, I raised money and made logistical arrangements. I read Indian mythology and meditated for at least a half hour a day and lit incense next to a statue of Ganesha. Up in my second-story office with views of downtown, the palmed edge of Dodger Stadium, and several backyards housing angry ghetto dogs, I worked through the Ashtanga primary and intermediate series, with breaks for slow, stretchy “yin” practices on mornings when my ass muscles were really sore. I proceeded patiently and consistently and treated myself kindly, in complete opposition to how I generally conduct my life. My physical shape was good, my mental shape, at least adequate. Every night before bed, I dissolved three spoonfuls of psyllium husk in eight ounces of water, and, knowing what it would do to my colon the next morning, eagerly drank the solution. The Augean Stables of my body and mind got scrubbed clean.

I was ready.

But because drinking eight ounces of water before bed generally means a 3 AM trip to the john, my nightly fiber cocktail proved my undoing. In the middle of the night, about ten days before I was scheduled to leave for my yoga training in Boulder, I got up to relieve my bladder. My wife and I had recently gotten back from a two-night trip to the desert to celebrate 10 years of not killing each other. We’d not yet unpacked our suitcase. There it lay, in the middle of the floor, invisible in the dark. My left foot hit it awkwardly, and the leg swung out at an odd angle, and I felt a little tug. I walked a few steps; that tug persisted.

If yoga teaches you anything, it’s that you need to listen to your body, and my body was telling me, “Hey, you injured your hamstring, you fucking moron!” After conducting my toilet, I went into the kitchen, popped a couple of Advil, and returned to bed, hoping that all would be well in the morning. It wasn’t, exactly. That hamstring still felt sore, but I could walk on the leg without pain. If I just took a few days off physical practice, I figured, everything would be fine and I could go to Colorado in game shape.

Three days passed, and I was on my feet again in samasthiti. My practices flowed smoothly, without pain or disturbance. Only something really absurd could stop me now. But since I live in Hollywood, something really absurd was about to arrive.

*****

The current trend in book publicity (a term that, for most authors, is an oxymoron), involves making video “trailers” to be distributed on the Internet. The idea is that if the trailers go viral then people’s interest in the book will be piqued, thereby bringing the art of literature to the same cultural level as short videos of cats playing the piano. My friend Alex, a commercial and short-film director of great renown, agreed to make a couple of spots for Stretch, my hilarious yoga memoir that Harper Perennial will publish, at long last, in August. I don’t want to ruin the viral surprise, but I’m not giving anything away when I say we shot one of the spots in a yoga studio.

Fewer than 72 hours before I left for Colorado, I found myself in the bathroom of the Shakti Box, standing by patiently while a stylist shaved my shoulders and neck. He even shaved my moles. After that was over, a different stylist slathered my now baby-smooth arms with pancake makeup and gel. I shone like a porn star.

The video involved a yoga-class scenario. We had to do a certain sequence of poses. Then we had to do it again while Alex’s DP filmed it from another angle. Then we did it again, and then a fourth time. Individual “coverage” followed, and soon one of the other people in the video, a fitness trainer who’d responded to a casting call on Craig’s List, said that she was getting a “really great workout.” So was I, but unfortunately our flow included repeated variations of paschimottanasana, or seated forward fold, and there’s no worse pose in the world to do when you have a mildly strained hamstring.

By the fifth take, I started to feel actual pain. By the seventh, the stylist no longer had to spritz fake sweat on my forehead. The director kept saying “you’re doing great.” I felt anything but great, but I had to continue. Anything else would have fatally damaged the continuity.

I woke up the next morning still hurting, and spent Friday night in bed watching the Dodgers game, my leg propped on a pillow, a RiteAid compression bandage with attached ice pack drawn tightly around my left thigh, my mind filling with angry, depressed thoughts. At last, I was on the verge of fulfilling my dream of going through a yoga-teacher training in a mountain town of well-heeled hippies. I’d done everything right. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, my body had failed me. Why, I wondered, had this happened to me? All was darkness and misery.

Now I type this after having completed my first day of yoga training, and I’m no longer bothered. My leg hurts, I can’t do half the poses, but it hardly matters. Yoga, if practiced diligently, has all kinds of wonderful benefits for the body, but it doesn’t promise you freedom from injury or strife. If anything, it warns you that such things are, inevitably, coming your way, and you should prepare your mind accordingly. Maybe I could have prevented my hamstring problem-no one required me to practice sloppy yoga with oiled-up arms while filming an Internet book commercial-but any mental suffering I felt came from false expectations of what my yoga-training experience would entail.

When the Buddha left his cosseted palace on the eve of his 30^th birthday, he saw a sick man, and old man, and a dead body. Someday, he realized, I, too, will be sick, and old, and then I’m going to die. That realization was the beginning of his long and tortured path toward enlightenment. And he never went anywhere near Boulder, Colorado.