namasteph yoga blog

I can do a headstand just fine but I’m always terrified of falling over backwards, so I usually cheat and position myself near a wall. Part of this is due to my tight hamstring issue – I can’t walk my feet up close to my body and lift myself up, I have to “jump” up (which they always tell you not to do in Sivananda class).

I’ve been practicing somersaults lately to get over my falling backwards fear, but I haven’t yet gotten the guts to purposefully fall backwards in headstand. At least with the somersault my hands are free. What can I say? I was one of those kids who could never do a cartwheel. No gymnastics or cheerleading for me growing up…I was  a nerd and always one of the last ones chosen on any sports team.

I fell once during Bakasana (crow pose), and it’s taken me a year to get the guts to lift my feet off the floor again for just a few seconds. Maybe I hurt myself falling in a past life?

Maybe I should just get over and join a “Head Stand Human Skittles” game, where you group people in headstand and throw Nerf balls at them to knock them over like they are bowling pins. And no, I did not make that one up! Strange world this is, eh?

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I am doing a 40-day kundalini yoga meditation for a fantastic teleclass I am taking on “The Art of Soul Listening.” It’s a meditation using the Pran Bandha Mantra, sometimes referred to as “Pavan Guru” or “Pavan Pavan.” This is the first time I’ve done a kundalini yoga meditation daily and the experience has been very interesting to say the least. I feel like I am purging a lot of emotional crap (and that is good, but a little overwhelming at times!).

The funny thing about doing the meditation daily is that it is making me want to do yoga more. For whatever the reason, the brief meditation practice makes it easier to get motivated to do my home yoga. I don’t necessarily do the yoga right before or after the meditation either.

To make it easier to perform the meditation (since you have to switch from chanting to deep breathing to breath of fire), I made an audio that chimes at the appropriate times. It includes a live loop of mantra chanting, and you can download it free here.

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If you are looking to keep that yoga mindset going in between classes, check out the free Guru Singh Podcast. Guru Singh is a kundalini yoga teacher in Los Angeles who is popular for his talks as well as his music. He teaches packed “Humanology” classes Monday and Thursday nights at Yoga West, which is where the recordings for these podcasts come from.

The talks are generally about 30-40 minutes long and provide self-help talk peppered with kundalini yoga philosophy. His delivery is even and smooth, and he’s often soothing to listen to. He’ll often say just that one little thing that I needed to hear that day to give me a new perspective on a problem.

The information is provided in memorable but sometimes simplistic aphorisms – if you get annoyed at word etymology games (the whole “assume means you make an ass out of you and me” type of word play) then you might find his philosophy to be a bit too pat at times. He also goes off on anti-war, political, and vegan rants on occasion (though that might be a plus, depending on your political views). But overall, he provides a very inspiring and uplifting message that does not require a belief in any particular religion, faith, or political ideology.

You can also get copies of some of the yoga sets he teaches at Guru Singh’s blog.

In a self-help world where most “gurus” are trying to make a buck off everything they do, it is refreshing to see a guru give away his teachings on the Internet without asking for money in return. You can pay $16 per class to hear these teachings live, or you can get them free on the Internet. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

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I actually got into a decent night-time yoga routine before bed while I was visiting family for the holidays. I live on the West Coast; they live on the East Coast. I was always up after everyone else went to bed. I find that doing some gentle hatha yoga before bed calms my mind down and helps keep my body limber. I’m also still working on those hamstrings – and doing it nightly definitely makes a difference! (I can actually see where I might actually get the backs of my feet to the floor in downward facing dog – this will be a miracle!)

I’ve also been learning a great 10-minute Qigong (Chi Kung) routine as well. I find the gentle nature of Qigong to be a good antidote to the sometimes harsh workouts you can do in a strenuous yoga flow set or in kundalini yoga. I’ve decided to study Qigong more this year, so I’ll be covering that in this blog as well.

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I taught a friend of mine a kundalini yoga set today. He wanted to see if yoga could help open up his chakras. So I read his energy before doing the set – his chakras were very shut down on the back. After the yoga and meditation, I did a second reading. The chakras had all opened up!

The great thing is, we didn’t even do the full length of the meditations, because my friend was new to yoga, and the meditations were a bit strenuous. (They involved arms being held up and waved around.) So even a shortened kundalini yoga set and meditation had a beneficial effect on the chakras. Good to remember when you are short on time and thinking that a quick dose of yoga won’t do much – it actually does have a very beneficial effect!

