Taken in December of 2014 in City Park (Városliget) in Budapest.
DAILY PHOTO: Városliget Bizarre Yogi Fountain
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Tag Archives: Yoga
Rewiring the Brain about Pain: All That Isn’t Pleasure Isn’t Pain
I see people staring at the railing on which they will stretch their hamstrings just like they would look at a side-by-side refrigerator unit that they have to move down a flight of stairs, psyching themselves up for the stretch. Or maybe they are weighing the question of whether they really need to stretch as one might ponder whether it would be better to get an engine overhaul or replace a car altogether. The point is that there seems to be an element of anxiety or dread associated with actions like stretching that aren’t necessarily pleasurable.
I have a theory about why this is the case.
First, people falsely equate discomfort with pain.
Second, the entire point of true pain is to tell one how not to move so as to avoid exacerbating an injury.
Third, this results in a desire to avoid pursuits that cause such physical discomfort.
Fourth, people create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which they tense muscles in the area of the stretch to counteract the aching stretch, but this just increases the discomfort level.
Your body has a clever little device called the myotatic reflex arc (MRA.) That’s when a muscle tenses to avoid injury because the muscle seems to be stretching too fast for comfort. However, that reflex is only relevant to dynamic movement and the fact that it’s a reflex arc means that the signals don’t go through the brain–thus–aren’t consciously controlled. The MRA is different from the tension one holds in a slow and controlled stretch. It’s fun to see people who’ve been encouraged to breath and relax into the stretch realizing that the stretch isn’t as bad as it seems.
Of course, many intense physical activities that cause discomfort may also result in a sufficient endorphin (natural painkillers) inflow and adrenaline / cortisol (stress hormones) outflow to result in net feelings of pleasure. While stretching results in endorphin release, the action of holding the muscle stretched may be too much for our natural painkillers to counteract, particularly when one is breathing easily and thus the body is not under the level of whole-body stress that might encourage the big endorphin dumps desired.
The problem is that one can’t achieve flexibility without pressing against one’s limits any more than one can make strength gains without lifting more or by employing more repetitions. If one just goes to the point at which one is no longer comfortable, you may be able to prevent losing flexibility, but you’re not going to make gains.
Another part of the problem is that people often go into stretching cold, and thus maximize their discomfort. Doing warm-ups and joint articulations before any kind of intense stretching is a good practice. These warm-ups should not test the fullest range of motion, but should move with sufficient quickness to get the muscles and the synovial fluid in the joints warmed up.
The problem with seeing stretching as painful is that it discourages it. Some individuals fail to stretch altogether, and others focus only on the major muscle groups (hamstrings and quads) and miss muscles that adduct, abduct, rotate, and generally stabilize and support the primary agonist or antagonist muscle pairing. The most common injury in the Japanese martial art that I study is a knee injury attributable in part to insufficiently flexible external rotators and abductors and the inability to keep the knee in line with the toes–thus putting too much torque on the joint and too much load on the ligaments.
Wrong: knee is not pointing over toes
Martial artists, in particular, need to avoid equating discomfort with pain. When discomfort becomes pain, pain becomes agony, and agony become intolerable. There are many factors that can determine the outcome of a combative event, including technical proficiency, physical fitness, and the ability to persevere. The last one may mean the ability to take a licking and keep on ticking as the Timex people used to say.
The good news is that it’s possible to rewire one’s brain to avoid equating the discomfort of stretching with pain.
Step 1: Get a yoga face. In the martial arts, we talk about having a warrior face, which is an expression that conveys one’s intensity and seriousness. For yoga and stretching one should ditch the agony face and replace it with a serene face. My personal recommendation is that you aim to emulate the faces on the Bayon at Angkor.
Yoga face as seen on the Bayon at Angkor
Step 2: Keep your mind on your breath, and away from the sensation of the stretch. There’s a reason yoga teachers harp on breath, it will help one reduce one’s overall tension.
Step 3: Stop using the word pain (in your own mind or when speaking out loud) to refer to the feeling of a stretched muscle. You may not be able to replace the word “pain” with something as euphemistic as “stretch bliss,” but try to avoid giving it a name with a negative connotation. It’s simply the sensation of a stretched muscle
Step 4: When you find yourself wearing an agony face and squeezing out the protective muscular tension, ease off the stretch until it’s comfortable. Then ease back into the stretch, keeping the surrounding muscles relaxed and the breath even and deep. You can visualize expelling the tension with one’s exhalation if that helps.
Step 5: When you experience real pain, have no guilt about heeding it and giving that part of the body time to heal. Of course, this requires an ability to differentiate stretch sensation from true pain.
Now I’ll segue into a discussion of actual pain. When I was having a lot of problems with my lower back–eventually diagnosed as arthritis–I had a bizarro interaction with my healthcare provider. When I first went to the doctor, I faced this unsubtle wall of suspicion because back injuries are a common fraud device for persons addicted to painkillers. That’s because there are many forms of back injury that are hard to witness externally. However, when they x-rayed my back they could see clear indication that something was wrong. Then they were surprised when they tried to foist painkillers on me, and I wasn’t interested.
Here is how I look at painkillers. Imagine the “check-engine” light came on in your car, and you took the vehicle to the mechanic. The mechanic has your car for a brief time and comes back to you with a nominal bill. At first you are thrilled, and then you ask the inevitable question, “So what was the problem?” Your mechanic then says, “Oh, I have no idea, I just disconnected the light. That light won’t be giving you any more trouble.” Needless to say, you are decidedly less thrilled. You wanted the underlying problem fixed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s no place for pain-killing medication. If one has pain that is so severe that one cannot rest, one’s body won’t be able to heal itself properly.
However, if you pop painkillers to do away with bodily aches, you should reconsider. Those aches are what being alive feels like, and if they come from exercise or labor they should be welcomed and not be framed in a negative light. If they are an indication of a postural misalignment or some sort of systemic problem, you should look into fixing the underlying problem.
