A few words..

After the last Asia trip, I came home okay. Then we ate at an Indian restaurant, which we have only visited once before more than a year ago and both me and MIL ended up with food poisoning. Wife and kids did not get hit although the little one complained of tummy pain, went into a fart spree and then declared herself okay. MIL and me were not that lucky. She was throwing up and I was feeling like an over pressurized cannister that did not know how and when it was going to explode for most of the weekend. 

So my yoga attendance in the last 5 days has been spotty at best. Finally made it back to class this evening. Walked in with low expectations but as usual there is the "now that I have made it past that door, better make the most of it" philosophy that kicked in and started doing the best I could.

It was almost the end of the class and we were doing the final stretching pose on the floor when the teacher mentions my name and says "pull your little thighs just above your knees up and towards each other and then stretch"!

Was trying to process that on the fly, given I have never heard anyone say that to me or another student before. 

The first question was "what are little thighs?" then my brain went "it is something between your real thighs and it is above your knees.. so even if we don't know what that is, just pull whatever muscle you can pull up and towards each other in that region!" 

So I tried to locally clench something in that area upwards and inwards and sure enough, like magic, my body went down a good six inches lower and towards my feet! It was MAGIC !

When we got a chance to do the second set, gave those "little thighs" a big inward curl and was able to repeat the stretch!

Have been doing this for 5 plus years. All it takes is a few words to click at the right time in the right way and there is a world of a difference in the result. 

Have come to the conclusion that teaching yoga cannot be an easy thing. Even if a person can do the poses and internalize how to use their anatomy to make changes, it is very difficult to communicate that cause and effect to another person using mere words. 

For all I know, what was moved may not be little thighs, but the learning continues. 

Walking the walk, talking the talk

Before we begin, this is a yoga post.  Not the usual experience in hot room post but rather a perspective on how the world is reacting to Yoga today based on latest media reports.

Three things sparked this post and I will list them in chronological order:

1. A friend of mine who knew I do Bikram Yoga but not much about the Yoga or Bikram recently told me "dude, I saw in the news that the guy who came up with this yoga you do is accused of a lot of bad things. So be careful with the yoga you do!"

2. Indian media reports in last month have a flurry of articles on Shri Shri (Art of Living), his recent event near Delhi and his tweets on cricket matches and articles on Baba Ramdev, another popular Yoga teacher/activist for his statements on what constitutes patriotism and the follow up internet memes about "does yoga help grow a brain?"

3. An article in YogaInternational which claims to debunk Bikram Yoga

Here is my perspective from personal experience.

Bikram Yoga worked for me. It continues to do the job for me. It has been nothing short of a miracle for me. By extension, I can say "Hatha yoga worked for me" and "the heat worked for me". Now what do I mean by "worked"?

Walked into the hot room for the first time, five years ago,  being 18-20 lbs over weight, depressed and having a range of other health issues after an accident in what can only be described as a downward spiral at work and home. Within a month I was back at my normal weight and feeling positive. With a fresh energy that made me a better person, it helped me through even tougher times at home and work over the next few years. Bikram Yoga turned that downward spiral into an upward spiral with positivity reinforcing more positive things. 

Could this be just me? The answer is No. It was definitely the Yoga. It is true that I work my ass off in the hot room and give it everything I got,  but still, it was the Yoga that made a difference. There is something magical about the way this sequence is put together that it worked, for me.

Does this work for everyone? The answer again is No. I happened to be at the right place at the right time in the right mindset. Had nothing to lose by walking into the room and everything to gain. The visual and non visual changes made me go back into the room, over and over and over again. More than 20 people have joined or tried Bikram Yoga after seeing me change over the last five years, but only 4 are still doing it. They all have their reasons for dropping out. Don't like the sweat, the smell, don't like to wash my hair so often, it is too long a time commitment, I am already flexible enough, etc. etc. None of them told me they stopped coming, because they injured themselves or they were afraid of their image because of what they hear in the news about Bikram or any of the other prominent Yoga teachers. 

Does it have to work for everyone? Hell, NO! If you are not serious about making a change and cannot take an opportunity to turn your life around, no yoga is going to work for you. The folks who have issues with the heat have tried other yoga and it works for them. The folks who have issues with 90 minutes have tried other forms of yoga for shorter times and some of them are very happy with the improvements. 

Does Bikram Yoga work? The answer is Yes! Have seen many miracles like me out there over the years. The folks who see the benefit come repeatedly. It seems to be a hit or miss thing. Based on the stats I collect, chances are, if you are a type A personality, Bikram Yoga has a higher chance of working for you. 

