Notes from class emails, September 2004:

1. Why do you do yoga?
" Last Thursday a friend asked me to join him at a party starting at 7 p.m. I told him I would come, but would have to arrive a little late, after yoga class. He said, "I really admire you for doing that," to which I replied, flippantly yet not insincerely, "As if I had a choice! meds don't work." I guess that sort of states my reason for doing yoga: when I don't practice, I'm not peaceful, productive, or happy and when I do I am. (Meds might work - I never tried. Too passive for my tastes. I suspect that meds mask without fixing problems.) I started taking yoga classes for a perfectly cynical reason: I could get college credit for a yoga class that fit my schedule. Despite the questionable motive, I found immediate benefits and adopted a very short daily practice (a little more than my first teacher's motto, "A dog a day"). My pattern is to take classes for awhile then drift away. In times of transition or challenge, I drift back into regular classes. The benefits then remind me of the reasons to practice, and the practice itself fosters healthful transitions. I like the service aspect of practice. At first, I was put off by the idea of spending all that attention and energy on one's self. Well, duh, you have to examine, strengthen, and polish the self to be of any use to anyone else. And to appreciate other's strengths and abilities. And to exercise compassion and reason and to balance seriousness with mirth. That's why I practice."

2. How have you used yoga to work with injury or illness?
" Whenever I have a cold or flu, I do passive restorative poses like reclining bound angle, legs up the wall, or backbend over the bolster. I should remember to do these things without getting sick first."

"I do Yoga for several reasons. First, it was simply for gym credit in college. Then, I soon found that Yoga was a form of physical exercise I actually enjoyed; it is the only one, really. Later, I injured myself. I fell down cement stairs, landing on th right side of my body. My shoulder and hip were tweaked, and if I lay on my back I could tell my spine was not aligned properly. I saw a physical therapist through Kaiser, my insurance company at the time, but intuitively felt the therapist did not take enough time with me, did not fully understand my predicament, and that I could heal myself. I decided yoga was the perfect tool. This decision has been validated time and again; every now and then a pose will feel exactly 'right', balanced, or somehow in harmony. As my practice progresses, I find my body operating better and better in every day life without having to think about it. Most recently, I've discovered that my yoga is extremely important to my singing. Developing a body awareness is crucial to improving the technique of singing. Also, courage is important; if I can stand on my head, I can certainly sing a high A. Yes, you may lose your balance and fall, but you learn something in the process. Yes, your voice might crack and produce an unpleasant sound, but again, you learn something. I am sure the two are linked on a more metaphysical level as well. It's hard to put into words, but let me share an example. Most people are familiar with the solfege scale: do re mi fa sol la ti do. Now, there are eight notes, but do is repeated twice. In fact, the second do is an octave higher than the first; in other words, it is resonating at exactly double the megahertz or frequency of the first do. So, more importantly than the notes is the steps between them, the steps that get you from do to do. There are seven. There are also seven chakras. In the solfege scale, we seek to reach a higher octave, to resonate twice as fast, by moving through seven steps. Is this not extremely similar to what we do in yoga? Here we are in physical form, stuck at do, knowing there's something more. Through physical practice, meditation and pranayama, we seek to activate and energize the chakras, to allow our individual energy to flow more freely, or vibrate at a higher level. We are trying to exist in a higher octave. I'm not sure how to use this information, and I know I have a lot more to learn, but I'm sure I'm on to something. In fact, if I get my Ph.D., this will probably relate to my thesis."

"I had skittered around yoga for years - my mother practiced regularly in the 1960's until she had her fifth and sixth children. I started practicing regularly, however, a few years ago when I transferred from Washington, DC, to San Francisco. I landed in SF the same month the US economy officially went into recession. Like all others, my company started cutting back and laying off people. In addition to that, I had recently separated from my husband and was in a new city trying to build both professional and personal contacts. I found it very stressful, so stressful that I was taking anti-anxiety drugs. I started going to yoga classes and practicing regularly as a way to get out of my head and my ability to worry incessantly. What I found, and what I still find, is that yoga has an ability, unlike anything else (well, maybe rock climbing), to ground me. When I practice yoga, all I care about is this moment: this body, this spirit, this earth. It represents a daily check on the rest of my life, to put it in perspective and to help me live. I travel four to five days a week on business, so I am usually practicing in a hotel room (hoping there's enough clearance for handstand!) or checking out local yoga studios (yet to find a good one in Des Moines, Iowa). I find that daily practice while travelling helps me deal with time zone and geographic differences and provides me with a sense of continuity."

"I just found out that my utterly un-athletic, rather lethargic mother did prenatal yoga with me in her belly. This may not sound out of the ordinary, but being thirty five years ago and my mother, it was. So I was sculpted into yoga forms before birth, and the forms are with me still. And, as a depressed teen I was brought back to yoga by a hippie therapist, and again as an adult seeking, or re-seeking, spirituality. It is as if yoga has chosen me and luckily, won't let me go. That being said, I now perceive the asanas of yoga to be a reverent expression of nature. It is a physical prayer paying homage to the weightlessness of spirit, the natural and beautiful balance of and on earth, the shapes of nature, and the freedom of ego. It is an act of humbleness that intends to crack this human form wide open to join our spirit with the light of nature (I forget this sometimes when I visit too many yoga classes. I get caught up in doing the pose "correctly" or sense the energy around me instead of within me. I lose my expression of spirit. Yet sometimes a simple guided touch of a teacher can lead to a freedom of the straining body to release into a pose. What a balance.). So why do I do yoga? The asanas are merely an expression of the philosophy behind yoga. An active prayer... Yoga is my religion, my philosophy, my vehicle to sanity, release, reverence, art... life."

"I read a while ago in a Yoga Journal article that most people start yoga as a physical practice and later explore it as a philosophical and spiritual system. My experience has been different. A girlfriend introduced me to yoga literature a long time ago, and, partly to impress her, I became interested in concepts like karma, stilling the mind, and cultivating the disciplined habit of witness consciousness (not getting caught up with thoughts and feelings, watching them come and go). It seemed to me that yoga posed an intriguing challenge. It posited that it is possible to be centered despite difficult outward circumstances. Alternatively it taught that if we are not centered, we will be miserable in favorable circumstances. It warned that we are responsible for our internal state, and that our internal state is what really matters. Years later I was quite literally dragged into my first yoga class on the way to a run by an acquaintance who teaches at the San Mateo YMCA. I was going through a very stressful period at work. After class I felt incredibly calm, despite being humbled by an inability to do simple asanas well. I have been doing yoga for the last seven years. I keep doing it because the physical practice gives me a glimpse, a brief experience of the concepts I read about a long time ago. Experiencing something is quite different than reading about it. After class my mind is still, I am somewhat capable of watching my thoughts come and go without getting entangled in them, and I feel a profound sense of well being. I can even accept the proposition that everything is as it should be, which would normally strike me as absurd. I know nothing about anatomy or physiology or the nervous system (and have little interest). How this internal alchemy happens is a mystery to me. The degree to which it happens varies from class to class but it does happen and it does work."