[To be fair to my aforementioned doctor, I think people aren’t conditioned to the notion that they are the key participant in their own healthcare and that fixing problems will often require hard work on their part. So a part of the problem in some places–most notably America–is that healthcare isn’t profitable unless they are pushing surgery or expensive medications. However, another part of the problem is that people just want to go to the doctor and have the expert fix them without requiring the personal effort of fixing postural deficiencies or cutting weight. I can understand why doctors are a bit fed up with suggesting people do the work only to get no response. I saw a statistic recently that only 1 in 8 people threatened with a lethal illness would make a behavioral change recommended by a doctor to reduce the threat of the ailment–e.g. stop smoking, stop drinking, cut weight, etc.]
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2014 Reads: The Most Captivating and Profound Books I Read in the Past Year
I read 80-some books in 2014. A few stood out above the rest. I’d put the best of the litter in two categories: the captivating and the profound. This is a more appropriate division than fiction and nonfiction. The captivating books were the ones that I couldn’t put down because they were intriguing and intense. The profound books were the ones containing ideas that changed my approach to life. Very few–if any–of these books came out in 2014, so if you’re looking for the best books of the year you might want to look here or here.
The Captivating
1.) The Elephant Whisperer [A wildlife preserve owner takes in an elephant herd, and learns about how the mighty animals think, feel, and communicate.]
2.) The Beach [A traveler in search of a fabled perfect beach finds it, and ultimately wishes he hadn’t.]
3.) Shantaram [An ex-con on the lam hides in Bombay and experiences life as an ex-pat, a slumdog, a prisoner, a medic to Mujaheddin, and a gangster.]
4.) Gone Girl [A wife goes missing, and the husband becomes the prime suspect–but nothing is as it first appears.]
5.) The Fault in Our Stars [An ill-fated romance blossoms between two teenage cancer patients.]
6.) Norwegian Wood [A young man’s life is shaped by his love for the girlfriend of a suicidal former best friend, and other relationships with unusual women.]
7.) History of the World in 6 Glasses [The title says it all. How beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca-cola shaped the world.]
8.) Dawn [A woman awakes in the custody of aliens to find that an unwanted leadership role is being thrust upon her as the Earth is to be repopulated.]
9.) Veronika Decides to Die [A suicidal young woman is told that she has only days to live, and finds a new lease on life.]
10.) The Novice [An old story about a young monk who stays virtuous in the face of multiple betrayals, as told by the famous Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.]
The Profound
1.) The Rise of Superman [How extreme athletes are using a mental state called the Flow to achieve phenomenal feats.]
2.) Warrior Pose [How yoga saved the life of a cancer-riddled war correspondent with a broken spine and an addiction to painkillers.]
3.) The Way of Chuang Tzu [Thomas Merton Edition- A series of Taoist stories as told by the prolific Trappist monk.]
4.) The Tao of Jeet Kune Do [Bruce Lee’s guide to the tactics and techniques of his martial art, Jeet Kune Do.]
5.) The Introvert Advantage [An explanation of the widely misunderstood state of introversion, and how introverts can optimize their lives in the face of their introverted nature.]
6.) The Art of Peace [The philosophy of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the martial art of Aikido.]
7.) The Wild Life of Our Bodies [We our not alone. The human body is an ecosystem, and killing off the other species that reside within us can have dire results. And a dire warning to clean freaks.]
8.) Mind Over Medicine [A medical doctor reviews the literature 0n the body’s tremendous capacity to heal itself under the right conditions, and a discussion of how those conditions might be achieved.]
9.) The Heart of Yoga [A guide to building a personal yoga practice by T.K.V. Desikachar, son and student of the legendary guru T. Krishnamacharya.]
10.) The Science of Yoga [What modern science has to say about the benefits and risks of yoga.]
Bernie Gourley’s favorite books »
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BOOK REVIEW: Yogic Management of Common Diseases by Dr. Swami Karmananda
Yogic Management Of Common Diseases by Satyananda Saraswati
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The title of this book gives one a nutshell description. It’s a book that discusses what yoga practices are beneficial for various common ailments. These practices include not only asana (postures), but also pranayama (breathing exercises), shatkarma (cleansing practices), yoganidra (a relaxation technique), meditational practices, and dietary and other yogic lifestyle practices. The book also discusses both the medical and yogic explanations of various diseases, and provides enough background on the relevant anatomy and physiology to give a layperson an understanding of the basic causes of each disease (if known.)
The book covers about 37 classes of disease, and is arranged into seven parts by bodily system (head and neck, cardiovascular system, respiratory system, gastro-intestinal tract, joints and musculo-skeletal system, urogenital system, and a miscellaneous ailments section that deals with skin diseases and varicose veins.) Some chapters deal specifically with one disease, while others cover two or more related ailments (e.g. Bronchitis and Eosinophilia, Sinusitis and Hay Fever, or skin diseases.)
This book has a number of strengths. First, it’s grounded in a scientific view of these ailments and isn’t selling yoga as a panacea. As suggested above, the title was carefully chosen. It’s “Yogic Management of Common Diseases.” The word “Management” is a critical one. If you’re looking for a book about how yoga can single-handedly cure your Stage IV lung cancer, this isn’t the book for you. If you’re looking for a book on how yoga can help you live a better life if you have arthritis, diabetes, or are hernia prone—possibly in conjunction with medication or other medical treatments—this may be the book for you.
Second, the diseases covered seem to have been carefully chosen. The selection of common ailments is not just to appeal to a broad audience. Many of these ailments are caused by common lifestyle problems that offer relatively easy fixes. Other diseases may not offer any fix per se, and, therefore, the ability to live a high quality of life with the affliction may be valuable. Also, I know a number of the diseases covered are particularly promising candidates for a yogic solution / mitigation.
Having given the strong points, I will say there are a couple of weaknesses to the book as well. First, it’s not illustrated in any way. Given that there is a lot of discussion of biology and anatomy, there are places where a picture might be worth a thousand words. I will note that this isn’t a book for a yoga newbie. It uses Sanskrit names for practices without so much as a glossary. That said, yoga teachers and intermediate/advanced students will probably not find this much of a problem because they will have built an appropriate vocabulary or have the necessary reference close at hand. I didn’t deduct for the lack of explanation, because the book is clearly intended for established practitioners (the Introduction warns as much.)
