Aye, Nay or OM: Yoga's Place in the Mainstream

Unless you're a fairly engaged yoga teacher, you may not have noticed something is changing in yoga: we're being mainstreamed. It's not only evident from the number of people you can see bopping around any community with a yoga mat on their back, sporting sanskrit symbols on cars, t-shirts and jewelry. While mother India goes Bollywood, the proliferation of her timeless spiritual practices has almost half of the United States wrestling with how yoga should formally participate in the collective.

Most yogis will admit we've wanted it, talked about how we wish everyone had a yoga practice of some sort. Who within the yoga community hasn't sighed at the idea of the houses of the U.S. Congress "OM"ing to open session, Sri President Obamananda scuttling his Marlboro's in favor of nadi shodana pranayama, Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin checking in with supta baddha konasana/goddess pose before taking the stage, or held some other fantasy about yoga's ability to offer deeper connectedness and clarity to the folks who emerge as our loudspeakers and decisionmakers. As someone who adapts and shares the tools of yoga within corporate environments, I know beyond a doubt it would certainly be for the good.

Fantasies aside, and perhaps part and parcel to their ever becoming reality, the other side of mainstreaming is also happening. Yep. Just when yoga began to show numbers of participants that would make ANY business sit up and take notice, the states are taking notice and wondering what this means from many angles. As the American Bar Association Journal reports, twenty-one states are looking at yoga with an aim to regulate and somehow define this practice. Yoga proponents are on the scramble, responding with petitions, letters, hiring lobbyists, talking to senators, citing First Amendment rights and generally worrying over how a practice-turned-business that offers dubious profitability to all but a very small percentage of us can bear the increased cost to serve of meeting bureaucratic requirements that will no doubt result from the regulatory push.

What the states say they are worried about: mostly students buying trainings or memberships from organizations who vanish in the night without any path or recourse. What studios are worried about: registration fees in the thousands of dollars to qualify as a registered school, bureaucratic headaches of filings and paperwork, and being told what to do by the government.

Panic aside, this is an inevitable moment. Embedded in this moment are questions including: is yoga a religious practice, is it a therapeutic modality, is it simply a form of exercise, how is it valid, is it taxable, is it a vocation...and no doubt the list goes on. No matter how we define the "everything" tool that yoga fans know the practice to be, that yoga holds irresistable outcomes for so many of us and can be adapted to give benefit no matter the proclivities of the practitioner simply means this moment HAD to eventually arrive. With a capacity for ubiquitous relevance, our beloved Everything Tool has been destined to gather the popularity and prominence that the regulatory push signifies.

Sitting with this inevitability, I'm thinking of lots of pros and cons to this particularly sticky aspect of the mainstreaming of yoga. One cause for consideration: Yoga teachers have never been formally validated by the medical community - ask anyone in Donna Karan's Urban Zen Teacher Training and they'll attest to the frustrations of taking a training that was marketed as integrating yoga-based modalities into medical settings only to find out that any contact with real patients is actually not permitted. Another cause for consideration: Yoga teachers in many states are actually not legally permitted to touch students - that means hands-on adjustments or therapeutic touch of any kind is illegal unless the teacher is liscensed for some other profession such as Massage, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, etc. Sure, yoga teachers can study for thousands of hours with therapeutics masters of multiple lineages, but because they are not recognized by state & local governments that they exist at all is the result of being "under the radar" - that is until now.

So if this is an inevitable moment, if the question "what IS yoga" is finally coming to the crown chakra attention of the mainstream world, we need to be the yogis in this moment. We need to ask ourselves what this means at the mula/root, at the solar plexus, what yearning rises from our anahata and how our voices give this truth expression. We need to step with wisdom beyond the veils of illusion and separation that we were ever separate from this world and know that we have always been spiritual beings on a human journey - in this world if not of it. We need to consider ourselves Arjuna in the chariot hearing Krishna's admonishment that we cannot retreat from the power struggles or machinations of this world into a spiritual coccoon. Indeed, because we are yogis in this world we must thoughtfully find how we powerfully serve in relationship with it and negotiate terms that best allow us to do that.

What can change: everything. It always is anyway.

Happiness or something else?

I've been watching the surge in happiness psychology offerings - the websites, the coaching programs, the university degrees. Seeing the proliferation of interest and academic intelligence about happiness raises questions around the measure of a life - is it happiness or is it meaning? Is it something else entirely? To the nihilists and even the tantrics, there may be nothing at all, no valuation differentiating between one lifetime and another. What would the likes of karma yogis such as Dr. King or Gandhi say? What do you think?

Counting down to the countdown...

Tick tick tick - I never feel so aware of time as when I realize there's something time specific I want to say on this blog and right now is one of those times. From Nosara beach in Costa Rica on retreat with my teacher Shiva Rea, hanging with a bunch of amazing people from around the world, I've been thinking lots about all the little breakthrough moments that have made my year a little brighter than it might have been otherwise. While I'm sure lots of you write gratitude lists - after all, even Oprah writes and advocates gratitude lists - in honor of the kind of year and decade I'm hoping to have, this post is dedicated to those breakthrough moments...may there be many, many more.