If you want to get results from Yoga you need the following basic ingredients:

- Right Teacher :There are tons of youtube videos on the poses and how to do them, but there is no substitute for a teacher who goes over the nuances. The devil is in the details. It is very easy to hurt yourself by doing the wrong thing in a yoga class (I am told it is easier to injure oneself in normal temperature classes compared to hot room classes) and blame the yoga for your injuries. A teacher who is qualified and has been through this learning experience first hand works better than a Youtube video. 

- Right method : Know what you are doing.  Not based on what you think the right thing is from your mind or just from your bodies feedback. If I only listented to the voice in my head that told me what my body was capable of doing, should have quit yoga after day 2. Listen to the teacher.

- Right commitment : Consistency and sincerity in any practice will help move it in the right direction. That goes for any learning. Practice makes perfect and in this case it is an asymptotic relationship towards perfection. 

- Right mindset : Keeping an open mind to learning new things first hand as opposed to infering from other people's experience definitely helps. 

I have only done Bikram Yoga in the last five years but the things above are generic enough for learning anything new, be it a musical instrument or a new language and chances are, with any type of Yoga, a right teacher, technique, dedication and mindset will go a long way. 

All that said, all three of those things that prompted me to write this post go towards three things.

Do not link the Yoga to the Yogi:

Yoga has not changed over the years. Pretty much every posture that you can do with the hardware a human being has, is out there in all its variants and documented extensively in stone to paper to 0's and 1's.

Over time, folks have come up with routines that are optimized towards different results. The most popular ones seem to take a "greatest benefit for the average person" approach. They are like Children's Tylenol. Works great for most kids for most ailments. Then of course you cannot expect to cure cancer with it. 

Do all Yoga teachers who have created a successful routine or a successful franchise or following, required to be perfect human beings? It is a fallacy of human kind to venerate and elevate humans to god status and then see their gods go down in their own eyes. Goes for politicians, sportstars, movie stars and definitely Yoga gurus! People may be fallible and not perfect all the time. That does not mean the works they create are bad. It is very much possible that someday I will lose my mind as an older person, but that does not take away everything I do till I reach that age. 

Before you decide to believe others on Yoga's efficacy, try it yourself : 

Yoga in this context is like religion. There has to be faith first. Then there is the way. Then again, there is no "one way". The way you want is the one that works for you and that doesn't have to work for everyone. 

The difference between Yoga and religion is that in Yoga, a set of physical exercies and breathing has the ability to transform minds even though nothing is being said about the mental transformation in the class. You come in day and and day out and do the exercises, but it changes the way you think, about yourself and your relationship to everything around you. You know it is the exercise because, you get these brilliant moments of clarity in the middle of struggling through the exercises.

You have to try Yoga with the right pre-requisites. If someone else got injured doing yoga, died during yoga training (first time I heard that was in this Yogainternational article) etc. etc. one of those pre-requisites was not there. If you are not the type who is good at taking instructions from a teacher, chances are you are likely to injure yourself. Same goes for the other pre-requisites.. right teacher, right method, right commitment. 

Don't take my word for it : 

We live in a world where the lines between opinion and fact are being blurred by Like buttons and 140 characters at a time, a world where it is difficult to differentiate between a genuinely researched news article and an infomercial. It is also a world where people with responsibility, following, power and money are the ones most likely to abuse it.

I can request you go to find a Bikram Yoga studio and try a class with a teacher who went to teacher training with Bikram himself, to ensure you are not going to injure yourself and come out with a positive learning experience. Chances are you might end up in one of the 1000's of studios that claim to be Bikram Yoga but have teachers who teach whatever they want for however long they want. It is like buying coffee at the Starfucks store, where the lady on the cup looks very similar, but you drink at your own risk!

Finally, Yoga is getting a bad rap either because of some Yogi's words and actions, mistakes by the press or people like you and me believing blindly in what others say or do. The fact that Yoga has survivied for thousands of years is a testament to its ability to prevent ailments and enable faster healing, not to mention its ability to open minds for a lot of people. There are some who say it will work for everyone. I am not going that far. It might work for you. 

I for one, am happy that it works for me!  

Dialogues with Yoga teachers

We have a new teacher at BYSJ who can only be described as "cross between a fire breathing dragon and a horse whisperer!"

In my third or fourth class with him, he jumps down from the teachers podium all concerned and in a flash he is standing next to me.

Fire breathing horse whispering dragon (lets abbeviate to Fire for short) : "Boss, something wrong with you?"

Me: blank stare that suggests "why would something be wrong with me? I am in the freaking first row busting my ass giving it a 110%" but I am unable to open my mouth and say anything because of the surprise factor.

Fire : "do you have a back injury or hip injury or something?"