The second weakness is that there’s no explanation of why the listed practices should work particularly well for the given disease. I think the book does a great job of explaining the nature of the disease for a non-expert reader. However, then it just lists practices by type (asana, pranayama, relaxation, diet, etc.) In some cases, the reader can easily make the connection, but in others it’s not so clear why one should do practice “X” for disease “Y.” I do realize that drawing these connections could be space-intensive and technical. The book is a nice slim 245 pages, and it could rapidly grow to an untenable length. However, I’m concerned that some of the recommendations might not be rooted in experience and observation.
I would recommend this book for yoga teachers and intermediate / advanced practitioners who are interested in yoga as a component of building a healthy body. If you are new to yoga, you will probably want to first familiarize yourself with many of the classic asana, pranayama, and shatkarma practices of yoga—otherwise you’ll have to look up terminology constantly.
It should be noted that this book is put out by the Bihar School (of Swami Satyananda Saraswati fame), and the same publisher has put out a number of books that delve much more deeply into specific ailments. (At least some of these are written by the same author, Dr. Swami Karmananda.) Also, let me say that while the school self-publishes through its Yoga Publications Trust, it puts out books on a large-scale, of high-quality, and they appear to be available globally through Amazon and the like. (Swami Satyananda Saraswati alone was extremely prolific and wrote the APMB, which is one of the seminal reference works on yoga.)
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BOOK REVIEW: An Introduction to Yoga by Annie Besant
An Introduction to Yoga by Annie Besant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Given what the word “yoga” brings to mind these days, I’ll first note that this isn’t the book for one who’s looking to improve a stiff downward dog, or even an errant kapalbhati breath. There’s no mention of such physical practices. This is a philosophy book–or theosophy if you want to get technical about it. Besant’s definition of yoga makes this clear, “Yoga is the rational application of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness, self-applied in an individual case.” The book is actually a series of lectures by Besant delivered in 1907 at the 32nd anniversary of the Theosophical Society. If it were being released today it might be called “An Introduction to Yogic Philosophy” or “An Introduction to Jnana Yoga” to avoid confusion. Jnana Yoga is the path of knowledge, as opposed to Karma Yoga (the yoga of action) or Bhakti Yoga (the yoga of devotion,) and it’s Jnana Yoga that’s the focus of this work.
I was ignorant of who Annie Besant was when I read this book. I’d heard of the Theosophical Society, but mainly in the context of being an organization that Jiddu Krishnamurti had been a prominent member of, but then had a falling out with. (Given my respect for—and alignment with– the ideas of Krishnamurti, I must admit that this biased me a bit against the Society–perhaps unfairly.) If you’re not familiar with Theosophy, the name probably gave you a big clue about what it’s all about. The “theos” (as in theology) refers to the divine or godly, and “sophia” (as in philosophy) means wisdom or knowledge. So theosophy is knowledge of the divine and it suggests that a mystical path to knowing god can be achieved. I mention all this so that the reader will be aware that this isn’t “what is yoga?” through the eyes of a Hindu or a yogi as much as it is “what is yoga?” framed by a Theosophist. (That’s not to imply any objectionable biases in the book, just in the interest of full disclosure.)
Having clarified what the book isn’t, it’s now time to turn to what the book is. It’s divided into four lectures. The first is entitled “The Nature of Yoga” and revolves around the questions of what is consciousness, what is divine, and how do they interrelate. The second lecture puts yoga into context as one of the six Indian schools of Philosophy, mostly comparing and contrasting yoga to Samkhya and Vedanta—the schools that yoga is most closely linked to. The third lecture considers yoga as an applied science. The final lecture discusses the practice of yoga. Again this is the practice of Jnana Yoga, and not yoga as it’s practiced today. Besides some discussion of diet and vague statements about how to purify the physical body, there’s no discussion of practices other than Dharana (concentration) and Dhyana (meditation.)
In more specific detail, the book addresses the following topics: the 4 states of consciousness, the 3 aspects of consciousness, the 5 stages of the mind, the 3 gunas, the 5 functions of pain, and the 7 obstacles to yogic progress.
I don’t mean to make it sound like the book is entirely a listopia, but the author is very organized—and, to be fair, a lot of these lists are passed on from ancient works. Given this book is the product is 19th century English, its readability is tolerable—especially considering the complex and abstract concepts under consideration. That said, there’s no attempt to put the abstractions in more concrete terms by way of narrative techniques or the like.
I’d recommend this book for those who are interested in Yoga as a philosophy. If you’re interested in the philosophy of the Theosophists, all the better. Again, it’s not of much value for an individual who wants to know about yoga as an approach to fitness, or even someone who wants a balanced view of the eight limbs of yoga. This book skips straight to the last three limbs, i.e. dharana, dhyana, and Samadhi (union with the divine, liberation from the karmic cycle, etc.) In that way it’s an advanced text, and the term “Introduction” in the title may be more deceptive than the word “Yoga.”
Also, it’s free on Kindle.
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My 2014: A Year in Review [w/ Photos]
2014 will be our first full year living in India. Having said that, I spent almost 50 days in Thailand, and Lilla and I will spend the last two weeks of the year in Hungary. So, in truth, I will have lived about ten months of 2014 in India.
The four months of 2013 that we lived in India largely involved acclimating and getting our feet under us, though we did see some important sights in India including the Taj Mahal, Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, Hampi, Mysore, Belur, Halibidu, and Shravanabelagola.
2014 was an interesting and learning-intensive year, so I’ll review some of the year’s key happenings.
January:
From the 1st through the 18th, I was in Phuket, Thailand. Lilla and I spent the holidays there, and–upon her return to Bangalore–I stayed another couple of weeks training at Tiger Muaythai. Tiger is probably Phuket’s largest and most well-known Muaythai gym. In addition to Muaythai classes, I took advantage of their broad class offerings to learn a little about Krabi Krabong, Muay Boran, Western Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Brazilian Jujutsu, as well as taking daily Yoga classes. I was particularly keen to learn about Muay Boran, MuayThai’s more combative ancestor art.