1. Teaching 300 NYPD officers to meditate
2. Peacefully ending an unhealthy relationship
3. Getting a puppy after YEARS of wanting one (yes, this is perhaps related to #2)
4. Spending a week on a lake with no visitors, no TV, no radio - just silence
5. Learning to drive a motorbike
6. Winning clients on national and global levels
7. Leading workshops for Harvard Business Review
8. Growing my hair beneath my shouders for the first time since college
9. Learning to surf (related 100% to being in Costa Rica this week but not represented at all accurately by the amazing photo above)
and (after a year that if it were a song it would be sung to the blues including all the maladies we've all been reading about in the headlines this year)...
10. Recovering my belief in possibility and deep love for this very brief pageant we call life.

Thanks for giving me a place to share this, internet world, and thanks to whomever is reading this for following the journey.

Re-Birth Day

Last night I threw my annual birthday-holiday fete. A bit of a challenge all these years not because of any primal experiences in the birth canal, but because with great hemispheric accuracy it falls in the middle of winter holidays (when I was little), final exams (in my teens and early twenties), and now competes with cold/flu and holiday party season. Among health, holiday challenges and the fact that I seem to send invites at the very very last minute, in the midst of regrets s'il vous plaît I take great comfort that I'm not alone in celebrating this day. In fact, the entire nation of Mexico and many other Catholic countries celebrate the day I was born.

No matter my intentions to live a remarkable life, they don't do this because of anything I did. By chance or grace, on December 12, 1531 the image of the Virgin Mary appeared in a little town in Mexico called Guadalupe. Lucky for me, I like religion in general and so whenever I get to hang around Mexicans here in NYC I love bragging that I am a "Lupita"- the nickname for anyone born on the day of the virgin - I love having a little extra zing in my birthday specialness.

You can probably tell that birthdays are important to me. Not for presents or hogging attention, but in a busy world they offer the potential for a ritual of recognition of all the life experiences that have combined in my life to make me the person I am, and to honor the many others who provide love and support for me to become the person I want to be.

Each year I look for ways to make these day-of-birth parties special by having a theme on the hunch that when we create a context for connection we're more likely to authentically connect and have real fun. Past years themes have ranged from human scavenger hunts in my apartment to "show and tell" where people share something they have created. One year we did a dj competition and the next we karaoked until sunrise. This year I asked folks to offer their favorite quote - from Raising Arizona to Winston Churchill, I figured whatever inspires my friends has to be inspiring.

What better gift than inspiration? I got exactly what I asked for. In hopes it is equally a gift of inspiration for you, here's a sampling:

Fail again...fail better
-Samuel Beckett

It could be better, but it's good enough
-Chinese Fortune Cookie

There was never a king like Solomon
Not since the world began
Yet Solomon talked to a butterfly
As a man would talk to a man
-Rudyard Kipling

CLOUDS
All afternoon, Sir
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still;
then they broke open. This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves the purpose. I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.
- Mary Oliver


Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to killed me / and has failed.
~ Lucille Clifton

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
~ Washington Irving

And this one, too, from wondrous Rumi:

you suppose you are the trouble
but you are the cure
you suppose that you are the lock on the door
but you are the key that opens it
it’s too bad that you want to be someone else
you don’t see your own face, your own beauty
yet, no face is more beautiful than yours
~ Rumi


And of course my own favorite quote which ties this admittedly rambling post together. With my birthday patron saint Mary as a symbol of the mothers' loving compassion, in honoring the journey and beauty of my own life there's no greater cause to celebrate than the profound impact of my relationship with my own mother. As in any relationship, I certainly did not always understand her, and it took more than two decades for us begin to like much less really fall in love with eachother. With an ironic twist, its crossed my mind more than once that it took her fighting cancer for us to finally stop fighting eachother. But somehow through it we got to that place beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing and uncovered enough space in our relationship to hold eachother's beauty in the very brightest light. The connection we created is my reference in understanding what this lesson called "love" really is.

Years since her death, I will never forget the day when minutes after having just delighted in finding the following poem sitting on my floor reading in NYC, my phone rang as she excitedly called me from her home in Cincinnati to share it with me.

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver

Wishing you re-birth every day,

With love,

Tevis

Gratitude List...because of the downturn I discovered...