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After spending some time with the Gaiam Yoga Club, here are a few second thoughts on it. I was impressed with it when I first tried out the program, and I still think it is a good way to learn yoga.

The club is definitely something you’ll need to commit time and attention to if you want to get the full value. I am so busy doing various forms of yoga that I don’t find myself turning to Gaiam Yoga Club for my daily practice. It can, however, be used as such and it is set up in that fashion, with increasing difficulty as you continue on with the series. I find myself turning to the Gaiam Yoga Club programs when I want a good home workout but I don’t want to take 45 minutes to an hour. With many classes running about a half-hour, providing just enough challenge without too much stress, I find the Gaiam audios to often hit the spot.

On occasion I find the instruction (particularly from Colleen) to veer towards the abstract discussion of physiology in a way that doesn’t relate for me – rotating, spinning, or wrapping specific muscles doesn’t really speak to me – but I know this is a personal preference. Overall, the instruction is extremely clear and easy to follow.

Thus, I’m still giving the program a thumbs up, but it’d be even better if they started offering new content on a semi-regular basis. I’d also love to try new styles of yoga, a yoga sampler as it were. We’ll see how it evolves…

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OK, it’s really not fair of me to target “gym yoga teachers” because I am one of those gym yoga teachers (currently subbing at a chain I will not mention so they won’t get on my case about publicizing their company on my blog). Gym yoga isn’t always bad – it depends on the teacher, of course. But the Bally Total Fitness I attend (but do not work at) seems to attract yoga teachers who have other things on their minds. It’s possibly the poor pay – I have heard they pay their fitness instructors somewhere around minimum wage at my local Bally. (Maybe it’s just the group manager at my particular gym.)

There used to be a yoga and pilates instructor at my gym who was so irritated with Bally and how they treated her, that she punished the students for it with her bad attitude. She claimed the issue was not only her pay, but their ridiculous substitution policy, which apparently left her unable to find anyone to fill in for her when she couldn’t be at her class. (At the gym chain I work at, there are so many of us on the sub list I’m scrambling to respond immediately to any call for subs just so I have chance to teach.)

So this particular instructor would just show up late, leave early, or not show up at all on those days where she had a conflict. One time, she was in the middle of teaching her pilates class, and she left halfway through because she had to be on the other side of town “for filming.” She let one of the student regulars finish teaching the class. No joke!

I was so annoyed that I stopped going to her class and only recently tried the new class in that timeslot because she apparently quit or got fired. This new class is not quite yoga, and not quite pilates, but a hybrid. It’s actually a pretty good workout, but I notice that the new teacher spends half the class with her nose in her iPod, fiddling around with the dial to come up with her next song. It would be one thing if she were changing her playlist once or twice during the class, but no. It seems that she manually changes every single song that plays.

Once I saw her on her back, bicycling her feet along with us as she peered into her iPod display, giving half-hearted instructions when her attention was directed solely at the little machine in her hand.

I’ve yet to see her really pay attention to what the students are doing, and she absolutely never comes around to help people.

Personally, I would much rather have a teacher who is paying attention to her students than focusing on her music. There’s this cool little thing that you can do with your iPod. It’s called a playlist. It will play a list of songs in the order you want automatically, and you set it up beforehand. Use it.

Now, some of the yoga teachers I have tried at the gym chain I teach at are pretty fantastic, so maybe my local Bally is just a vortex of distraction and this is not typical of gyms. Unfortunately, the whole reason I got my Bally membership was because I could walk to it and it was convenient. If only they had a better group fitness instructor at my location, and some quality yoga classes with happy teachers who care. Sigh.

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I recently saw an ad on Craigslist for free meditation classes. They did not include a link to their website, but I gleaned from the email address provided that the organization was Brahma Kumaris, an organization that describes itself as a “spiritual university” teaching Raja Yoga. (Raja Yoga, i.e., “royal yoga,” is the yoga of meditation as originally described by Pantanjali in the Yoga Sutras.)

I always like to know what I’m getting into and a quick search on the Internet reveals that Brahma Kumaris is considered a cult by many. Brahma Kumaris has some heavy duty critics. It’s apparently not just your usual yoga cult – this one is a “doomsday cult,” where the belief is that the world will end soon and those who participate in Brahma Kumaris will ascend to become deities in the new Golden Age.

The doomsday stuff was enough to convince me that the free meditation classes probably weren’t worth my time. I also shy away from organizations that rely on guilt-trip donations and do a heavy sell on tithing.