While my training schedule (up to six hours / day, 6 days a week) didn’t allow for much sightseeing, I did get to see a little of Phuket Town and a couple of the beaches that Lilla and I skipped while we were traveling together. Phuket displays a lot of Chinese influence and there are many brightly colored Taoist, Confucian, and Chinese ancestral shrines and temples around Phuket Town. Rang Hill overlooks the island’s main “metropolis”, and I was able to take advantage of that vantage point. The beaches I visited were Karon and Kata which were middling between the two beaches Lilla and I visited together. That is, they weren’t as quiet and secluded as Naiharn, but neither were they as frenetic and overrun as Patong.
February:
February was marked by two firsts. First, I began taking classes in Kalaripayattu two mornings a week. While this Indian martial art is far afield of the Japanese art I was raised on, I wanted to take advantage of living in India to learn something of the indigenous martial arts. One reason for my interest is the widespread belief that Indian martial arts—and Kalaripayattu specifically—are ancestors to many of the Asian martial arts–including the Chinese martial arts that are said to be predecessor to the Japanese arts I’ve studied. While I’m somewhat skeptical of that claim, I’m not in a position to altogether dismiss it. (I believe that in the face of combat, martial arts evolve rapidly to adapt to local conditions and needs. Also, I believe that ancestral arts continue to evolve as much as their off-shoots. Together this means that a martial art could look quite different from its ancestor in short order.)
The reason I’ve kept training is that Kalaripayattu is an awesome workout. I see a two-fold strength in the art. For one thing, it builds bodily capacity. I mean one is able to leap higher, stretch farther, and endure more through the practice of this art. I’ve realized that the idea of a martial art solely as a means to ingrain movements that worked in the past is limited. Another thing that the art does is help build a variety of fearlessness. One has to throw one’s body around in a ways that can be intimidating, and one must build confidence that one will—like a cat—land on one’s feet. Further down the line, the metal weapons practice—choreographed as it may be—takes a special kind of inner calm. By “further down the line” I mean—as of this writing–I haven’t yet begun to learn weapons. I’ve passed through the first two levels and it’s been suggested that it might be time for the third test (though I’m far from skilled with some of the required jumps), but these levels are all unarmed.
The second activity I began in February was volunteering that the Don Bosco Mane Center, which is home and bridge school for young boys in central Bangalore. (A bridge school is a school used to prepare kids to go to regular public school, which is what they try to do a soon as possible, but some of the kids haven’t been to school and aren’t ready to leap in at the appropriate grade level.) BOSCO is one of the major charities working on children’s issues in Bangalore, and particularly in trying to intercept kids coming into the bus and train stations before the pimps and slavers get their hooks into them. They also run a help / reporting phone line. If it’s possible, they try to get the kids back to their families, but if that’s unsafe or impossible the children live at one of the centers like Mane.
BOSCO also has a person trying to match kids to foster homes. Foster homes are a relatively new and undeveloped approach in India as compared to the West, but–as it’s a much better approach when it works—they’d like to see more of it. I volunteered here over the course of two months, before I started Yoga Teacher Training. Because I was only volunteering one day a week, and given the nature labor costs in India, they weren’t always sure what to do with me. Such a facility in the West would probably tend to be much more undermanned, but that didn’t seem to be so much the problem here as the challenge of funding and resources. At any rate, I have talked to the head priest about going back to teach martial arts and /or yoga. It was amazing to see how well-adjusted and respectful the kids were, given the hard life they’ve had.
March:
March wasn’t a big month for travel or new experiences. Lilla was in the middle of her busy season, and I continued learning Kalaripayattu and volunteering at BOSCO. Otherwise, I was writing or working out. I’ve been keeping my Gyokko-ryū koshijutsu and Kukishin-ryū jōjutsu training going as much as I can, and work on Muaythai as well. As part of my yoga training, I started doing yoga with Lilla three mornings a week (this began in January or February), and—after going through yoga teacher training—this will become a regular class that I teach MWF from 7 to 8am. I attended about four studio sessions a week at a1000 Yoga in Indiranagar during March.
We did take one long weekend trip at the end of the month. We went to Coorg and stayed a couple of nights at a coffee / tea plantation near Madikeri. We stopped along the way to visit the Namdroling Monastery, which is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery set up by exiled Tibetans in the early 1960’s. It’s one of the largest Tibetan communities in South India, and is the largest teaching center for the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. The monasterial campus was impressive.
The serenity of the plantation provided a welcome respite from the horns and chaos of Bangalore. The Golden Mist Plantation is owned by a German who spends part of his year in Germany and part of the year in Coorg. Interestingly, they sell only organic products, which they largely export because organics are just beginning to catch on in India and not at the same scale as in Europe and other parts of Asia. The food was great, and—needless to say—the coffee and tea were fresh as can be. We had a couple nice hikes in the Coorgi countryside, and I had authentic Coorgi pork—that’s a popular Indian dish from these parts.
April:
April saw me begin my 200 hour yoga teacher training course (RYT-200) at a1000 Yoga. This course ran about 4 hours a day for five days a week through May 23rd. The first hour and a half to two hours each day was yoga on the mat, and then we got into a broad range of subjects dubbed “theory” in the afternoon. These included yogic philosophy, Indian approaches to the body (chakras, nadis, granthis, kundalini, koshas, prantas, etc.), Western anatomy and physiology, and the historical development of yoga. The most unusual practice we learned was jala neti, in which one pours warm salt water in one nostril such that it drains out the other, cleansing the nasal passages. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, and—given the dustiness of India—it’s a valuable skill to stave off sinusitis. Most of the course was about learning yoga, but the last week focused on learning about teaching.
May:
The RYT-200 course occupied most of my time during this month as well. Even after the course ended on May 23rd, there were many requirements to be met and they all had to be documented. This included seva, which was charitable teaching requirement that we did at another of Bangalore’s (unfortunately) many orphanages. This was a smaller shelter than the BOSCO center, and was run by an individual man rather than a large organization. Again, the kids were enthusiastic and well-behaved and made the process a happy one. I also had class observations to make as well as documenting my own teaching experiences from the guesthouse class and sadhana (my personal practice.)