....
1. Cortados (latin lattes probably made with Cafe Bustelo) from bodegas and homemade lattes beat Starbucks any day
2. Rockstar haircuts from Chinatown
3. Levi's AWESOME skinny jeans
4. Selling a little stock to pay rent during a lean spot did not kill me
5. Drycleaning bags cut into squares make great doggy-curb plastics
6. Threading instead of waxing saves a LOT of money
7. Happy hour with friends at home is a lot more relaxing
8. QiGong from the little underground places is AMAZING and 1/3 the price of a spa massage
9. I can still paint my own toenails
10. Making birthday gifts always was and is still more fun
11. I don't miss frivolous shopping at all
12. Consignment shops in NYC are full of AMAZING stuff
13. Coconut oil is a FABULOUS deep conditioner
14. Theme parties beat lounges hands down
15. I have more music already than I could ever listen to in a year
16. My doggy likes broccoli more than doggy treats
17. This meditation/yoga stuff really works on managing stress and keeping peace of mind
...I have a feeling this could go on for a while...but I guess the thing I'm really happy about is recognizing how full and beautiful my life is at any given moment. I wouldn't trade the moments I remember to recognize that beauty for all the gold in Fort Knox...if there were any gold in Fort Knox...

Corporate Yogi Undercover - Finest Worksong

There is an often-quoted study somewhere that the majority of heart attacks take place between Sunday night and Monday morning. If you know where I can find this study, send it right along. But from personal experience, I know even the sound of the stopwatch on 60 Minutes used to give me a sense that my night was ticking ticking ticking down to the demands of Monday morning.

So Sunday night, I ventured off the island of Manhattan to listen to live country music at a little place in Billyburg, Spike Hill. Uncle Leon and the Alibis were playing - I especially liked their country-fried version of "Baby Got Back" - anyway, here's the reason I'm sharing this: their rabble raising anthem is entitled "I Hate My Job", and a good 9 minutes of the hour long set was dedicated to explaining the song, singing the song, then getting the crowd to sing along through the refrain - once to get the words down, then again with more passion with lots of harping and harassing anyone who wasn't singing/likes their jobs.

Hearing this song called to mind a line from Drew Carey: "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." People, really? Really? Is this really the best thing to plant in your brain before you get up and go to work in the morning? Really? How does this make things any better?

Uncle Leon, you rock, and thanks for the reminder about "little in the middle but baby got back" - but wow, all things considered, from what I can tell not many of us are actually suffering. Sure we experience interpersonal brain-pattern clashes, but other than the fact we have a habit of THINKING we are suffering, most of us are doing just fine from one breath to the next...aren't we?

So here's the challenge: look through your Itunes and tell me what a positive Monday Morning Anthem might be - heck, I'd even accept a neutral one like Finest Worksong by REM only since I already have thought of that one, you have to come up with something else. Because here's the problem: most work songs (and most work movies) are negative. 60 Minutes stopwatch ticking notwithstanding, I promise to pick a winner from everyone who suggests a work song and buy them a leisurely Sunday night dinner. And if you're in a foreign country or something I'll paypal you the money to take yourself to dinner. So...suggestions?

Perspectives from a Party

Life is a great storyteller - offering moments of insight into the mundane and the sublime, the tragedy, beauty and celebration of it all. The great storytellers all do this and it resonates for us because in their observations are embedded the very paradoxes that exist in our own lives.

Last night, life delivered one such a powerful response to conversations we've all been having about how short life is, and the mandate to overcome obstacles and put yourself fully into whatever you're doing no matter what, where, how or why.

Last night friend Sheena Mathieken threw a party to celebrate the six month mark of her really cool Uniform Project. In the Uniform Project, Sheena has pledged to wear the same dress every day for a year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. You can go onto her site and see the many ways she has injected creativity into it - looking, as she says, as if accessorized in the "Marquis de Sade's boudouir". She created this initiative as a fundraiser for educational initiatives for kids in slums in India. So far, the effort has won attention from the BBC, Elle, The New York Times, and The Times, London. Slightly over $28K later, with German press at the party and a room full of New York's creative influencers, it's clear Sheena is just getting her engines started.

Updating her about what's up in the world of corporate yogis, the focus on shifting consciousness she laughed, "if it were really about fitness or staying thin, my secret is following your passion AND keeping your dayjob - I have two full time jobs now and the energy alone is enough!". Even her boss acknowledged the energy this is demanding of her and that she is completly engaged and happy in what she is doing.

But last night after we left the party, someone in the building apparently fell down an elevator shaft and died. I'm not the first to report this - it's posted on Gothamist and ABC news. The tragedy to the deceased and his circle of loved ones is unimaginable. For the rest of us at the very least it is a powerful reminder to live our lives with passion and purpose, contribution and without complaint.

Which is what Sheena was already doing and hopefully will continue to do. Stressors clear, I'm offering up a prayer that this accident doesn't take Sheena off course either in this project and all the incredible contributions she has yet to make. I'm urging you to go to her site and tell her to keep going and if you have an extra $5 in your bank account make a donation.

The world needs the Sheena's and the you's and the me's to look life in the eye and give all we got while we're here - as you live your own greatest story, don't let anything take that offering off track.