But I’m not automatically scared off by cult charges. I regularly take kundalini yoga classes even though the kundalini yoga organization, 3HO, has been considered a cult for a long time. In both organizations you’ll find vegetarians who get up at 4 am for meditation, wear all white, and follow other strict rules for living.

Most of the kundalini yoga teachers I go to actually do seem to be “Happy Healthy and Holy” as the 3HO name suggests. These are fantastic spiritual teachers who really do seem to walk the talk. I can tell you, however, from the stories that these folks tell, that I would have never gotten along with Yogi Bhajan. I am too independent by nature. Regular life in an ashram wouldn’t sit well with me. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I believe there are some people who want direction and authority in their lives, and that makes them happy. As long as they aren’t harmed by it, it’s fine with me. If they want to wear all white and wake up at 4 am to take a cold shower every morning, then more power to them. No 3HO member has ever given me a high pressure sell in any kundalini yoga class, ever. I’ve never been asked to tithe away my live savings, though I suppose yoga classes can add up.

I do think, though, that it’s good to be skeptical of charismatic leaders and rigid authority, whether it’s yoga or not. I know of a teacher (not a yoga teacher) who has such tight control of her little community that her students are emotional prisoners. Rather than encouraging the students to leave the nest for bigger and better things, the teacher has emotionally crippled the students so they are dependent on her.

From observing that, I don’t think it’s meditation or yoga that creates a cult, but psychological manipulation, which can occur without these things. People are drawn to yoga-specific cults because meditation and yoga does bring such tremendous benefits.

So some cult watchers go a bit too far, perhaps, when they bash spiritual organizations simply for being weird, or having problem people in it. (Yes, apparently some guy at 3HO was growing marijuana but what does that have to do with the rest of the sincere members?) Leading anti-cult guru (irony intended) Rick Ross has actually gone so far as to warn people against Yoga Alliance, simply because some board members were involved in 3HO and other yoga organizations he deems cults. He wrote back in 2003:

“Anyone considering yoga classes with teachers and/or schools registered by the Yoga Alliance might want to exercise a bit of caution, before beginning any of their exercises.”

A bit over the top, I think. Well, maybe he was unaware that Yoga Alliance is pretty much the de facto yoga certifying organization in America, and that almost all mainstream yoga teachers in the US have their certification through them now.

At any rate, I personally like to keep my toe into organizations without jumping full in to the point where an organization takes over my life. I enjoy the exercises and meditations I have learned in kundalini yoga, but I do not need to go full on American Sikh in white clothes and a turban to benefit. If it works for you, great, but it’s not for me. But I think the key here is that kundalini yoga people allow you to be who you are – on the other hand, those strict organizations that are the cults to be wary of do not.

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I just saw an interesting interview with a KGB defector from 1984 who talked about how the KGB was studying Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his followers. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the guru to the Beatles, if you recall, and he died in February of 2008.

Apparently, the KGB thought that people who were “stupid” enough to get involved in meditation would be inclined towards brainwashing and could be used to help demoralize America. The interviewee also explains that people who focus too much on meditation might become complacent and not be alert to a possible Soviet takeover of the United States.

I don’t think meditation has made me complacent whatsoever. I have seen a disturbing tendency among certain yogis to get really wrapped up with gurus, however. This type of hero worship seemed to extend to the election of Obama this year, where the man was deified and set up to be some sort of new age messiah. (Never mind that most of his cabinet appointments show that he’s just a regular politician like everyone else.)

I don’t think this is the fault of yoga or meditation. I think people who are inclined to worship a guru are the same people who’d be worshiping a televangelist if they were a fundamentalist Christian. It’s simply a personality type that likes authority and being told what to do – it makes life easier. Or they are enamored with celebrity worship as a means of giving their bland lives some excitement and meaning.

I’m not suggesting all gurus are bad, but I think the unconditional, uncritical acceptance of a guru can lead to bad things. We’ve heard plenty of stories of gurus taking advantage of their students sexually, for example. Politically, I believe it is quite dangerous to set up any politician as a guru, however well-meaning the leader is on the surface, because that can lead to all sorts of problems if the leader’s ego gets in the way of the needs of the people. (Remember: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.)

The KGB interview is available below, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi section starts at about 10 minutes in.

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I went to one of those kundalini yoga classes where you have to meditate for an hour. An hour! I was so annoyed. I was in a bad mood and had gone to the class for a healing. We sat there for an hour chanting something long and nonsensical. This was supposed to make us more “radiant.” I thought I had just wasted one of my class passes. When I left the class I was still annoyed. Yet, somehow, the next day, I felt terrific. I guess it worked!

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