At the beginning of May, I completed a workshop in Tok Sen. Tok Sen is a Thai approach to massage that uses a mallet and a wooden chisel-shaped tool. While it sounds less than pleasant, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I had no idea what to expect besides that it was a Thai approach to body work that used wooden tools.
Toward the end of the month there was a Kalaripayattu demonstration. This was the first time I’d seen the art practiced besides in Kalari sessions. Needless to say, it was much more acrobatic and stunning than day-to-day training. It featured many weapons, including the urumi, which is a four to six-foot flexible sword that old-time practitioners wore as a belt. Urumi demonstrations are about as edge-of-the-seat as one can imagine. While the demonstration is choreographed, the urumi is a severe injury waiting to happen. It requires the utmost attention on the part of both participants.
June:
June was an intense month for my yoga practice. In addition to my own personal practice, which I was still documenting for my RYT-200 certification, I was attending 5 to 7 studio sessions per week. I was also able to do some refresher training with my Thai Yoga Bodywork teacher as he was running the Level I and II course in Bangalore, and I attended a few days.
July:
In July I finally got my RYT-200 journal in and accepted, completing the requirements for a RYT-200 Yoga Teacher certification. Through the first half of the month, I was largely working on finishing up the last of the requirements and typing it all up into a 54 page account of my yoga life (not even double-spaced) since the courses beginning including my teaching, personal practice, observation of master teachers, etc.
We made our first trip to Kerala, another of the states in south India—bounding the Arabian Sea. We overnighted on a houseboat in the backwaters, got our first Ayurvedic massage, stayed at a resort in tea country, and toured the historic Malabar spice capital of Kochi (Cochin.) We were very fortunate with the weather in that we visited Kerala during the heart of rainy season, but stayed dry for the most part.
Our houseboat stay was great. Our cook was skilled and the meals were outstanding. Chugging through the backwaters, I felt like a young Martin Sheen heading into the jungle to track down a rogue Army officer who became a cultist chieftain. Except that there was so much life and the ubiquitous Indian flare for color and sound. We got to see a snake boat crew in training, and saw so many colorful houses ornamenting the lush dikes—usually with verdant rice paddies as a backdrop.
Ayurvedic massage was an unusual experience. It was the most oily I’ve ever been. Days later I felt a little like greased pig. It took place on a massive hardwood slab that had a channel carved through the middle to keep the oil from sluicing over onto the floor, an event that would cause the most skilled masseuse / masseur to slip fatally. The table looked a little like an autopsy table carved out of hardwood. It was a very impressive looking piece of furniture and not the least bit comfortable on one’s bony parts.
Munnar, amid the tea plantations, was green hill country and the low hanging clouds and vast expanses of tea bushes made it a scenic wonder. There were also some waterfalls in the area. It was misting part of the time we were here, which brought out the full jungle feel.
Kochi is an enigma: ancient and modern, small but global. Its history is shrouded in the mists of time. It’s been an important center of commerce since who knows when. While trade with Arabs, Jews, and Chinese are all well-documented, it’s said that this port was familiar to the Greeks and Romans as well. When spice was king, Kochi ruled.
August:
Lilla and I attended a yoganidra workshop this month. Yoganidra literally means “yoga sleep” and it’s a relaxation technique in which one maintains a state that is neuro-electrically like being on the edge of sleep. As you may know from visions that pop into your head right before sleep, those dreamlike random fragments that don’t make a lick of sense, this is a fertile state for the subconscious mind.
My second visit to Thailand took place in August and September. I left out on the August 20th and returned on September 17th. From the 20th to September 3rd, I was training at the Muay Thai Institute (MTI) in Rangsit, Thailand. This involved training four hours a day—i.e. two 2-hour sessions. Unlike Tiger, which offered a wide range of classes, MTI specializes in Muaythai and all my training time was devoted Muay Thai. (At Tiger I generally trained one Muay Thai session per day and one other session in boxing, grappling, or muay boran.) I was in the freestyle tract, and had a well-rounded experience of footwork drills, bagwork, pad drills, shadowboxing, and a bit of sparring.
While I was training at MTI, I took one day trip with other trainees to play paintball, ride ATV’s, and go rafting. This also involved stops at a couple of temples at Ayutthaya, one of which I’d visited on my 2012 trip and another which was new to me. The one I’d visited before is Wat Mahathat, which famously appears in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer movie. Wat Mahathat is particularly famous for a Buddha head that’s enveloped by Strangler Fig roots.
I also took a boat trip around Koh Kret, which is an island in the middle of the Chao Phraya River—i.e. the river that runs through Bangkok. Koh Kret has a popular market and is known for certain unusual street foods like fried flower petals. The only other place I visited during training was the J.J. Market, Bangkok’s sprawling weekend market where one can buy everything from pets to artworks to cheap tsotchkes to Louie Vattan (that’s how it’s spelled there) purses to street food. I’d been once before in 2012, but still got lost in its maze-like corridors packed with goods.
September:
After I finished my second training week at MTI, I moved into Bangkok to a guesthouse in Chinatown. This was a short walking commute to the Wat Po Thai Traditional Massage School where I completed the General Thai Massage course and the Foot Massage course. These courses were each 5 days long, and the first one is a prerequisite for just about everything at the Wat Po School.
In the morning I would work out in one of two nearby parks frequented mostly by elderly fitness-buffs doing tai chi, chi gong, takraw, or Jianzi (the latter two being hacky-sack like games played with a woven ball [Thai] or a feathered weight [Chinese], respectively.) On several occasions I went to the Thai Yoga (Russi Dutton) classes that were run inside the temple grounds. Then I would go to class for the day. The General Thai Massage sequence was gradually taught by parts defined by position (supine, side, prone, and seated), and it was not so different from the Chiang Mai style I’d learned in Bangalore. With the Foot Massage course, we began doing the entire sequence from the very outset, which meant one got to practice it about 10 times over the course of the five days.
