Yogurt

So: Yoga.  You have all heard my confession in the past of not being a particularly good yoga student.  Why?  Because I don't practice very much.  Is it really that big of a deal if you say you love yoga and you teach it but you don't practice a whole hell of a lot?  Well, yes.

I told you I would explain why I am taking a break from teaching and here it is.  I may have some readers who do not know much, if anything, about the dissolution of Anusara Yoga over the past couple of years.  In a nutshell, there was inappropriate and perhaps even illegal misconduct by the founder and leader.  Super lame and disappointing.  Kind of like when you find out your dad has been sleeping with his secretary: Really?  You did what?  Seriously?

But worse.  Oh and by the way my dad has not been sleeping with his secretary, primarily because he is retired and secondarily because I'm not certain he even had a secretary after Claudette worked for him in the 70's and also too because he just wouldn't.  So anyway, here we all are, after investing thousands of dollars and hours and time and effort into a style of yoga that, in my opinion, is absolute genius, watching it disintegrate because, well, in hindsight, maybe it was just time for it to be over. 

I became an Anusara student while I was living in Hawai'i, the teacher that I practiced and studied with was Anusara trained and it turns it out it was the right kind of yoga for me.  Because there were no mountains to climb, I did a ton of yoga while I lived there.  I turned the extra bedroom in my overpriced, sterile apartment into a lovely yoga room, with caramel bamboo on the floor, my crocodile wood Ganesha statue beneath the breezy windows, daily picked hibiscus around his feet, and foot marks on the walls from all the handstands I finally learned to do.  On days when I was torn between whether I should practice yoga or go to the beach, I would compromise and do both: go to Ironwoods Beach and do drop-backs where the sand sloped up and away from the mesmerizing cool of the ocean.

As most of you who know me know, and some of you might find maddening at times, there is a part of me that doesn't really totally buy into anything.  I become entranced easily by many things, but my tendency is to hang a little on the fringes and still do my own thing.  No different with the Anusara craze.  It helped that I was living on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while the rest of the nation (the "mainland" then) was getting swept up in the warm fuzzy ooey gooey heart-expanding love fest that was Anusara.  For a system of yoga that I connected with so profoundly, I still had my doubts about the scene around it.

So when it all fell apart, I didn't find myself personally affected by it.  Was it kind of fun to talk about with friends?  Yes.  Was it fascinating to watch it all fall apart after all the hype and all the buildup?  Yes.  Was it embarrassing when people asked me about it?  Yes.  Did it affect my practice and my method of teaching?  Not really.  It had a brief effect of inspiring me to practice more, harder and deeper, but in a community as small as this, all I did was change the name of my yoga class to Yoga Level 1, with no affiliation to any school of yoga and my class size remained the same - small.

But now, after the dust has settled and my former teachers have found new ways to forge their own path in the American Yoga Frontier, I am suddenly finding myself feeling a little lost.  I have no teacher, I have no method, I am a sporadic practitioner and I am uncertain of my teaching goals.  All I really want to do right now is practice.  Ally and I still have our 3 hour Sunday morning extravaganza and I am finding myself wanting to move and stretch and explore and discover all by myself.  I cancelled my subscription to YogaGlo (if you don't know about it, it's awesome), I quit teaching my Thursday class, and I am going to spend the next 6 months doing my own thing and seeing where I end up.

Because I am such a weirdo I have some simple goals I am going to write down and work on, which I have mentioned before, but basically I just want to practice.  I will keep you posted on how it all plays out.   For now, I will have to pretend I am back in that lovely yoga room with the trade winds playing through because our little ski chalet is so small it is silly.  But whatevs.  Practice and all is coming.