Me : worried look on my face and thinking "do I have a back or hip injury that I am not aware of? maybe he knows something I don't.. these yoga teachers always seem to know more about my body and mind than I do myself" .. then I mutter a feeble "No"

Fire : Then why are you not kicking your leg out? I see you are never kicking your leg out. (His drill sergeant tone actually suggested "why the hell are you not kicking your leg out? what is wrong with you boy?") 

Me : (my head was going.. now come on.. "never" is a strong statement. you are saying never based on just one week of observation.. again all this is in my head) and I say out loud  "That is because I am not sure if I am locking my leg!

Fire : How long have you been standing like this?

Me : little over 4 years.

I was thinking the dude was actually going to be proud of me, for staying in stage 1 of standing head to knee pose for four years, patiently trying to lock my legs for all of 60 seconds, before graduating to stage 2. The next stage was to kick the leg out. After all, this is a life long practice and some folks apparently take months or years to lock their leg! Turns out, I was off on that logic, by a wide margin.

Fire : Your legs seem locked enough for me! Try it. I am going to stand here till you kick it forward a little bit. 

So he stayed next to me, literally pushed my hip to one side and pushed my knees back and breathed fire, till I kicked forward. 

Then he tells the class "If you keep doing the same thing to the same extent every day and come back and say, nothing is improving, you are not being fair to yourselves and the yoga. You have to take a chance and try the next step every now and then"

He brought out the bad bengal tiger in me.. I started getting flashbacks. 

There is a back story to my love hate relationship with this pose. There was a time, when I actually managed to do this pose.. nine months after starting to do Bikram Yoga. 

Guess I spoke too soon, while writing that post!  

In early 2012, every time I would kick out, my teachers would look at me and go "lock the knee.. your knee is not locked yet".. and they would all say it with concern in their voice like a parent tells a kid "dont touch the stove"! 

Somewhere, I became so unsure of my knee's "lockedness", if there is such a word, that I stopped at stage 1. It was okay in my head. After all, I was perfecting standing on one leg and distributing the weight evenly on one foot. It came in handy to occupy the kids and their friends in "who can stand on one foot the longest without bending the knee" contests. (note the profound lack of the word "locked"!)

It would be nice to have a lockometer strapped to the knee, that rings a bell and goes "Locking confirmed. Please proceed to stage 2"! Maybe I should come up with such a meter, because there is always the question in my head of "how locked is locked?" and Fire is not going to be there in every class for a confirmation.

The last few days have seen me go from stage 1 to stage 1 1/2 with some consistency. At this rate, I might even get to stage 2 and beyond very soon! 

At the end of the day, he was right. Every now and then the T-rex in me should test the fences. Who knows what might happen?

Worse case, you get a sequel to  "standing head to knee" post!

A side note: It is great to see teachers walk around and fix poses during the class.

In one class, Fire handed the microphone to another teacher in the room and was walking around fixing everyones pose. It was surreal to have that kind of attention in a class.

It is also funny, when a teacher comes to you and says "can I adjust your pose?" It is like they are asking permission to touch you, be it male or female teacher, asking a male or female student. See it happen so many times in class and I really don't get it.  

This is a physical class. It is like your doctor or physiotherapist asking for permission to touch you, before doing a treatment! If the teacher is not going to adjust your pose, who do you expect to adjust it? Shaquille O'Neil?

Transported to another time

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of reconnecting with old high school friends. It is going to be 25 years since we all graduated from high school and a reunion is on the cards.

Thanks to social media and friend finders, we have managed to connect to a lot of folks using the "ghost to ghost" network...

I know at least a few friends of mine, who stood in line at the school library to get their hands on the one book they could take home every Wednesday, will get the "ghost to ghost" reference.. 

There is now a larger group on Whatsapp, which I could not understand. It is a single serial thread on text, where it is not easy to parse or figure out who is responding to whom. Facebook, which still falls short of my expectations on how things should be does a better job!

Everyone tells me though that for folks who are not used to getting unlimited texts for 10$ a month or 140MBps at a minimum, it is very convenient.  I have joined the group and am figuring out how to check 600+ texts over a 8 hour gap. Stating that my classmates seem to be "prolific texters" is an understatement. 

One our classmates happened to visit our middle school geography teacher, a person who was very special to a lot of kids in the class. Always nice but stern, she had a way to get us to learn, what we needed to learn and drilled it into our heads. She also had a way to confirm that we actually got it! It was not through tests and quizzes but by making us feel proud of displaying what we had learned, to the whole class.

If you got something that no one else got in the class on some special topic, she would award a small pencil to that kid. In "those days", we used to have only the standard 2B lead pencils made by two companies, Natraj and Flora. I might still have a sample of those two somewhere in my shoe box.