I was glad to visit Wat Po this time, as it’s the most important Bangkok sight that we missed during our 2012 visit. I also made it across the river to Wat Arun. I also made a trip across the river to a popular seafood restaurant on the edge of town with a group of fellow students from my General Thai Massage Course. With the same of Thais and Germans, I had dinner at the top of the tallest building in Thailand, the Baiyoke Tower.
After I returned to Bangalore, there were two small events of note. I attended a function for the children at the KAMMS put on by Lilla’s firm, Grant Thornton, which is the third youth shelter /orphanage I’ve visited. This was the largest group of kids I’ve seen, because, unlike the other shelters, it was both genders and a wide-ranging age group. Again, the kids were very pleasant to be around.
I attended another Kalaripayattu demonstration. This one was out of town at the Kalari Gurukulam, which is the parent school to the Kalari Academy where I’ve been attending classes. This would not be noteworthy except that I was briefly interviewed by a Canadian film crew who were making a documentary about old martial arts in Asia. They’d previously interviewed the Master of Bokator in Phnom Penh, and were making their rounds through the rest of Asia. (I almost visited that same school in Phnom Penh in 2012, but our limited time didn’t allow it. There was a time when it looked like moving to Cambodia might be a possibility.)
October:
The big event in the month was our 20th wedding anniversary.
Our big trip this month was to Mysore for the Dasara festival. We took the train, our first Indian train ride. Mysore is a city that’s only about an hour and a half away from Bangalore. While it’s much smaller than Bangalore, it’s also more popular with tourists and travelers than Bangalore because of its history as a long-standing capital of the Wodeyar Kingdom and as a global center for yoga. It’s a yoga mecca because it was the home of T Krishnamacharya, who was the guru to some of the most famous yogis of the modern era, including B.K.S. Iyengar, Indira Devi, Pattabhi K. Jois, and T.K.V. Desikachar. Pattabhi Jois, founder of the Ashtanga Vinyasa style of yoga, also lived in Mysore and ran a school there until he passed away in 2009.
Anyway, Dasara is huge in Mysore. They celebrate all 10 days with various events around town. However, the processional and the torchlight parade on the last day are the major draws, and we had seats for both of those events. For the processional we were right up front at the start of the parade route. For the torchlight parade our seats were not as great, but close to the front. We revisited the Zoo, which this year was rated the best in India by a TripAdvisor survey. There was flower show in progress for the festival.
I attended a 10-day Advanced Hatha Yoga workshop that focused on building the capacity to do challenging intermediate and advance yogasana (postures.)
November:
I did a couple of sessions of intern/assistant teaching of corporate yoga for a1000 yoga, and will do some more after the beginning of the New Year.
Lilla and I went to a talk on philosophy which introduced me to an organization near our home that we were completely unaware of called the New Acropolis. It’s a school of practical philosophy. This led me to sign up for their introductory course, which takes place every Tuesday night. The class covers a wide range of topics in the domain of practical philosophy. (By practical philosophy, I mean philosophy geared toward substantively improving oneself, as opposed to sitting around staring at one’s navel and bemoaning our inability to know whether anything is real or whether we are all heads floating in vats.) As of this writing, I’ve attended three of the first four sessions (I was in Maharashtra for one of the classes) and have found it to be a fascinating experience.
As you may know from my recent posts, this month I traveled to the Indian state of Maharashtra. Lilla and I were going to Mumbai to visit a relative, and I decided to take advantage of the relative proximity to visit the Buddhist caves at Ajanta and Ellora. The caves are among the most important archeological sites in India, but are out in the boondocks, and so they aren’t as well-known as, say, the Taj Mahal. However, in their own way I would rate them—as I do Hampi—as far more impressive than the Taj. A city of about 1.2 million, called Aurangabad, was my base from which to visit the caves. Aurangabad has a few sights of its own, most notably a copy of the Taj Mahal that is from the same era. Aurangabad also has its own set of caves that are nowhere near as extensive as the ones at Ajanta and Ellora, but are worth a visit, and it has remnants of fortification from the days when it was Aurangzeb’s capital.
December:
Because the last graduation date occurred while I was in Thailand, I attended the graduation to get my RYT-200 certificate.
We have one more trip for the year. Lilla and I will be traveling to Hungary in the middle of the month and will be there through New Year’s Day. We last visited Budapest in the summer of 2011, and haven’t been there in the winter since 2008. We haven’t experienced seasons, in the conventional sense, for a year and half–so that’ll be interesting. (Bangalore has two seasons, rainy and dry, and even those can be muddled, as they were this year.) While I’ve been to Hungary many times, I hope to see some new sights this time, including a possible trip to Pécs, which will be my first Hungary trip south of Balaton. There are also some quirky Budapest locations listed on Atlas Obscura that I’d like to check out.
The Upcoming Year:
I hope to do some new and interesting things in the upcoming year as well. Probably the oddest activity for the year will be attending the Vipassana Meditation Course. It’s 10 days on the outskirts of Bangalore with no books, notebooks, or electronic devices of any kind, and during which my only interaction with other people will be daily meetings with a teacher. It’s meditation all day every day for 10 days straight. From accounts I’ve read it’s an amazing or insanity-inducing experience.
Writing: The past year hasn’t been as productive as I’d like on the novel front. As I mentioned, I’ve traveled quite a bit and had major time commitments on the Yoga Teacher Training front. A fragmented life disagrees with novel writing because novels are long and fictional, so if you get away from it for any length of time you have a lot of reacquainting to do when you come back to it. If you’ve ever put a book you’re reading down for a month and had trouble getting back into it, multiply that by 100 and you’ll know the challenge of doing the same for a book you’re writing—so many details for which continuity needs to be maintained. I tossed my first to chapters out entirely and rewrote them from scratch, having to update the rest to accommodate the new beginning. I’ve hemmed and hawed for days over certain plot points and devices.
Having said all that, I’m converging on a product that I’ll be ready to submit sample chapters to agents from in 2015. Most of the points that have been giving me problems are worked out as well as I think they are likely to.
I’ll do some revamping of my website, part of which I’ve already begun.
Martial Arts: I expected that the jumping-intensive level of Kalaripayattu would be the end of that martial art for me. I’m not built for leaping. However, having cut some weight and built my fitness, I’ve found that my old body has taken the acrobatic craziness surprisingly well. So I’ll continue taking classes at the Kalari Academy as long as my body holds up.
I plan to check out another martial art as well. There are a number of Muaythai places in Bangalore, and I may see if any of those work for me. I don’t have any plans to travel to Thailand in the upcoming year, but—if I do—I’ll make sure to squeeze in some Muaythai. (Actually, wherever I go I’ll try to squeeze in some of the indigenous arts.) Alternatively, there are Krav Maga classes offered at the New Acropolis, and that would be convenient to check out.
Yoga: I’d originally planned to do the 300-hour course that would complete my RYT-500 certification, but it doesn’t look like it will work with my travel schedule. However, I do intend to continue my studies, and—in particular—may pursue specialty teacher training courses in Children’s Yoga and /or Prenatal Yoga. There are also some intriguing workshop opportunities in Ashtanga Vinyasa and Iyengar Yoga (props yoga.) I may even try out the yoga in Mysore.
I’ll continue to teach my MWF courses as long as there is interest and will maintain my own personal practice. Also, I’ll try to do some interning / teaching of corporate yoga classes.
Travel: We don’t have any specific trip planned past our December Hungary trip, but we’re sure to see some fascinating places in 2015.
It looks like I may have to make a trip to the US during the summer time-frame. However, if I don’t have to take care of business with the house, I’ll probably stay in Asia and visit some other country—possibly Burma. Lilla and I are planning to make a trip to the Himalayas sometime during the summer. This may involve a trip to Amritsar (location of the Sikh Golden Temple) in conjunction with visiting McLeod Ganj / Dharamsala (home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile) and Shimla or Ladakh or other Indian portions of the Himalayas. Alternatively, we may go to Nepal.
Among the Indian locations that remain on our list to see are Khajuraho, Varanasi, Pondicherry, Hyderibad, Chennai (with Kanakapura), Kolkata, and Darjeeling. That’s not to mention countries nearby that we’d like to visit while we’re here like Burma and Sri Lanka. It’s unlikely we’ll pack all that in to 2015, but hopefully we can make a dent in it.
Well there’s my 4,500 word narcissism-fest, but it has pictures.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath by William Walker Atkinson
The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath by Yogi Ramacharaka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I got this book as a Kindle freebie. It’s made available for free because it’s in the public domain, not necessarily because it was so bad that the author couldn’t even get people to pay $0.99 for it. It was written by an American named William Walker Atkinson, who also went by the pseudonym of Yogi Ramacharaka. Atkinson was an American who lived in the latter 19th and early 20th century, and authored more than 100 books. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of an author this prolific, it’s in part owing to his love of nom de plumes and the fact that he dodged the spotlight.
This book is short—less than 100 pages—and is organized into 16 chapters. The early chapters provide background for an audience that would’ve been fairly unaware of yogic practices, and the latter chapters are more along of a how-to book—giving instructions on various yogic breathing techniques. The first part of the book also tries to discuss the science of breath in terms of anatomy and physiology, but in layman’s terms. All in all, the book’s organization is logical.
This book’s readability is not bad, considering its era. However, it is 19th century writing, and so sentences can be long and tortuous by present-day standards. In the instructional parts, he uses bullet pointing to explain sequences.
The book runs into some problems, in my opinion, by trying to explain breath both in terms of modern science and yogic physiology. Imagine the story of the creation of the universe being told simultaneously in terms of the big bang and the Biblical account. These explanations are at odds, and any attempt to merge them into an integrated explanation will convolute the principles of one system or the other. Furthermore, explanations of respiratory and nervous system operations from Atkinson’s day are a bit out-of-date.
I would recommend this book for someone who has a scholarly interest in yoga and how it came to be introduced to the West. I can’t say that I would recommend it for its originally intended purposes of putting pranayama (breathing techniques) in the context of Western medical science or teaching the techniques of breathing. There are better books for the former (e.g. Coulter’s Anatomy of Hatha Yoga, chapter 2—though this is a much more technical account), and a teacher is needed for the latter. If one is an intermediate (or above) student of pranayama, then experimenting with Atkinson’s methods may prove interesting. However, from what I could read, it’s not clear where Atkinson learned pranayama. The fundamentals (e.g. abdominal, thoracic, and yogic breathing) seem sound, but there are other techniques that are unfamiliar to me and seem a bit unconventional. I can’t vouch for whether these are things I haven’t learned or whether Atkinson got them wrong. However, mostly there is just not enough information to communicate the fine points of the practices, and practicing pranayama is not without its risks.
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BOOK REVIEW: Yoga Mala by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
Yoga Mala: The Seminal Treatise and Guide from the Living Master of Ashtanga Yoga by K. Pattabhi Jois
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yoga Mala is a guide to yoga by one of the most influential yogis of the modern era, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Sri Jois, who passed away in 2009, developed an approach to Hatha Yoga that is alternatively called Ashtanga Vinyasa or Ashtanga Yoga. Herein, I will use the term Ashtanga Vinyasa to represent Sri Jois’s style of yoga, which relies on a fixed sequence(s) conducted with vinyasa, i.e. flowing transitions that link postures. The reason I chose one term over the other is that the term “Ashtanga Yoga” long predates Jois and is a more generic name for the practice of all eight limbs of yoga as described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
Having mentioned the “eight limbs of yoga,” it should be noted that this book really only gets into half of them: yama (rules for interacting with others), niyama (rules for conducting oneself), asana (poses), and pranayama (breath exercises.) Furthermore, three-fourths of the book’s pages are devoted to asana. This is not unusual as many yogis consider it a waste of time delving into the higher level practices (pratyahara [sensory withdrawal], dharana [focus], dhyana [meditation], and samadhi [liberation] with individuals who haven’t yet made headway into the more fundamental practices.