Natraj had alternate faces of the hexagonal sides painted red and black and flora was a white pencil with small pink or purple flowers on it. Our Georgaphy teacher was handing out a pencil with a really tiny lead that would pop out when you clicked it.

It was a technological marvel when seen by the eyes of 7th grade students. When I said this to my daughter she went "so you got a mechanical pencil.. big deal!" 

It was a bigger deal than anything she can imagine.

Me : has your teacher even given you anything for being outstanding?

Little one : No

Jr. : Yes she has. I got a free dinner certificate at "The Elephant Bar" restaurant last year. You guys did not even use it or take me there. 

Me : Okay, but why is that any different than my "mechanical pencil" ?

kids : Because mechanical pencils are what we use all the time. We don't use lead pencils.

Then I got their point. They did not "diss" the concept. They did not understand that this was a novelty in those days. 

Today I spent a good thirty minutes rummaging through my shoe box which should now be renamed as my memory box. Opening the shoe box can be a double edged sword. Sometimes it brings a rush of happy memories, but sometimes it is just sadness. Dead friends, relatives, people who have been lost over the years to distance and time, sometimes a tear or two at being able to find a pencil from middle school years!

You just don't throw things like that away! Another thing that the kids are learing from the shoe box concept. 

The pencil still had some lead in it and works. I clicked the pencil and closed my eyes and before knowing it, was in middle school sitting in my Geography class learning about European countries, one at a time, their food, people, culture, currencies, landmarks to visit with a little bit of history thrown in for good measure.

It might be just a "mechanical pencil", but what my kids don't know, is that it is also a time machine!

The under age kid

History has a tendency to repeat itself, over and over and over again. I guess that is one reason why it is still taught to people, so they would learn from the past and move towards a better future.

This is also counteracted by the ability of human beings to forget things quickly and get on with life.. the same life that people got on with a few decades ago and by extrapolation a few centuries ago..

It is true that todays Cyclotrons are a lot more complicated that the proverbial "wheel" invented a long time ago, but have we really come that far in learning from history?

People still kill each other, go take things forcefully from others if they lack a certain resource (it used to be gum arabic, silk, spices, gold, diamonds, now it is oil!) and continue to ignore the past.

All that, was the cynic in me talking. This post is more about something happening in our life right now. Jr. who is a November child, just like her daddy, is having attention issues in school. She is an extremely smart and intelligent kid and is easily distracted, just like her daddy and she does tend to walk into the occasional wall, just like her grandma!

We had a meeting with her teacher who gave us a detailed report card for the Kindergardener and said "she has trouble following my instruction. She keeps looking at what the other kids are doing and cannot focus". She went on to explain how she is the youngest in her class and how it is going to pose problems for her because some of her classmates are 14 months older.

San promptly cut in and said "hubby here was in 2nd grade at Jr.'s age". Being the sincere daddy, I went on to explain to the teacher that I had the same problems. I never went to kindergarten and was directly thrown into first grade at age 4 and finished school at 16 and college at 20 and was in gradschool before I could legally drink in the US. I also told her that my social life wasnt exactly stellar because "having no moustache when graduating high school" was an issue, but I never had any problems with academics.

At this point, the teacher must have seen very clearly why Jr. is distracted (talking to her daddy for 5 minutes would explain that) and asked me "so do you have any suggestions to improve Jr.'s focus?".

Daddy said "Eureka! I know exactly what they did when I was in first and second grade". They moved me to the first row so all I saw was the teacher and the blackboard. Nothing to distract me.

The teacher said, well.. in the US, we used to do that only to kids who were troublemakers. In any case we do not have rows in the classroom till 3rd or 4th grade. We have them sit around circular desks in groups of 4 or 5 so they can learn the value of teamwork!

Where do you sit then, and where is the blackboard ? I asked.

Apparently there is no thing like a blackboard and the teacher moves around the classroom as she gives instructions to kids.

Hmm.. let's see here. You are trying to focus on a certain voice trying to give you an instruction and you have to execute on it. This might also involve looking at a piece of paper or an object that is in the teachers hand and you have to do something on your desk based on that. What would be easier. A fixed location for the teacher directly in front of the student or a moving teacher who could sometimes be talking from your right, left, or even behind you..

Bah!!!! I said and walked out.

Really love the teachers, their enthusiasm and their passion.. but I know myself and based on history and some genetic extrapolation, my kid, and there are no surprises on why she cannot focus. First we need to learn focus on stationary targets before we can focus on the moving targets!

Bah!!! Bah!!! Bah!!!

Now I am going to train Jr. Jason Bourne style on how to follow instructions from a moving daddy..

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