After brief discussion of yama, niyama, and pranayama, Yoga Mala launches into description of the postures of the Ashtanga Vinyasa preliminary series. This begins with the two variants of the Surya Namaskara (Sun Salutations) practiced in Ashtanga Vinyasa and progresses through the poses of the standing, seated, and finishing sequences in the order in which they occur in the Preliminary Series. There are clear black and white photos of the optimal version of each asana. The written descriptions explain the entire set of vinyasa for that asana—i.e. the flowing transitions that connect one pose to the next. Most asana have a header paragraph that tells how many vinyasas are associated with the pose and which vinyasa constitutes the asana proper. This opener is followed by a “Method” section that lays out the vinyasa in detail, and—in many cases–a “Benefits” section that explains what the posture is said to do for one–and occasionally what major the contraindications are. (However, this is a poor reference for contraindications as it mostly only says what pregnant women shouldn’t do and doesn’t get into much detail beyond that.)
There are a couple of things that I think could have been improved—mostly formatting / editorial critiques. The first is that the text increasingly lags the photos so that one has to flip forward several pages to view the associated photos. Also, the author often refers to a movement through a position using the numbering system of an earlier set of vinyasa, and this necessitates a lot of flipping back and forth. For example, the instructions often say “then go to the 4th vinyasa of the first surya namaskara sequence” whereas if he said “then do chataranga dandasana [or low plank]) they would have saved words and obviated need for the back and forth.
Sri Jois was very devout man. For those of a similar mindset, you’ll likely find the book resonates. However, if you’re the kind of person who prefers explanations rooted in a logical or scientific approach, then you may find explanations a bit summarily invoked for your tastes. In other words, he’s prone to say, just do what the Vedas and your teacher tell you and everything will be rosy. I don’t know that this is a critique so much as fair warning. If you think that the Vedas were divinely written by infallible authors, then Jois’s approach may sound good to you. However, if you think that the Veda’s reflect the biases and limited knowledge of another era (just like our present writings reflect our current biases and limitations), you may find a few comments suspect. For example, Sri Jois makes a point of saying that the Vedas state that one can do a headstand for three hours straight without adverse effects. (To be fair, he does point out that you must do it properly and under the supervision of a teacher.)
If you practice Ashtanga Vinyasa, or intend to, this is a must-read book, but it’s a useful book for those who practice Hatha Yoga of other styles as well. It’s a good summary of classic asana, and you may find something in Sri Jois’ explanation of yama and niyama to be helpful to you on your personal path.
I should point out that those who aren’t sure whether they want to practice this form should be forewarned that Ashtanga Vinyasa is an intense practice. The vinyasas require a high level of core strength as well as upper body strength for Uth Pluthi (lifts) and vinyasa motions requiring that one load all one’s bodyweight onto one’s arms. Also, the fact that one is doing the “Preliminary Series” shouldn’t falsely lead one to believe that these are all the “easy” asana. That isn’t the case; there are a number of challenging poses both in terms of flexibility and strength requirements. If you haven’t done yoga before, I would only suggest Ashtanga Vinyasa for those who have a fairly high fitness level.
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DAILY PHOTO: Swami Vivekananda in CMH Park
Taken on October 25, 2014 in CMH Park, Indiranagar, Bangalore
Swami Vivekananda is one of India’s most famous yogis, though he lived only to the age of 39 and died about 112 years ago. Considering his short life, he was quite prolific and wrote a number of important texts on yoga. He was also instrumental in introducing yoga to the Western world. He was the chief disciple of Ramakrishna, and founded the Ramakrishna Maths and Missions. His name and image are ubiquitous throughout India.
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BOOK REVIEW: Your Brain on Yoga by Sat Bir Khalsa
Your Brain on Yoga by Sat Bir Khalsa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This Harvard Medical School Guide presents the findings of many scientific studies on the benefits of yoga, and it does so in a manner suitable for the layman. The book is written by Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa, a long time practitioner of Kundalini Yoga and a neuroscience researcher at Harvard, and is co-authored by a science writer trained in journalism.
I became aware of Khalsa’s work when reading William Broad’s The Science of Yoga, a book that is complimentary of Dr. Khalsa and his studies—a favor which Khalsa doesn’t return as he rejects Broad’s work as being overly sensationalist. The book does talk about Khalsa’s research, such as a study with young musicians at Tanglewood that examined how the practice of yoga increased their equanimity. That said, this isn’t merely a summation of Dr. Khalsa’s work. It’s what in academia would be called a literature review, but “literature review” implies a far more dismal reading experience than one gets from this book. It does present anecdotes in a way that is useful for a layman’s book, but would not be well-respected in an academic setting. This work isn’t designed for medical colleagues but rather to be of benefit to run-of-the-mill yoga students and teachers.
This is a very short book at only about 50 pages. The book consists of five chapters after an introduction which sets the stage and gives some relevant background on Dr. Khalsa. Chapter one delves into the effect of stress on the body and mind, and how yoga (and meditation more generally) has been shown to help counter the effects of bad stress (not all stress is inherently bad, as is addressed in the chapter.) Chapter two examines the effect of yoga on the body and in countering a number of common ailments. The third chapter considers how yoga might actually help one to be smarter and more creative. Chapter four presents the results of studies of how yoga can counter depression and improve one’s mood. Chapter five is in a different vein, and might well have been included as an appendix. The last chapter gives an overview of the various types of yoga to assist readers new to yoga on what style might best meet their needs and disposition. This is a nice feature for those new to yoga, but also for veteran practitioners who’ve practiced one style and might not be aware of the wide range of styles out there. (A few of the styles mentioned are popular in India, but I don’t think are as well-known in the West.)
For such a thin book, this work covers a wide range of topics including–but not limited to–the effects of yoga on sleep, the immune system, neural plasticity, memory, math skills, and mood. A nice feature of the book is a series of brief exercises that one can practice to help reduce stress or achieve a desired goal. These practices are generally located at the end of chapters. Finally, while this book isn’t written primarily for doctors and other scientists, it’s endnoted so those interested in tracking down the studies the book references can readily do so.
I’m a big fan of applying a scientific approach to the study of ancient methods such as yoga. I would, therefore, recommend this book for yoga teachers and students who are interested how precisely these practices can assist them. It’s extremely short and easily digested. It’s in no way overbearing with medical jargon and is readily understood by anyone with a basic education in biological science.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 
